CAL STATE NORTHRIDGE : Chicano House Suit May Be Filed

Latino activists at Cal State Northridge said they may take legal action if administrators follow through with their plan to turn the campus Chicano House into a multicultural center.

More than 50 students, mostly members of the campus MEChA chapter, staged a sit-in last week to protest the proposal. Charging that CSUN administrators had reneged on a promise to preserve the house, the students briefly blocked doors to an administration building room in which officials were meeting to discuss CSUN’s master plan.

Protesters, who included students from UCLA and Valley College, said they felt that they had no choice but to stage the sit-in Wednesday when they learned that the newly released CSUN master plan calls for the 21-year-old Chicano House to be replaced by a multicultural center.

MEChA leaders said that for two years they have been negotiating with CSUN President James W. Cleary and Bill Chatham, vice president of facility planning and operations, to preserve the house, a center for Latino studies.

“They basically undermined what we had agreed to,” said Gerardo Cueva, MEChA vice president. He said the group may take legal action against the university in an attempt to save the facility.

Cueva said the two administrators had assured students that the facility would be kept intact or, if torn down, would be replaced with a comparable facility.

The three-room house is used by MEChA members and other Latino students for meetings, study and cultural and outreach programs.

Administrators reportedly said at last week’s meeting that classroom sites for the Chicano House might be found, but Latino students said that is not acceptable.

“The administration wants to take away the house,” Cueva said. “They’ve been wanting to do it for the past 15 years.”

Cleary said Friday through a spokeswoman that he will continue to seek solutions “to the concerns of MEChA over the Chicano House. I hope that we can come to an understanding of their needs as well as the needs of all ethnic groups at CSUN.”

Although they support the idea of a multicultural center, MEChA students and some faculty members claim that abandoning Chicano House would ignore its historical significance. In addition, some said they see a multicultural facility as a form of discrimination.

“It’s just ghettoizing people, throwing them together and fighting over the space,” Chicano studies professor Rudy Acuna said.

Acuna also asserted that the administration is attempting to make the MEChA students appear to be “the bad guys” who oppose ethnic diversity.