In an upcoming Weekly Edition, we will spotlight Alec Navala-Lee’s new biography of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory physicist Luis Alvarez. However, we also wanted to take a moment to discuss why we deliberately avoided doing the spotlight during Hispanic Heritage Month in September and October, as Alvarez’s case illustrates some of the interpretive challenges that historians can face when confronting the complicated subject of identity

At AIP, we are generally enthusiastic about contributing to the month-long observances that are dedicated to highlighting different cultures and personal identities. They are an excellent tool for calling attention to the diverse life stories and the work of past and current members of the physical sciences community. These occasions also offer a chance to reflect more deeply on the nature of personal identity and how its roles in scientists’ lives have changed over time.

Alvarez, notably, did not consider his thin patrilineal links to Spain to be integral to his identity. This included his sharing of his grandfather’s given name, which, in his case, was pronounced “Lewis” or converted to the nickname “Luie.” Yet, thanks to the scholarship of Sacramento State historian Rubén Martínez, we also know how often Alvarez’s name led others to presume a connection to Hispanic culture in the two decades between his winning the Nobel Prize in 1968 and his death in 1988—and how he felt about it.

Alvarez’s background and identity

In his 2011 dissertation, Martínez relates how Alvarez was regularly approached by compilers of profiles of prominent Hispanic Americans after such efforts became common around 1970. Alvarez consistently declined to be included in such projects, explaining, usually succinctly but politely, that he was not Hispanic or a representative of whatever other identity, such as Chicano, the profiler hoped to highlight.

That such perceptions made an impression on Alvarez was evident in the opening of the first chapter of his 1987 autobiography, where he wrote: “People have sometimes been surprised that a tall, ruddy blond should bear the name Luis Alvarez. Although my paternal grandfather was born in northern Spain, my mother’s father came from Ireland. All four of my grandparents were adventurous and raised their families thousands of miles from home.”

Exploring Alvarez’s sense of his own “whiteness,” Martínez notes that Alvarez’s physician father Walter’s own autobiography evidenced a similar awareness of the disconnect between complexion and national background when discussing his father, the elder Luis, who had likewise been a physician.

For Walter, this contrast was fodder for speculation about racial and ethnic characteristics. Martínez writes, “Luis F. Alvarez, a Spaniard from Asturias, is described as ‘short, blond, blue-eyed, and slight in build.’ Photographs demonstrate that Luis’s grandfather could have passed for German. Luis’s father, Walter, credited the Visigoth invasion of Spain for his father’s racially motivated work ethic. Because of this invasion, Walter believed that the Spaniards of this region were ‘blond, energetic, and hard-working—more like Germans than are the often easy-going peoples of the South of Spain.’”

The younger Luis seems not to have been given to such ideas. His sense of whiteness was connected foremost to the environment of his upbringing. The elder Luis emigrated from Spain to Cuba to California to Hawaii and back to California, where the younger Luis was eventually born. The younger Luis did not speak Spanish and had little consciousness of his ethnic background, and, while he was still in school, his family moved to Rochester, Minnesota, where he lived in an entirely white community.

In a draft autobiography, dictated in 1972, Alvarez discussed his first exposure to racial disparities while a student at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and especially on a visit to the Deep South, and he went back and forth with his editor over the wisdom of a claim that he held no prejudices. Martínez takes note of a rare episode when Alvarez and his wife were subject to discrimination at Los Alamos during World War II, when an objection was briefly raised to their moving into an apartment building due to their surname.

It was not until later, though, that mistaken ideas about his identity began to intrude on him more regularly in the form of attempts to place him in an ethnic category as part of broader efforts to rectify past disparities. In the 1972 draft autobiography, he noted, “These days, ‘Spanish surnames’ are important—in a recent University-wide survey, the Berkeley physics department came out with good grades because my name was first on that list, alphabetically.”

Alvarez and would-be biographers

Alvarez elaborated on his resistance to being categorized as Hispanic in correspondence with potential biographers. In a testy 1973 multi-letter exchange with evaporated milk producer the Carnation Company, which was producing a compilation of profiles of “fifty-two contemporary Hispanic Americans,” he wrote, “I have never thought of myself as being either Spanish, or Spanish-American, and I will certainly be no part in your scheme to present me to minority peoples as a member of a minority.” He went on that he would not cooperate with “a program that I consider to be a ‘phony’ by any definition I know.”

Martínez ascertains that Alvarez was not so much trying to distance himself from having a minority identity as he was avoiding making an illegitimate claim to the status. In the Carnation correspondence, he argued it was inappropriate to include him, because, due to his lack of non-white ethnic identity, he had not been subject to the disadvantages the compilation aimed to combat. Martínez notes that the position Alvarez was in could be complicated, as identity did not necessarily imply personal experience of disadvantage, and Hispanic identity could be interpreted quite loosely to encompass Spanish lineage, however distant. Moreover, his refusals denied hopeful advocates the inclusion of a Nobel Prize winner in their compilations of Hispanic American achievements and role models.

Reflecting at length on the tensions between white and Hispanic identity, Martínez writes, “As it turned out, Luis Alvarez’s genealogy lent itself to either identity—Anglo or Hispanic…. Being one-quarter Spanish, he could have chosen a Hispanic or Spanish American identity without giving up his white status. Spain is in Europe and Europeans are the definition of white. Many New Mexico Hispanics consider themselves white. But Alvarez was from California, and he seemed to feel the need to take a strong stance on his ethnicity. White Hispanic, an option on today’s census forms, was not good enough. Spanish American was no better, but he was correct to question attempts to concentrate on his paternal grandfather. Had his mother’s mother been Spanish rather than his father’s father, he would be no less Spanish, but no one would suspect that a Dr. Louis Smyth was Hispanic.”

In any event, while Alvarez generally managed to maintain control over presentations of his identity during his lifetime, after his death he was incorporated into a number of compilations of prominent Hispanic and Latino individuals. Martínez noted that, as of 2011, Alvarez biographers seemed to be becoming more accurate in their presentations. Nevala-Lee actually refers to Martínez’s work on Alvarez’s identity in the main text of his new book, which is likely to now become the standard biography.

Alvarez vis-à-vis Sandoval Vallarta

It is not at all uncommon for identity to present these sorts of interpretive challenges. In the Weekly Edition that we did include in Hispanic Heritage Month, Adriana Minor’s profile of Manuel Sandoval Vallarta, identity is a no less complicated matter. Sandoval Vallarta was without question Mexican, and for a quarter-century he lived and worked in the United States and accepted the use of his maternal surname, Vallarta, as his sole surname. Yet, as his eventual, somewhat forced departure for his home country indicates, he never fit fully into the category of “Mexican American.” As Minor so aptly observes, from the very beginning of his time in the US, he actively cultivated an identity as a “transnational” scientist.

As an interesting postscript, Martínez notes that Alvarez and Sandoval Vallarta worked together on cosmic ray observations in Mexico City in the 1930s. It was one of the few occasions when Alvarez felt embarrassed he did not speak Spanish in spite of his name, according to a letter he sent to Sandoval Vallarta four decades later in 1974.

William Thomas and Anna Doel
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org and adoel@aip.org

*We regret a misspelling of Rubén Martínez’s name in the email version of this newsletter.

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