What the student said, regarding La Malinche and more: the crisis of modernity is a crisis of gender … and the crises of Latin American national identities (especially the Mexican one, with the things Paz says, for example) are also crises of gender. People have written about this and it is a smart perception.
♦
To be happy I must spend more time thinking about things like this. And the man who hired me, the one who has said that literature is “bullshit,” that theory is “too difficult for students of [his] ethnic background,” and that since the women instructors are not people who “had the chance to do the Ph.D.” it is my job to “make that up to them” IS RETIRING.
“I feel as though I had gotten a monkey off my back,” said one of my colleagues. We do not love this man. But he is a cultural nationalist and clearly conservative on gender, and it is interesting.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Congratulations!
I STILL do the happy dance about getting rid of a toxic colleague who retired a year ago. Fortunately he was never in a position of power.
My student says, darkly, that the new one can always turn toxic and that my hopes for improvement are utopian.