Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
Source: The Gallery: A 35th Anniversary Photographic Directory of the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community Faculty, Administration, and Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District, 1996. p89.
Source: Saintsman Yearbook. San Diego, CA: St. Augustine High School, 1986. p45. [Cropped] Image used with permission, courtesy of St. Augustine High School (Library Media Resources).
Source: Private Collection. Copyright Joseph M. Medina; digitally reprinted with permission.
Source: English Department Gallery Photos. Private Photograph and Documents Collection. Copyright Homer B. Lusk. Digitally reprinted with permission, courtesy of Homer Lusk, Grossmont College Professor Emeritus and former English Department Chair.
Source: Harrison, Donald H. "Panel on Sept. 26 to Discuss Books Others Would Ban." Grossmont College News Release, 23 September 2013. Web.
Born Durango, Mexico, eight-year-old Joseph M. Medina, a.k.a. Jose Medina, immigrated with his family to San Diego in 1957 and at once started public school without any language fluency in English. A Class of 1968 local Varsity Cross Country and Track star at Crawford High School, Medina graduated at a time when he felt vulnerable to military conscription, which initially motivated his enrollment in San Diego City Junior College. Shortly after, he found himself accepted to University of San Diego, majoring in History and minor in Telecommunications. At USD, Joe was active in a variety of clubs and recalls many supportive instructors who guided him, but he was also troubled by the dearth of Latino students to be seen on the USD campus, which is why he wrote his senior thesis studies to 19th and early 20th century American history with special focus on the American Southwest and Mexico.
Also inspired by the Beat Generation, Joe took to the road after completing his bachelor’s degree in 1974, and hitchhiked for a time across the U.S., traveling to the Pacific Northwest, then eastward to Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston. While in Savannah, he discovered what would become a lifelong affinity for Jazz and Blues.
Eventually, however, he returned to San Diego, whereupon in 1976 he enrolled in SDSU’S Master’s program to obtain his degree in Creative Writing. With the submission of his poetry thesis, Moon, Sun, Magic Runes (portions of which he had the good fortune to show then poet in residence Philip Levine, who strongly encouraged Medina to continue writing), Joe completed his graduate work, earned his degree, and began exploring his options as an educator. In fall of 1979, during one of the writing seminars, City College English Department Chair Jack Sullivan extended an invitation to Joe for a part-time position, whereupon Joe taught his very first English fundamentals course. When it was discovered he was actually good at teaching, opportunities began to avail themselves. From 1982 to 1987, while continuing to teach in the evening program at City College, he held a part-time position at St. Augustine High School as an instructor of sophomore and junior English.
In 1987, however, Joe married his fiancée, Margot, and the stability of a tenured teaching position had now become a more pressing objective. When Grossmont College posted a job announcement for a 1987-1988 interim position, Medina took notice and was interviewed by a committee he would eventually come to call his colleagues: Mike Evans, Homer Lusk, and Mary Donnelly. Although in the end the position was offered to another colleague, Sue Jensen, Donnelly nevertheless contacted Joe’s employers at St. Augustine to arrange for him to come to Grossmont College on a part-time basis, and within a year he was hired to fill a tenure-track position.
While on staff in the Grossmont English Department, Medina made several significant and lasting contributions. In 1990, Homer Lusk enquired about his interest in a Latino program the college was planning to bring the campus. Medina, on board with the idea, immediately researched the shockingly poor rates of university transfer among minorities at junior college and, working alongside counselor Cruz Cerda, officially helped to install the Puente Project as the mechanism to improve transfer rates among African-American and Latino students at Grossmont College. Puente was hugely successful, and transfer rates for minority students improved exponentially. Over the next decade, however, the wheel of state economics and politics turned sharply, and Puente Project fell into its cross-hairs: support for the counseling component diminished and, after Cruz Cerda’s hours were reduced, he withdrew his energies from the Project. Joe Medina soldiered on by himself for a while with his sites set on hiring a qualified Latino/a counselor who could specialize in Puente, but when the opportunity came to fill a Counseling vacancy with just such a candidate, she was intentionally passed over, and it became clear to Joe that administration not only had dried up its support for Puente but also had actively began targeting the Program despite its continued successes. Medina resigned from Puente forthwith. (For another two years afterward, the Project continued under the direction of a Latina part-time instructor, until she acquired a full-time position at another college.)
Joe attained tenure in 1992, after which he became more willing to take experimental curricular approaches in his composition classes. One of these approaches was to focus on themes of censorship and banned books. What began as a student-generated report on censorship grew into an annual tradition, and on one fall evening in 1992, during National Banned Books Week, the first Grossmont College Celebration of Banned Books was staged to advocate antiestablishment rebellion, champion nonconformity, raise consciousness about censorship, and create opportunities for diverse campus voices to be heard through controversial literature. Faculty quickly proclaimed their interest to participate in the readings, while others made attendance of the event a regular part of their curriculum. As a result, the Celebration of Banned Books reading became a mainstay of Medina’s composition classes for the next seventeen years, while it concurrently established itself as a fixture of what would soon become the Creative Writing Program’s Fall Readings Series. (Joe passed the baton for the Celebration of Banned Books reading in 2015 to colleague Alan Traylor.)
Another of Joe’s proud accomplishments was bringing award-winning Mexican fiction author and novelist, Daniel Reveles, to Grossmont College to give his first ever public reading on April 27, 1995. (Reveles has since authored four story collections and novels.) Much like the origins of the Celebration of Banned Books reading, the Reveles event had its nascent beginnings as an optional reading and research project assigned in one of Joe’s English 110 classes. Using his influence with the Puente Project, and inviting the participation of Associated Students, Medina evolved the English 110 extra credit option into a public event that not only drew a packed audience but also started a lifelong friendship with Reveles. In his third story collection, Tequila, Lemon, and Salt: From Baja Tales of Love, Faith and Magic (2005), Reveles directly acknowledges his influence: “This is also my opportunity to thank Joe Medina and Homer Lusk, two dedicated professors at Grossmont College who lure non-readers out of the dark and into the bright world of reading, using my books for bait.”
After a tenured career spanning twenty-two years, seventeen hiring committees, and service on Academic Senate, the Education Committee, the Curricular Committee, and the Student Grievance committee, Joe Medina retired in spring of 2012. After the passing of his wife, Margo, in 2015, Joe returned to his creative roots as a poet and began writing steadfastly. In a 2018 interview, Medina explained, "The last section, 'Cauhtemoc, I Came Here to Find My Heritage,' provides personal insight into love poems for my deceased wife: yes, it’s an homage to Margot, my wife.…I came to this project by fulfilling a promise to my wife to put a book together. It was her wish, she had faith in that my drafts were publishable. After I mourned her passing, I got to work: wrote, wrote, capped and chopped, to put it into a book form." The collection, The Scorpion's Mineral Eye, was launched by San Diego City Works Press in September of that year (available through Sun Belt Publications and other online booksellers).
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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