An Uncompleted Conversation: For Jim Malloy

James M. Malloy changed my life, and I did not thank him before he died. That is one of the sorrows I now have to carry.

I went to Pittsburgh to study with Jim because of a book. As a young student finishing my undergraduate degree, I read The Uncompleted Revolution, and it had an enormous influence on my intellectual formation. To me, Jim was the great scholar of Bolivia, and I wanted to study under him. I traveled to Pittsburgh right after completing my master’s degree, and my young wife accompanied me. Jim was on sabbatical when we arrived, but he kindly allowed us to share his apartment with a Bolivian couple. That was my introduction to his world.

I quickly learned that Jim was not an easy man for most people. He had rough edges, and those rough edges were genuine. He could be difficult, abrasive, and suspicious. I don't think it helps his memory to deny that. But it is also true that I didn't see him primarily that way. With me, he was generous. We ran together through the streets of Pittsburgh, and while we ran, we talked, mainly about Bolivian politics. Those conversations were part of my education. They mattered as much as any seminar.

Jim thought in large arguments. He distrusted academic fashion. He had little patience for the idea that politics could be reduced to technique, data, or professionalized jargon. He called himself a storyteller, but that description understated what he really was. He was a scholar who believed that history, power, and political conflict had to be made legible in all their human complexity.

That is what made The Uncompleted Revolution such an important book. Jim did not treat Bolivia’s 1952 revolution as a single heroic event frozen in time. He treated it as an unfinished process, a struggle over authority, development, and social transformation whose outcome remained unsettled. That way of seeing Bolivia shaped a generation of scholarship, and decades later the book was still being described as one of the most systematic works in English on the revolution. In my own view, it remains the preeminent study of that historic event.

Jim’s generosity toward me was tangible. We later co-wrote Revolution and Reaction: Bolivia 1964-1985, a book largely based on research and fieldwork I did in Bolivia. He also provided the kind of mentorship that young scholars often don’t recognize while they are living it: editing, gathering materials, working on major reference projects, doing the often unseen work that builds an academic career. At the time, I saw this as paying dues. Looking back, I realize he was also teaching me how to build a career.

Most importantly, Jim helped me secure the professional opportunity I needed. Without his recommendation, I don't believe I would have built the career I have at Florida International University. To a large extent, I owe my success as a professor to his support.

Our relationship did not survive intact. Many years later, after Jim retired, I read an unpublished novel in which I recognized an unflattering fictional version of myself. I felt insulted. I felt betrayed. I believed that the years I had devoted to him and to our work had been repaid with contempt. We never spoke again.

In retrospect, I was wrong to let that be the final word. The older I have become, the more I think that novel revealed less about me than about Jim’s own fears, suspicions, and injuries. It was fiction, yes, but it was also the product of a troubled and searching mind. I wish now that I had made the effort to reach out to him—not to erase the hurt, but at least to say thank you.

I am glad that Jim seems to have had a good final chapter. His obituary presents a man who, in his later years, was surrounded by family, sustained by Mary Ellen, and still remembered as a reader, thinker, writer, teacher, and adventurer. I am genuinely glad for that.

Jim was not a simple man, and this cannot be a simple tribute. He could wound people. He could alienate them. He could be exasperating. But he could also be intellectually exhilarating, personally generous, and life-changing. The public record will remember him for his books, for his years at Pitt, for his work on Bolivia and on Latin American politics, and for his role in building Latin American studies there. I will remember him in another way as well: as the man with whom I ran the streets of Pittsburgh while talking about revolution, history, and Bolivia.

It is perhaps fitting that the author of The Uncompleted Revolution should leave behind, in me, an uncompleted conversation. I did not reconcile with Jim while he was alive, and I still carry the ambivalence of having survived his rough edges. But I can still say plainly, and with gratitude, that James “Jim” Malloy mattered enormously in my life. He helped make me the scholar I became. For that, and for more than I said when I had the chance, I honor him now.