"I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue"
About this Quote
A novelist admits his teaching career started as paperwork triage, and the candor is the point. Puig strips the romantic varnish off the standard writer-myth - the inspired artist nobly “choosing” academia to share wisdom - and replaces it with a blunt logistical truth: institutions aren’t just temples of ideas, they’re also visa machines. The line lands because it’s unsentimental, almost procedural, yet it quietly indicts how creative lives get routed through bureaucracy.
The intent feels double-edged. On the surface, Puig is explaining a career move. Underneath, he’s showing how immigration status can reorganize a person’s identity: you become “a university worker” not because it’s your calling, but because it keeps you legally present. That inversion matters for Puig, an Argentine writer whose work often tracks exile, desire, and the pressure of social systems on private life. Here the system isn’t a censor or a moral code; it’s administrative reality. The stakes are still intimate: where you’re allowed to live, who you can become, how you survive long enough to write.
Context sharpens the subtext. Mid-century U.S. universities have long served as a back door for international talent, a respectable cover story for displacement. Puig’s sentence exposes the bargain: intellectual labor traded for stability, the campus as sanctuary with strings attached. It also hints at the emotional texture of exile - not melodrama, but the low-grade anxiety of being “out of order,” and the improvisational pragmatism required to keep your life from being revoked.
The intent feels double-edged. On the surface, Puig is explaining a career move. Underneath, he’s showing how immigration status can reorganize a person’s identity: you become “a university worker” not because it’s your calling, but because it keeps you legally present. That inversion matters for Puig, an Argentine writer whose work often tracks exile, desire, and the pressure of social systems on private life. Here the system isn’t a censor or a moral code; it’s administrative reality. The stakes are still intimate: where you’re allowed to live, who you can become, how you survive long enough to write.
Context sharpens the subtext. Mid-century U.S. universities have long served as a back door for international talent, a respectable cover story for displacement. Puig’s sentence exposes the bargain: intellectual labor traded for stability, the campus as sanctuary with strings attached. It also hints at the emotional texture of exile - not melodrama, but the low-grade anxiety of being “out of order,” and the improvisational pragmatism required to keep your life from being revoked.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
|---|
More Quotes by Manuel
Add to List
