Former AWC professor plans Mexico adventure, New York incarnation

Pete Self bought a used car for $125 at an auto auction and drove it from Waldo, Fla., to Arizona Western College 15 years ago.

"Now I'm fixin' 'er up for the return trip," the recently retired professor said as he sanded rust and cracked, dry paint off the car.

He plans to drive the car back to Florida, then fly to New York City to work as a photographer. But first, he's driving it down into Mexico to hang out with the Zapatistas.

Though he could easily afford a new car, reusing the old one "just seems green and spiritually right," he said. "If there are things that are still working that other people are ready to throw away, and you can make 'em work instead of filling up a landfill and going in to buy some new crap, why not buy the old stuff?"

Posing questions to make people think comes naturally to Self, who came to Yuma to teach philosophy.

"When you find a philosophy job, you go where it is," he said. "Did you look at the want ads today? How many philosophers were they looking for?"

He also came to Yuma to work with the Latino population. "I worked on social-economic justice in Florida, but ... between every group that was struggling for justice, the Latinos weren't incredibly well represented.

"So when I had the chance to come here and work with this population, I was thrilled, and it turned out every bit as good as I anticipated and better."

Within a year at AWC, Self, who was shooting publicity and other photos for AWC, began teaching photography as well. "I taught photojournalism, I taught philosophy, lived in the dormitories - which they would rather I call residence halls - up until this year and ran a program called Each One Teach One.

"The idea was to get the students to help each other. I ran a 24-hour a day, seven day a week study hall."

During his time at AWC, Self helped expand the philosophy and photography programs.

"I suppose in terms of building programs and just getting tons of students in, when I started philosophy, there were three classes a semester of philosophy offered and three courses to choose from. By the time I stopped coordinating the philosophy program, there were 21 classes a semester and eight classes to choose from."

Likewise, when he began teaching photography, there were just eight students. "When I quit coordinating the photo program, I had 226 students," he said.

As the AWC photography program mushroomed, so did the photo exhibit at the Yuma County Fair. "Far as I know, when I started, we weren't even turning things in to the fair," Self said.

"And it was no time before we were turning in 300, 400 entries every spring when the county fair came. And there were years when we just kicked butt!

"We mopped up Best in Show, six out of seven purple ribbons in this category, five out of seven in that category. We did really good!

"For all but the last semester, I lived on campus and my community was the dorms. And through the many students that studied philosophy and/or photography with me, my prodigy goes forward," he said.

Though Self loved teaching at AWC, he retired several weeks ago. "I'm 60," he said with a shrug. "Time to do something different."

His retirement was also prompted by a reorganization plan that took him out of the photography program and made him exclusively a philosophy professor, he said.

In retrospect, if he'd have had the mind set he has now, he may have retired earlier, he said. A "free man" who's no longer a "slave to a schedule," he talked excitedly about his plans for the future.

He's headed for New York City, where he wants to see if he can make it in the big leagues as a photographer. "I already got some leads to be a stringer for the New York Post ... I also can do sports photography for this company called Light Room ... and I'd like to do runway photography.

"I figure with my expertise as a sports shooter dealing with low light and moving targets, that I'll do all right."

Meanwhile, his biggest decision in life right now is whether to paint his old car red or blue for the return trip to Florida. He'll head to New York from Florida.

But first, "I'm going to go through a big adventure," he said. "I'm going to go down the coast to Guadalajara over to Mexico City, down to Chiapas, hang out with the Zapatistas, then eventually make my way to the Yucatan Peninsula.

"If they've got a barge that'll let me float it across the 200 or whatever miles it is to Tampa, I'll get it right back to Waldo, where I started from. Otherwise, I'll give it to some lucky person in Cancun."

Self's interest in the Zapatistas is just like his interest in "any revolutionary movement around the world," he said. "But, you know, I especially like the Zapatistas because it's indigenous peoples.

"Radicals get involved in social issues because they understand that the white working class has no chance for economic justice unless people of color unite with them, or they unite with people of color .... Radicals realize that feminism, black liberation, liberation of indigenous peoples, if all the people that suffer injustice under the current distribution of power united, the powers that be wouldn't have much of a chance ....

"So philosophy messed up my life. Otherwise, I could be at the golf course having a martini in an hour."

Instead, he's fixing up a car to drive out of Yuma.

But who knows? Self may be back someday as a "toothless old man."

He's been known to pay some students' tuition over the years. "Well, I don't have any kids of my own," he said. "I usually got some spare change, so, yep, I've helped.

"And usually, I don't pay it. Usually I'll loan. Like there's somebody that I loaned $500 to last year 'cause they couldn't pay their tuition. I just say, 'When you're grown up and making good money and I'm a toothless old man, I might be back.'"

Then he grinned, revealing a mouth full of teeth.



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Nancy Gilkey can be reached at ngilkey@yumasun.com or 539-6851.