Why do I blog?

I started this blog (on another hosting platform) in August 2007. My first posts had nothing in particular that tied them together other than the fact they came from me. I wrote about Elvis, music, movies, and Latinos in the news. After moving over to WordPress, I started to focus only on issues of political or cultural importance, keeping this as a space where I could try and find ways of bridging the gap between the academy and the public. After making that decision my volume of posts decreased, but (I think) the quality got better.

During the 2008-09 school year, I was on sabbatical from my job. I work as an Assistant Professor of History and Latino Studies at a small liberal arts college in Southern California, and one of the benefits/demands of that job is that I get time off from teaching and committee work to produce research. While blogging doesn’t count, I found ample time to do so. My time off from the regular demands of my job coincided with a presidential election cycle that involved a Black man, a woman, and a Vietnam veteran–all with the issue of immigration looming in the background. Needless to say, I rarely struggled to find something to write about.

During the past four months I have been back at my teaching job, trying to balance family (I have two kids, a 4 and a 2 year old) with my increased research/writing demands, and teaching and committees, and grading and reading, and. . . The end result is that compared to a year ago, my volume of blog posts has gone down to a trickle.

I haven’t run out of things to say. I just find that I don’t have the time to say most of what I want to say, about the things I generally talk about here.

In the meantime, though, LatinoLikeMe has kind of blossomed in its readership. The sheer volume of posts I do have up, on such a wide variety of topics, means that people visit here everyday to read something. Right now, this blog gets about 14,000 hits a month, which is 13,073 more hits than it got in its entire first year. Whether or not most stay, I don’t know. But some do, as the steady stream of complimentary comments attests. It nice to know people enjoy reading something you wrote.

All this is to say, I find myself at a crossroads. I’m not considering closing shop, but I am thinking it might be okay for me to write with a bit less constraint than in the past, maybe use this space as more of a kind of journal than I have. Then again, what I do already seems to be reaching people, even if I can’t add to it with the frequency with which I would like.

I dunno.