Eduardo Vergara Torres

Lessons from a life between the lines. 

By Bohan Gao

Illustration by Iris Pope

He saw literature as something living, something that pressed back when interrogated. A Literature Humanities instructor from Chile who earned his PhD at Columbia, Eduardo Vergara Torres’ class was one of the most formative experiences of my freshman year. As the semester unfolded, so did he. He brought to the classroom not only his scholarship but his history—years growing up in post-dictatorship Chile, his love for working-class and marginalized voices from Latin America, the belief that literature could be a way of claiming the world for yourself. And maybe he was right. Maybe he understood in his teaching that making meaning required something that was alive to begin with—that all literature was just the aftermath, the memory of a wave crashing on the shore, a collision of voice, of self, of being alive in a room together. 

When I walked into his 6:10 p.m. class on the third floor of Hamilton, I came armed with my copy of Madame Bovary—a book he added to our syllabus—not knowing I would leave with something less tangible, yet far more substantial. In that room, I began to understand how a text could hold the shape of a life. Eduardo’s classes were never just about the words on the page; they were about the worlds that created them, and the lives that they touched. In his classroom, I felt the rare combination of intellect and humanity that makes you believe, if only for a semester, that learning might still change the world.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

The Blue and White: Why do you teach the Core? 

Eduardo Vergara Torres: For many years, I didn’t consider it something that I could do because I was very insecure about my English. But I started becoming drawn to it. While I was at Columbia, during these years, I started thinking about my background. … I started thinking and writing a lot, and then developing a resource on how it is that working class people, or people from marginalized groups from Latin America and around the world—how they engage with what we call high culture, or the literary tradition. And so I was very drawn to teach the Core because it was also very closely related to my own reflections and to this research project. And, of course, I also studied literature in Chile, so it was within my specialization.

B&W: Yes, I remember you’ve told me this before—that you’re fascinated by how people from these minoritized backgrounds come to develop that crazy fervor for literature and philosophy. Do you remember when that feeling first took hold for you, and what did it feel like? What is your theory for why this happens?

EVT: Well, that’s what I'm writing about. About my own memories. I’m not sure why this is—I think there is something mysterious about this, because my parents didn't go to college and in my house there were very few books. I was born in the late 80s, and my parents would go to the street market, and there, laying on the ground, people were selling used books for 50 cents. 

My dad, he’s not someone who reads books. He’s very smart and very interested in history and everything that's going on around us, but he’s not someone who has the habit of reading books—sitting down and reading for hours. I was not exposed to that in my house. There were very few books, and the ones that we had were old books that were published during the military dictatorship in Chile. All of them were classics—universal literature—and my dad started by collecting those. They were very cheap, and they were very important books. And so those books were in my house growing up. But I didn’t have an example, you know. I was not following their example, my parents, even though they are very intellectually curious.

So where does it come from? I think I just started developing an intuition that there’s something important out there. And we humans are curious and nosy, and we all want to be where we are not invited. Reading felt like that—like I’m gonna get into this place of very important things, where no one has invited me… And then I started reading, and I realized that there were these amazing things. And then I couldn't stop.

B&W: In class, we talk about books and their symbolism just as much as we talk about the emotional and existential questions that they raise for us personally. Why is it important to you that we read the Core in this way?

EVT: I've been thinking a lot about it in the last month—I think what I intended to do was to put an emphasis on history. … That was something I found very important because I don't see literature just as a collection of books to be contemplated because they are beautiful, but as a way of understanding the past. I realized, after thinking a lot about it, that my approach to this class is pretty much determined by having grown up in Chile in the 90s and 2000s, because we were living in a country that was trying to rebuild its democracy.

People were trying to have a country again, so when you went to school, you were not only going because you wanted to be successful. You were participating in something that suddenly felt free, that had been liberated after the dictatorship ended. You were able to get together with your classmates and talk about politics, which only a few years earlier was completely banned. And you wanted to be part of public education. It was public education that had been under attack in the previous decades, and people wanted to be engaged with politics because they were not able to do it—for twenty years, you’d turn on the TV and see how people were discussing, revealing the most horrifying crimes that the dictatorship had committed. People were asking, what are we going to do with this? How are we going to find justice? And then you’d go to the university, and the universe within the university was full of people who were coming back from exile or who had been silenced or persecuted, and now they were going back to their teaching positions to do research, to look back on this past. So our whole society was involved in that process.

