Chicano Studies Find Favor on Campus : University Classes Fill Up, New Research Centers Sought as Latino Population Booms

After more than a decade of struggling to survive, Chicano studies programs at universities throughout the Southwest are becoming the focus of renewed interest, coinciding with growing public attention to the Latino population boom.

Enrollment in Chicano studies programs has doubled on some campuses, and classes are drawing large numbers of Anglo students for the first time. Some University of California campuses are considering requiring that all undergraduates take an ethnic studies class.

The Legislature, calling the number of minority faculty at public universities “dismal,” is pushing for increased hiring. And Chicano professors, emboldened by the encouraging signs of change, are pushing for new Chicano research centers on some campuses.

They also are calling for a recommitment to their 1960s ideals of challenging the educational institutions on behalf of their growing and troubled community.

“The burning bush has been smoldering,” said historian Rodolfo Acuna, a dean among Chicano scholars and founder of the Chicano studies department at Cal State Northridge, the nation’s largest. “It’s starting to heat up again.”

As radical Chicano graduate students during the 1960s, they barged their way into the white ivory towers of American academia and then insisted on staying--on their own terms. But not long after their tumultuous beginning, Chicano studies programs began to falter. Dwindling enrollment, budget cuts and denial of tenure were common.

Chicano scholars managed, nevertheless, to produce an impressive body of knowledge. But because they insist on analyzing the world through Chicano eyes, their work has often been dismissed as subjective and second-class, they say. Only in recent years have mainstream university presses begun to publish their works.

‘Activist and Scholar’

Nevertheless, the scholars are particularly proud of those who, like Acuna, have maintained the 1960s’ tradition of Chicano “activist and scholar.” He has worked closely in various campaigns with labor union organizers and community activists in the San Fernando Valley. And his books--including “Occupied America,” the first general Chicano history written by a Chicano--have become standard texts in the field.

“Our research should address itself to the pressing problems of our community,” said Tatcho Mindiola Jr., director of the Mexican-American Studies Program at the University of Houston and coordinator of the 17th Annual National Assn. of Chicano Studies Conference held in Los Angeles recently. He reminded his colleagues that the organization was founded to “challenge the status quo” and improve conditions in their community.

Spawned through the protest marches, walkouts and sit-ins of the 1960s, the movement’s activist tradition has admittedly set some of the scholars apart from the mainstream of academic life.

“Our discipline was developed in opposition to the dominant paradigms of social science, which sustained the status quo, and essentially blamed our people and our culture for problems in education, employment and our inability to assimilate,” said William V. Flores, a Chicano-Latino studies program professor at Cal State Fresno.

Because the Chicano model of advocacy scholarship poses a challenge to the Euro-centered tradition of academic “objectivity,” he said, Chicano research has been “maligned as biased, narrow and self-serving.”

In their defense, Chicano scholars point out that the so-called objectivity of previous Anglo scholars often misrepresented, denigrated or ignored Latinos.

“We literally barged our way into mainstream academia,” Mindiola said. “We’ve institutionalized our courses and wrested control over what is said about us. It used to be all in the hands of Anglo scholars; now the majority of research on Chicanos is done by Chicanos.”

But Chicano scholarship has yet to win general acceptance from the academic Establishment.

“Methodologically, our stuff is completely sound,” said David E. Hayes-Bautista, a UCLA School of Medicine professor who heads the university’s Chicano Studies Research Center. The difference, he said, is that Chicano researchers look at the world based on a “Latino intellectual tradition . . . that leads us to see and analyze things differently.”

For instance, in a study the center is conducting on AIDS among Latinos, researchers are dealing with issues of life and death, sex, sin and dying. To understand these issues among Latinos, they must be studied from a Latino Catholic “intellectual” framework. The Anglo Protestant model would not work, he said.

Illegitimate and Undervalued

In a 1987 national survey of 240 Chicano professors, most said they were regarded on their campuses as “second-class” and “illegitimate” and that their research was undervalued by their universities, said Hisauro Garza, a visiting ethnic studies scholar at Santa Clara University, who conducted the study.

Nevertheless, Chicano scholars have broken new academic ground.

