User:Potosino

I'm a part-time lecturer (on Mexico, Latin America, Anthropology, History) at the University of Michigan, and a part-time student advisor/paper-pushing bureaucrat at the same.

Language interests: In my "spare" time, which takes nearly as much as my two half-time jobs put together, I do what I would be doing full-time if only it paid more than a small fraction of the minimum wage: literary translations. My specialty, and my passion, is Spanish to English, though I have also done English to Spanish (don't ask!) and Portuguese to English, with suprisingly good results given my clumsy Portuñol and the cheap little dictionary I was using. (One of my coworkers is a triply transplanted bahiana/carioca/Michigander, which helps a lot.) In case anyone is wondering, I first learned Spanish during a year-long trip to Spain in 1980-81, then completely relearned it during three years in Mexico in 1982-85, then continued to pick up new nuances, variations, and accents from my cubano in-laws plus about half a dozen research trips to the island over the past 20 years.

I learned Russian from a total of eight years of classroom study plus a six-week trip to Moscow/Leningrad during the grim Brezhnev era, but have managed to forget it almost completely in the years since. However, when I watched the underrated film "The Collector" in 2005, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I understood nearly half of what the Ukranian characters were saying. (Though I was unable to tell the difference, whatever that may be, between Ukranian and Russian, which probably says something about how sub-basic my Russian is now.) I learned the basics of Portuguese by sitting in on a "Portuguese for Spanish Speakers" class at UM in 2004, plus by listening to lots of Jobim, Cayetano, and Maria Bethania, and by trying to speak with my coworker's mother when she calls the office from Rio. I learned rudimentary Runasimi by sitting in on the Quechua class at UM and by running the UM Quechua program and talking with the visiting lecturers from Cusco over the past several years.

How I got into Wiki: As I do my translations, I have to look up lots of stuff on the internet (thank goodness it exists!), which is what got me into Wikipedia. I've done lots of research over the years in Latin American history and culture, so I feel qualified to make additions and emendations in articles on those topics whenever I see something that looks like it could use a little tweaking.

My contributions, so far:

• I created the article on The Mangy Parrot (an early Mexican novel, reputedly the first Latin American novel, and one of my translations into English).
• I expanded the stub on Guaman Poma, whose work I am currently translating.
• I have also made random corrections and additions to several other articles, such as the 1857 Constitution of Mexico, and basically any article I read that has a typo, broken link, misprint, etc.

My name: I lived in a town named Mexquitic, in the state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, for about three years back in the 1980s, and I always loved the name potosino for people from my favorite state. I hope my "fellow" potosinos don't mind that I took the name first!