In Memoriam: Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez 1929–2019

Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez, Professor Emeritus of Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was a Member of the Executive Committee of the International Linguistic Association (ILA) and the Editorial Board for the Association's journal, WORD. He died on 4 August.

Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez was born on 15 November 1924 in Trujillo, Peru and was exiled to the US in 1946, where he continued his studies at William Penn College and the University of Arizona and received his Ph.D. in linguistics and Hispanic literature at the University of Washington in 1955. He became known as a scholar of wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests in linguistics and the intellectual history of Peru, having authored or edited some forty books and countless journal articles. Along with his prolific scholarship and dedication to teaching, he was active in the International Linguistic Association, the publisher of this journal.

The ILA, originally known as the Linguistic Circle of New York, had its roots in the Prague Linguistic Circle. It was founded in 1943 by European linguists located at the New School for Social Research, who had arrived in New York as refugees from World War II and taught at the École Libre de Hautes Études (Free School for Advanced Studies). Joining them to form the Circle were linguists at other colleges and universities in the New York area, as far afield as Princeton and Philadelphia. Professor Chang-Rodríguez first learned about the Circle while he was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He and a colleague, Alphonse Juilland, wanted to learn more about this group, so they decided to travel to New York City in October 1956 to attend one of the Circle’s monthly public lectures. From that moment on, he became a member—regularly participating in the monthly lectures and the annual conferences and eventually becoming a member of the Executive Committee. He bore witness in 1969 to the change of the group’s name to the International Linguistic Association in recognition of its expanding membership. He worked on various committees of the Executive Committee and organized and chaired several annual conferences, including the first ever held in Latin America—in Arequipa, Peru, in 1973. He also served as ILA’s president from 1969 to 1972 and generously took the presiding role several times again in later periods until 2008.

Professor Chang-Rodríguez was greatly devoted to the Association’s journal, WORD, which was established in 1945 with the mission to become the journal of record for general linguistics. He guest-edited two consecutive issues in 1982 on the topic Spanish in the Western Hemisphere in contact with English, Portuguese, and the Amerindian languages and authored an article entitled “Problems for language planning in Peru.” And very importantly, in 1985 Professor Chang-Rodríguez was selected to be one of the WORD Editorial Board’s four members, and he remained in that editorial role until his passing, 34 years later.

While Professor Chang-Rodríguez made many contributions to the ILA as a member of the Executive Committee and as an editor of WORD, perhaps the greatest gift to us was his scholarly documentation of the Association’s history. He published an article about ILA’s origins and its journal, which appeared in the 1995 issue of Philológica Canariensia, celebrating the 50th anniversary of WORD. More recently, he wrote a lengthy piece in Spanish that can be found in his three-volume work called Entre dos fuegos (“Between two fires”). The “dos fuegos” in the title refers to the dates between the Revolución de Trujillo, Peru, in 1932 and the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, the time frame covered in this work. The trilogy was a kind of memoir, or in his words, “a testimony written by a Peruvian in exile … born out of a longing to recover the past in order to revive it and reflect on it.”¹ Volume 3, published in 2009, is subtitled Reminiscencias de Europa y África, and Professor Chang-Rodríguez dedicated the entire first chapter to the history of the ILA, chronicling the names of eminent linguists invited to present at the monthly lectures and the annual conferences, recording WORD’s 1945 inception and subsequent issues and monographs, names of its Managing Editors beginning with Pauline Taylor followed by others such as Roman Jakobson, Giuliano Bonfante, and George Herzog. He also provided names of Guest Editors such as Alphonse Juilland, who oversaw articles written in French, English, German, Italian, and Russian in honor of André Martinet’s 60th birthday. Finally, he detailed the roles of Martinet and others who were active and influential contributors to the vitality of the ILA.

Along with our gratitude for Professor Chang-Rodríguez’s professional and intellectual support to the ILA, we wish to remember and celebrate him for his warmth, his cordial and respectful presence on the Executive Committee, and his generous mentorship of students and junior colleagues. We also wish to offer our condolences to his wife, Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Distinguished Professor at City College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and the family.

Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez spent over 60 years of his life contributing in these various ways to the ILA. The ILA community will miss our esteemed member and friend.

Notes

1 This is my own translation from the Spanish.