“For the first time you’ve had Chicano historians begin to unearth a whole field of archival materials and documents previously overlooked. They’ve often gone into new terrain, or corrected erroneous concepts of earlier scholars, in documenting the real live story of Chicanos in this country,” Garza said.

In a departure from standard methods, Acuna, for instance, has used Mexican and bilingual sources as well as American. This has led to some reinterpretations of history.

For example, most U.S. historians hold that the motivation behind the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 was to provide a direct railway link between El Paso and San Diego. But on the basis of archival material he found in the border state of Sonora, Acuna concluded that the United States purchased the land because of the mineral deposits officials knew were there.

The broad scope of Chicano scholarship was on display at the recent Los Angeles conference. Workshop topics ranged from the history of medicine in pre-colonial Mexico to the political conflicts between Chicanos and Chicanas; and from a panel on the corrido , or folk ballad, to one entitled “Rosita the Riveter: Midwest Mexican American Women During World War II.” Other panels covered issues ranging from immigration, gangs and U.S.-Mexico relations, to politics, women, education and the arts.

Although most of the work has been primarily in the social sciences, increasingly, there are contributions coming out of the humanities. Much of the ground-breaking work of recent years has been in the areas of literary criticism and theory, said Hayes-Bautista, who cited the work of Rosalinda Fregoso at UC Santa Barbara. Also drawing attention is a book about the connection between Asian and Mexican poetic forms by Bruce-Novoa and E.A. Mares, of New Mexico, entitled, “En Breve: Minimalism in Mexican Poetry, 1900-1985.” Others point to a blossoming of literary works and of research by Chicanas about women. Margarita Melville’s book, “Twice a Minority,” deals with the issues confronting Latino women.

Policy Research

Another expanding area has been that of public policy research. “The Burden of Support,” a recent book by Hayes-Bautista dealing with the state’s changing demographics and their economic implications, is frequently cited as an example of work in this field.

Chicanos at UC Berkeley are working to establish a Chicano/Latino policy project, similar to the one at UCLA, to research public policy issues, said Melville, who heads the Chicano studies program at UC Berkeley. Chicana faculty at UC Davis also are trying to establish the first research center on Chicanas in the state, she said.

While progress continues in some areas, Chicanos say there is still a long way to go.

According to a report released last week by a joint legislative committee calling for the hiring of more minority professors, only 9.9% of all tenured faculty in the University of California system are minorities. Chicanos account for about 3.4% of the total, only slightly higher than the 2.6% of 10 years ago, Melville said. Latinos make up about 25% of the state’s population.

‘Permanent Underclass’

The report also said that the state’s public universities must work harder to recruit minority students and that all undergraduates should be required to take a course in ethnic studies. California “is threatened with a permanent underclass,” unless higher education better serves minorities, the report warned.

UC campuses at Berkeley, Irvine, Riverside and Santa Barbara are already considering instituting the ethnic studies course requirement, said Rick Malaspina, a spokesman for the office of UC President David Gardner. Malaspina added that Gardner has long advocated developing a faculty more reflective of the state’s minority and female population.

But Malaspina said that “there has not been a lot of turnover and . . . there’s competition (from other universities and from private industry) for the limited number of available” minority candidates. “We’re working at it, but we need to do more,” he said.

Another concern is that not enough Chicano graduate students are in the academic pipeline to fill the growing demand.

“We’re the first generation of Latinos to teach in colleges in large numbers. I don’t see another generation as large as we coming behind,” said Mindiola, adding that the number of Latino graduate students has stagnated, if not declined, during the last decade. Melville at Berkeley blames limited financial assistance for the small numbers.

Chicano scholars are critical of what some call the intransigence of American universities in facing the realities of a changing society.

Society’s Conscience

“Universities should be the social conscience of society, the leaders. But they’re not,” said Adaljiza Sosa Riddell, who has been at the forefront of social change most of her life. She has spent most of the last two decades building one of the largest Chicano studies programs in the country at UC Davis.

“Chicanos are now at the forefront of a serious struggle for the future. To the extent that universities are moving on this issue, it is because they are being pushed by Chicanos,” she said.