Our community lost the inimitable Raúl Pacheco-Vega this week. Someone who knew him better than me should write a more definitive remembrance and maybe they have in some other corner of the internet. But, I haven’t seen a longer treatment yet (here is a terrific one!), so I thought I’d have a go at a remembrance.

Raúl lived his life on-line, as many of us these days tend to do, myself included, with much of our personal and professional life advertised in real time. His blog was a legendary resource for other scholars.

But beyond the internet, Raúl I believe had a close circle of family and friend confidantes. I knew he was especially close with his mother. How did I know? Well, from Raúl, and his various postings on different platforms. I knew she was proud of him and he of her, as I believe she was a scholar in her own right. I had seen his celebration of their travels together to France, where he had I believe gone to conferences and had a longer guest appointment in the past. He also had several siblings, some of whom were also in the academia.

It sounded like of late that he had been actively involved in providing more care for his mother, and that resonated, as I’ve been going through the same thing.

Raúl often wrote of his own fragility, with a stridency that I thought perhaps was exaggerated, but clearly not. He would write about the need for self-care, the need for breaks, the dangers of burnout and over-work, how close he nearly came to death on previous occasions. It sounded dramatic but now, not knowing the circumstances of his passing, it sounds like simply an act of truth-telling.

But, he had just been on-line – it can’t be can it? Last week, he was commenting on the impending World Cup coming to Mexico, how he had FOMO for a conference that he been scheduled to go to but had to back out of. Little things on different social media platforms that always struck me as sort of Raúl comfort food. His tidy office, a new assemblage of favorite pens for marking up manuscripts in his Everything Notebook, new books he had added to his over-stuffed library, how proud he was to be a senior Professor and be mentoring students, a blog post with a helpful methodology for junior social scientists to become the best versions of their selves, exhortations to sit down and write, reflections on his former life in volleyball, his love of hummingbirds in all its forms. 

All of these musings which percolated in to our feeds were an overstuffed reminder of his personality. Most of us probably knew him more on-line than in real life. I think it was ISA some years ago where I ran into him at a mini-mart where we were both buying Diet Coke. I was like “You exist!” I think he had just had his braces off.

I was aware of his work but not a deep student of his writings. He had me read a couple of draft pieces on wastepickers once. I knew that he wrote in the global environmental space on sanitation and collaborated broadly, but the awareness I had of him was more of his presence as a champion for others, a Lizzo if you will of the social sciences, putting forward a helpful and dynamic character, even as his own life must have contained multitudes, including pain.

Raúl’s death is another bitter reminder that death comes for us all. We have lost a number of colleagues in recent years, and not simply the passing of aging greats. Contempories dying young makes you realize how fleeting and how much a gift life is.

So, it is with sadness that we won’t have new contributions from Raúl to read and fill our feeds with his light and uplift. We will miss you friend. Rest well, colibrí.