Long before I became a novelist, I was a young Chicano activist at UC Berkeley, challenging institutions and helping create a place for histories that American education had largely ignored.
When I arrived at Berkeley in 1965, I thought I might major in English. I was drawn to literature, poetry, and language—but I had also chosen Berkeley because I was inspired by the protest movement taking root there.
Before long, I found myself torn between aesthetic interests and political activism. Outside the classroom, Vietnam, civil rights, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Dylan, and Baez were defining the era. Sproul Plaza featured Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael, Richie Havens and Phil Ochs.
Activism at Berkeley
My attention turned to César Chávez and the grape boycott. While walking a picket line at a Safeway store, a Teamster drove his semi-trailer truck directly at us. I had to leap out of the way.
There were only about thirty Chicano students at Berkeley. We formed the Mexican American Student Confederation—MASC. In 1968, outraged that grapes overflowed in university cafeterias during the nationwide boycott, we staged a sit-in at the office of University President Charles Hitch. I spent the following week fasting in Santa Rita Jail. In the end, the University agreed to our demands.
Later, I led a MASC delegation to Delano and addressed the United Farm Workers convention. César Chávez invited us to his humble home, where we sat on his rickety back steps and discussed the Chicano movement as his children played and his wife, Helen, brought us tortillas. That intimate moment has remained with me throughout my life.
In 1969, Black, Asian, Native American, and Chicano students formed the Third World Liberation Front and successfully moved Berkeley to establish an Ethnic Studies Department. I did not yet know how the questions behind that movement would return to shape my life.
Law, retirement, and a return to history
I continued to Berkeley Law and spent forty-five years practicing in Redwood City. The law became my career, but the concern for social justice and the welfare of our people continued.
After retiring in 2016, I returned to history and identity. I immersed myself in Mesoamerican civilizations and particularly the Mexica—the people commonly called the Aztecs. I studied their codices, history, art, poetry, philosophy, society, religion, and warfare.
I became increasingly aware of how narrowly the civilization is often presented. The Mexica are frequently reduced to conquest and human sacrifice, while their engineering, poetry, discipline, family life, and complex understanding of humanity receive far less attention.
The debate that became a novel
The immediate inspiration grew out of a conversation with a renowned archaeologist about social mobility. He argued that Aztec social structure was static—that people’s position was determined by birth and their parents’ role.
I could not accept that as the whole story. The desire to excel—to achieve success, recognition, wealth, influence, or a higher position—is part of being human. As I researched further, I found exceptions to every rule. Mexica society was hierarchical, but it also contained avenues through which disciplined, talented, and ambitious individuals could advance.
That question became the impetus for writing Flight of the Hummingbird.
The novel follows four generations of one family as its members rise from laboring on the chinampas to the worlds of art, commerce, education, warfare, diplomacy, and imperial power. Huitzilin’s father rises from farm boy to jeweler and philosopher-artist; his brother becomes a wealthy merchant; his sister a famed feather artist. Huitzilin himself becomes chief adviser to Emperor Moctezuma II.
Their achievements unfold beneath a gathering shadow. Omens appear. Rumors arrive of strangers approaching from the eastern sea. At the height of the family’s success, their world moves toward its prophesied end.
Writing people, not archaeological figures
I wrote the novel to present the Mexica as human beings: parents and children, artists and merchants, teachers and warriors—people moved by love and fear, joy and heartache, loyalty and duty, ambition and jealousy.
My hope is that readers enter their world with curiosity and emerge with a fuller understanding of a civilization too often defined by its destruction. For Latino readers especially, I hope the story contributes to a deeper conversation about ancestry, cultural memory, and the histories that shape our sense of who we are.
The questions that drew me into activism as a young man never entirely left me. Decades later, they led me to write this novel.