And I think that shaped the way I see literature, because that's the context that gave meaning to this. It wasn't only something that we were doing because we enjoyed it and we thought that we were good at it. It was that we were trying to have a democracy, even if we didn’t know it. But that’s what we were trying to do.

B&W: You often invited us to bring our “whole selves” into the room—the political, the personal, the vulnerable. What happens when students do that? Has anyone ever brought something into the room that changed you?

EVT: On many occasions, students started writing to me to share something—an essay that they read, or an idea that came to their minds. And I am always happy to engage with that. It's very fulfilling. I learn a lot, not only from the texts they sent me, but also from understanding their own concerns and where they come from—how they fit in this country, in this society, in this moment. 

My intention with doing that is to help people realize that all these books are actually about themselves. They are not about something foreign or alien or detached from our reality. All of them are saying things that are very urgent. 

The way I grew up in Chile, that was the way we approached literature. When I came here, I was so surprised to see that people could talk about the Classics—Greek tragedies—without making reference to anything going on nowadays. I remember when I was taking the same classes in Chile, we read the play Antigone and, for us, it had so much to do with the victims of the dictatorship—this woman who wanted to bury her brother who was murdered by a tyrant, and her conflict with loss. We would turn on the TV and see these groups of women who were the sisters, the daughters, the wives of people who were kidnapped and murdered, and they wanted to bury their dead, but they couldn’t. So for us, Antigone was a current event. It was not something that had to do with a strange past, unrelated to us. Everything was like that, which was a much more vital way of reading things. 

B&W: You mentioned that most people around you at Columbia feel “the place was built for them.” But for you, the experience has been different—more like an interruption. What does it mean to read or teach in a space that wasn’t made with you in mind?

EVT: The feeling that things were not made for us is something that we have experienced since we were born. Of course, nothing is made for us. I still remember when I was little, I’d turn on the TV, and everyone on TV was rich. Every child in the ads was rich, and they were rich and white—and Chileans, we do not look like that on TV. So, from the moment you’re born, everything around you is communicating to you that these things are not meant for you. And it is the same with books. This culture is transmitted in a way that makes you feel that it’s something very high, very solid, very unreachable. All of that is communicating to you that this is not made for you, and that’s why I was saying that when you start reading in the working class it’s because you are very nosy. You are getting into a place that is not made for you, where you are not supposed to be. There’s this philosopher Jacques Rancière and, for him, that's the definition of democracy: when you get into places you're not supposed to be, and when you get into those places that are not made for you. I think that’s very concrete.

B&W: What made you choose [the humanities]? What advice do you have for someone who wants to pursue the humanities but perhaps struggles with the socio-economic cost or other barriers to access? 

EVT: I will say that it’s hard for me to imagine myself doing something else. I know I have to work because I have to make money. Under capitalism, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. So if I wasn’t doing this, I would have to do something else. But if I was left alone to my own devices, I would just read and write—I would come up with a research project. It feels like that’s just the way my mind works.

But if I had to do something else, I would turn to woodworking or manual labor. I come from a working class family, so when we think of doing “something else,” we don't think of going into consulting—that's what many people think, right? Well, we don't think that. We think, if we can’t have an intellectual life, then we’ll go back to the occupation that corresponds to our social class, which is manual labor. I guess I could do many other things too, but this is what feels more natural. 

As for what advice I would have for someone who wants to pursue the humanities, I guess that I would advise them to organize and fight against the people who want to make it impossible for us. 

B&W: [You’ve] talked about how reading Ocean Vuong and Jiayang Fan returned to you a sense of what’s real. What makes a text feel real to you? 

EVT: When I was scrolling on social media, I started realizing that, when content was not created with violence or hatred, the other major topic was rich people. Rich people doing what they did, or how to become one of them. And everything is related to that. We’re talking about them all the time, and we have to endure whatever they decide to do to us or we have to engage with whatever crosses their mind. What I want to know is what’s happening with ordinary people—what's going on with nurses, with school teachers, with truck drivers? What do their lives look like? What are they thinking about? What makes them suffer, what makes them happy? What ideas do they have? I don’t want to hear any more about whatever crosses Elon Musk's mind. 

