Once Upon a Time

Hugo Moreno grew up in the border city of Juarez, Mexico. As a child, his favorite books were Little Men by Louisa May Alcott, which he read several times (in Spanish), and Aesop’s Fables. He also liked to read encyclopedias, comics, and some history books, especially a multi-volume, illustrated chronicle of the Mexican Revolution. He was a devout Catholic and loved to read the beautifully illustrated Bible that his maternal grandparents kept in their living room. He also perused Aguiluchos, a Catholic magazine for young readers that promotes the values of the Combonian missionaries and advertises their activities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although he never envisioned himself doing missionary work, he greatly admired those who provided humanitarian care and aid to the needy. Religion played such a central part in his early life that, when he was a teenager, he concluded that, if God does not exist, life has no meaning. When he graduated from college at the age of 20 from Texas A&M University, he thought and was very glad that his academic education was over. During those years, he fantasized about making it in the business world, traveling the globe, retiring at the age of thirty, and devoting the rest of his life to drawing and painting. At the age of 23, he opened and operated a small clothing store in Juarez. To combat his boredom while waiting for customers, he read books by Plato, Chekhov, Zola, and other canonical Western authors. But when he read La guerra del fin del mundo by Mario Vargas Llosa, everything changed. He was so fascinated and impressed by this novel that he decided to apply to graduate school to study literature to become a writer one day. Since he did not take any literature courses in college, he was not admitted into the master’s program in Hispanic literature, but they admitted him into the political science program, which allowed him to take several literature classes and to write a master’s thesis on Carlos Fuentes’s political ideology. During that period, he participated in the free philosophy lectures offered by the late Professor Federico Ferro Gay at the University of Juarez. These lectures and two Latin American philosophy conferences that he attended in 1990, one in Juarez and one in El Paso, gave him a new worldview and a more critical perspective that led him to abandon his religious beliefs and that inspired him to broaden and deepen his humanistic education, particularly in the fields of literature, philosophy, and history. After completing his master’s in political science at the University of Texas at El Paso, he studied at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he obtained a master's degree in Latin American Studies. Subsequently, he moved to Ithaca, NY, to pursue a PhD at Cornell University. Before completing his doctoral dissertation, he spent a year in Dhaka, Bangladesh, with his then-wife, Sandra Comstock, whom he met at Cornell. During that year, he worked on his first novel about an experimental community devoted to seeking mystical union with God by scientific and technological means. At the end of that year (1999), they returned to the U.S., and he faced the decision on whether to continue working on his novel and try to make a living as a writer, or finish his doctoral dissertation and seek an academic career as a professor of Spanish. He chose the latter and, a few months later, he obtained a tenure-track position at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. After working there for three years, he took a year off to work on another novel that he tentatively titled “Donde termina el Norte.” At the end of that sabbatical, he faced again the dilemma of whether to focus his energies on writing fiction or stay on the academic path. He chose the latter partly because his first son, Sebastian, was going to be born that summer. In 2006, he accepted another tenure-track job at the University of Western Ontario and moved with his family to London, where their second child, Isabel, was born. Four years later, they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to spend a year there doing academic research at Harvard. In 2011, he accepted a tenure-track position at Reed College and moved to Portland with his family. Three years later, he and his wife decided to open an arts café in the Pearl called Glyph, which they ran together for about a year. However, that venture put a strain on their marriage, and they eventually divorced. He quit his job at Reed started working at Lewis & Clark in 2014. A year later, he resumed work on the novel that he had started in 2004, and, in August 2020, he finally completed it and self-published it under the title Donde se acaba el Norte. In 2021, the novel received a Latino Book Award for “Best Adventure Novel in Spanish.” A couple of years later, he translated it into English. Where the North Ends is now part of the Querencias Series of the University of New Mexico Press, and it’s available for sale as of October 21st of this year. In addition to this novel, he has published and edited academic articles on Hispanic literature and philosophy, and an academic book titled Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato (2022). At present, his two children are attending college, and he lives in Portland with his wife, Siobhan Martin and her son, James Ferlazzo, who is a senior in high school.