Courage, Not Caution

Jorge Mancillas is a fighter who makes lots of enemies. He doesn’t care who they are or what they say. He is willing to take them on because he believes he is right.

In recent years, the 40-year-old assistant professor of anatomy and cell biology at UCLA has irritated many people, including Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez and UCLA Chancellor Charles Young. Hernandez called Mancillas a publicity hound for his high-profile championing of Latino merchants who lost businesses in last year’s riots. Young wasn’t happy that he joined seven students on a hunger strike for a Chicano studies department on campus.

Now, Mancillas thinks his beliefs could cost him his job. In answering a question at a recent symposium on Chicano activism, he admitted that his out-of-class activities might hurt his chances for tenure at UCLA, although the university isn’t saying anything one way or the other. Mancillas didn’t mention any names or fully explain his situation but he told the audience that it was just another risk of fighting the good fight.

“You have to have the willingness to give anything and everything to get the movement going forward,” he said. “If not, then tenure isn’t worth getting.”

The crowd of 70 college kids cheered.

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I have been an admirer of Mancillas for several years, ever since he arrived at UCLA. I like his willingness to take a stand, something I wish I saw more of in Los Angeles.

Mancillas has seen injustice up close. Growing up in Ensenada, he saw the harsh economic conditions that drove Mexican workers north in search of jobs and how the Mexican brand of democracy doesn’t always meet its lofty goals.

He has been an unyielding critic of authorities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Earlier this year, he incurred the wrath of Mexican officials when he wrote that they were responsible for the devastation from the 1993 floods in Tijuana that left 30 dead and thousands homeless. He said it was the bureaucrats who ignored pleas of help from shantytowns for paved streets and schools, recalling the protests he and other student activists staged to protest horrid living conditions among Tijuana’s poor in the early 1970s.

“I feel bitter when I hear Mexican government officials boast of their rescue efforts keeping the (flood) toll relatively low,” he said. “I am reminded of the . . . hundreds of people whose lives, like tears in the rain, have been washed away under the tide of government corruption and indifference.”

After last year’s riots, Mancillas became chief supporter for a group of Latino merchants who lost their businesses in the unrest. The merchants, calling themselves La Union de Comerciantes Latinos y Afiliados, staged news conferences and demonstrations criticizing public agencies that the merchants accused of being too slow to help them.

Mancillas’ criticism angered some, including Councilman Hernandez, who at one point accused the UCLA professor of undermining the merchants’ cause by continually criticizing public agencies. He also accused Mancillas of having ties to radical leftists trying to foment trouble in the riots’ wake--a charge that Mancillas denies.

It was no surprise that, in late May, Mancillas joined the seven students who launched a hunger strike in an effort to force UCLA to create a Chicano studies department. Mancillas didn’t see the 14-day protest as a publicity stunt but as an act of faith in a city where Latinos make up 41% of the residents.

Mancillas said he had been warned by colleagues that joining the students was political suicide, but he went ahead anyway because it was the right thing to do.

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Mancillas is a good professor, having received favorable reviews of his work at UCLA. Holding a doctorate in neuroscience from UC San Diego, he did neurobiology research at the Salk Institute and the Scripps Clinic Research Foundation, both in San Diego. He also did research work for three years at Cambridge University’s famed laboratory of molecular biology in England.

I hope Mancillas gets to stay because the students need his dogged intellect and spirit. So does Young, the UCLA chancellor who opposed the hunger strikers’ tactics but later agreed to some of their demands to end the fast.

You see, Mancillas said one of the reasons he came to teach at UCLA was because he was inspired by the courage displayed 25 years ago by Young, who had defended the right of anti-war activist Angela Davis to teach on campus.

We’ve grown up since then, but Mancillas is another reminder that lonely fighters should have a place among us.