When Tamara J. Walker was a seventh grader in Denver, she made a life-changing decision — to study Spanish. That simple academic choice led her to Mexico in high school and then to Argentina for a semester during her undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania. Soon, Walker’s focus had expanded to the history of slavery in Latin America.
“My experiences as a Black person in Latin America — in Argentina, Mexico, and Peru — are the reason I became a historian of slavery in Latin America,” said Walker. “I had so many challenging experiences that made me uncomfortable but also posed questions that the discipline of history helped me to answer.”
Since fall 2022, Walker has been an associate professor in the Department of Africana Studies, the first, and only, faculty member in the department with a full-time appointment. She researches and teaches courses on slavery and gender in Latin America, Afro-Latin American art, and Afro-Latin American history and culture.
Walker is also the author of the newly released Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad, a hybrid of travel memoir and historical nonfiction that delves into the lives and motivations of African American expatriates. In 2017, she penned Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima.
Walker’s interest in history fuels her academic research, as well as personal passions. In 2009, she co-founded the nonprofit The Wandering Scholar. (Listen to their podcast, Why We Wander.)
“The mission is to make international education opportunities accessible to high school students from low-income backgrounds,” explained Walker. “Beyond the travel scholarship, we created a curriculum that takes students from the pre-departure experience to the reentry experience and centers on producing a research project based on their experience in country.” Walker hopes to create a similar version of the Wandering Scholar at Barnard.
In this conversation, Walker charts her border-crossing journeys and intellectual pursuits since that fateful choice to study Spanish decades ago.
Was there a particular incident that sparked your interest in Latin America and slavery?
I was studying abroa in Argentina, walking to a calling center that was near my host mother’s apartment. This was a period when people didn’t have cell phones. It was an upscale neighborhood in Buenos Aires, and I passed a group of doormen standing on the corner. They all started making monkey noises. It took me a minute to realize what was happening.
I was on my way to call my grandparents. I told my grandpa what happened, and he told me a story about his own experience when he had been stationed in the military in Austria in the 1950s. People would ask him if it was true that Black people had tails. There was this interesting connection all those years apart in these different places, but [the same] ideas that people have about Black people being less than human [persisted].
Your newest book focuses on African Americans who have chosen to leave the United States. Is there anything that you found surprising in your research?
One thing I didn’t consider when I first started researching the book was how complicated the feelings around leaving the U.S. would be. I had intended to write a story that celebrated these global explorers. But what I became aware of pretty quickly was how homesick people were: how much they missed their families, communities, the food they left behind, news of home, how much they missed just being able to read what was going on in the world of Black people by picking up [papers] like the Chicago Defender or the Philadelphia Tribune.
For example, I [wrote] about these agronomists who went to Uzbekistan in the 1930s. They had all these skills that would have come in handy during the Great Depression, but no one was hiring them in the U.S. So it’s the racism of the U.S. that sends them to this far corner of the earth. They didn’t know anyone; it was really cold and muddy. But they had incredible opportunities, in terms of employment, their sense of self, and for their families. It was a lonely, overwhelming time, even though it was also exhilarating, exciting, and empowering.
That kind of complexity that I hadn’t really expected to touch on in the book quickly became one of the key themes.
Why did you decide to create the Wandering Scholar?
I had a Fulbright when I was in Peru, doing my dissertation research, and noticed how homogenous my [cohort] was. I had the opportunity to sit next to a representative from the organization who said they had a pipeline problem. I understood that because I had studied abroad in Mexico and Argentina, I had these early formative experiences that meant I could speak Spanish, navigate in a foreign country, and do independent research. I had been in a pipeline that made me an obvious choice for Fulbright. And so what I wanted to do with the Wandering Scholar was create a similar kind of pipeline that would allow students to go to college, go to graduate school, and get these kinds of fellowship opportunities, which many of them have done in the 15 years that we’ve been around.
How can or should Black travelers think differently about their place in the world?
With U.S. popular culture traveling in ways that present a very homogenous view of the country, I think it’s all the more important for Black travelers to complicate and disrupt that image of who Americans are. It’s really important for us to be able to show a different side of us — especially during periods when the U.S. is not doing right by its own citizens or by humanity in the global community — to show that there is more to this country than our government and our most racist ambassadors.
I also think that there are so many possibilities to get opened up through travel. I was the first person in my family to graduate from a four-year college, and I didn’t have too many senses of what my career path would look like. Yet the career that I have was only made possible because I traveled. My entire life path opened up because of those experiences.
There were things that I wanted when I was young that I got in traveling [and] things I hadn’t even conceived of that I got from those experiences. It can sound really trite to say that travel can change your life, but in profound ways it does — even just in terms of how we think about ourselves and what we’re capable of achieving.
For more on Walker, read “Expanding the Borders of Scholarship” in the Fall 2023 issue of Barnard Magazine.