Late Chancellor at UC Riverside Honored by Opening of Archives

During a series of discussions Friday on his life and legacy, four students held an impromptu debate in a hallway on the UC Riverside campus that no doubt would have pleased the school’s late chancellor, Tomas Rivera.

“How do you refer to yourself?” asked one of the women students.

“I am Hispanic,” said Linda Ureno, 22.

“I’m Chicana, and proud of it,” said Carolina Martinez, 21.

“I say I am human,” said Esther Martinez, 22.

Rivera, who was 48 when he died of a heart attack in 1984, also explored the questions of identity and personal values throughout his life--first as the child of migrant farm workers and later as a poet and novelist, and the first Latino to head a UC campus.

Student of Everyday Life

Mexican literary critic Carlos Monsivais told an audience of 50 Latin American scholars and students that Rivera explored these questions “because he wanted to get to the bottom of psychology and everyday life in his community, which he observed without scorn or self-deprecation.”

Such was the man honored Friday at the inauguration of the Tomas Rivera Archives, a collection of more than 80,000 documents including Rivera’s novels, poetry, essays and literary criticism, as well as public and educational policy statements and personal papers.

The inauguration was accompanied by an all-day conference focusing on the three major points of Rivera’s life: literature, civic activism and education.

“Rivera helped pave the way for Latinos in higher education,” said Armando Martinez, archivist in charge of the Rivera collection. At the same time, Martinez said, Rivera sought to “build intellectual bridges” in literary and artistic fields spanning his Mexican heritage and American society.

‘Vital Ties’

Monsivais agreed, and emphasized the importance of Rivera’s goal of validating “vital ties” between Latinos who were born in the United States and those who migrated here with similar tastes and “points of view acquired through close relations with workers and agricultural laborers.”

“For us,” Monsivais said, “the Chicano experience is extremely important, and evidence of this is the influence of Chicano fashions and attitudes in Mexico . . . from a synthesis of the languages to (the popular East Los Angeles musical group)Los Lobos.”

Kemy Oyarzun, a professor of Latin American literature at UC Riverside, told of a personal side to the man who had left an indelible mark on her own life.

Taught by Example

“Through his own example, he showed how education can open up possibilities for working-class people to play a more responsible role in society,” she said.

“He was a multidimensional intellectual,” Oyarzun added, as a particular memory brought a smile to her face. “At serious administrative meetings, instead of doodling, he used to write bits of poetry on a yellow legal pad.”

Born in Crystal City, Tex., in 1935, Rivera and his family traversed the Midwest as part of a vast stream of migrant farm workers. Unlike most of his peers, Rivera graduated from high school, where he displayed a fluency in English and Spanish that marked his literary career.

In 1978, he became executive vice president at the University of Texas’ El Paso campus, and it was there that he became the UC Board of Regents’ choice over 180 other applicants for the Riverside post.

Rivera was his own translator in both the English- and Spanish-language editions of his two best-known works, “Always and Other Poems,” and “Y No Se Lo Trago la Tierra (And the Earth Did Not Part),” a series of short stories.

“I read ‘Y No Se Lo Trago la Tierra’ in my first year of college when I was 18,” recalled Carolina Martinez, a Latin American studies major at UC Santa Cruz. “I saw a lot of myself in there.”