And so I think that this feeling of unreality has a lot to do with social inequality, because now that inequality is so staggering, we only get content and public discourse about the rich. And everything is not about that. Texts force us to confront the words and the lives of ordinary people that feel real. That’s at least part of the answer. Inequality and unreality are very closely tied.

B&W: Is there a story you haven’t yet been able to write that still feels too close or too distant? And how do you navigate the tension between stories that feel “unwritable” but necessary?

EVT: That's a good question, because it’s something I am struggling with right now. When I started this research project about how working class people engage with literature and high cultures, I realized that I needed to learn a lot about my own family, about my parents and my grandparents… and then try to connect all of that with the world historical processes that were determining their trajectories.

The thing is, it seems to me that my parents’ story still feels too close and too early right now. So I accumulate material about it, but I don’t think it’s the moment for me—I still have to wait decades before I have enough distance to be able to tell these stories. But at least now I'm doing research and thinking of how to approach it.

It's not that there is anything particularly exceptional about my parents. Actually, it’s precisely because of that that I think it's important, because it can be very representative. Many scholars in Chile and here, too, are rich or are middle class. So I have been surprised to see that, when I talk to them about these things—for example, about how my dad would go to the supermarket to get a copy of The Odyssey, and I read that same copy for twenty years because it was the only one that was available—my colleagues would have no idea what I was talking about. And so there is a huge world here that is not being addressed by literary studies or historians.

B&W: On that topic, you’ve recommended a lot of authors—Eribon, Ernaux, Irigaray, Lispector—who ask: What happens to love, to class, to selfhood, when we leave the world we came from? Do you still feel divided between those worlds? And how do you reconcile them and yourself?

EVT: Yeah, I do feel divided. Often in these kinds of narratives, you find this sense of guilt, of these contradictory feelings, because the more progress you make in your education, the further away you go from the world you come from. So today I’m here talking to you, at Columbia University … It feels weird, because then I go back home and I realize that my life has absolutely nothing to do with [that world]. And I feel guilty about that. I don’t have a positive feeling about it. 

I don’t feel proud. I only feel bad in different ways. I feel guilty, I feel sad, I feel detached, so I think maybe I'm trying to make up for that by writing about it, because I do think that at least I have some tools to describe this.

B&W: You once said that teaching Literature Humanities isn’t just about reading the past, but about finding what’s missing between then and now. What first made you feel that gap and want to teach into it?

EVT: That’s a great question. I have this constant dialogue with students, as if I’m always in my classroom. And what’s on my mind is, how can I explain this to someone… to make things feel concrete, real, and important.

I want to ask, “What is it that you have lost?” I want to make you visible. I want to question this drive towards success—personal success—and to try to discuss how impoverishing that can be for our experience as human beings in this world, who—one day, sooner or later—are gonna die. We are here for a very limited time, and doing that feels very lame. So, yeah, I’m interested in that, in shaking that up and putting that to question. To convey the feeling that things can be different.

I think these concepts are very closely related. You want to succeed and you are necessarily accepting things as they are, because you want to succeed within this framework that we are forced to be in, but the way things are right now are particularly awful. The world is something we make. It’s not something that is there and obeys the laws of nature. It’s made of institutions and practices that we are constantly choosing. I think that’s another thing that I want to convey. It’s not a force of nature. We are doing this to each other, and we can choose to do otherwise. And it seems to me that we often forget about that and we start believing that everything is just what it is, and that the only thing that could exist is what exists now.

And that’s not true. And there's also the fact that we are together and that the people next to you are real. The people next to you are not social media profiles. The people next to you have a story, and they have a grandma, and that grandma also has a story. So there’s a whole world here.

And I want students to be able to disclose that to each other. That's something that I’m very interested in, because I want to make it possible for students to disclose this inherent policy—this plurality. That reality is not a simulation. That people around us are real. They exist.

And I think that the classroom is a very good space to make that visible.