COLUMN ONE : A New Generation of Rebels : Latinos are demanding colleges be more responsive. Unlike the ‘60s and ‘70s, these students grew up with bilingual education and other attempts at cultural awareness. So patience is short, expectations are high.

Tomas Duran is the son of a rebel.

His father was a Black Beret, one of the streetwise revolutionaries who patrolled the San Jose barrios during the early 1970s out of distrust for the white police force. And both his parents were part of the Chicano student movement that swept higher education two decades ago.

So now that he is at USC, the civil engineering major says it’s no mystery why he’s also an activist: “It’s a cycle that has been completed, you might say.”

Duran is among the new generation of Latino students who, infused with chicanismo and equipped with beepers, are again stirring things up at universities from California to New York.

Like their parents in the ‘60s and ‘70s, they call themselves Chicanos and are confronting officials with demonstrations, sit-ins, hunger strikes--and sometimes vandalism--to demand more respect for their culture and more faculty appointments for Latinos.

Unlike their parents, who attacked the college Establishment as outside radicals, this generation of fledgling activists is used to having the education system bend to meet some of their needs. They’ve grown up with bilingual classes, ethnic awareness programs and cultural holiday celebrations from kindergarten to high school.

They expected even more in college, only to be shocked and chagrined to find it different, said Leo F. Estrada, a UCLA urban planning and demography expert.

“What makes this interesting is that the past generations didn’t expect the system to be responsive,” Estrada said. “The attitude was, ‘They’re the enemy, but I am going to survive it no matter what.’

“Now you have a generation of kids who know the system can design programs aimed and focused upon their needs,” he said. “The students I talk to are astounded that higher education hasn’t caught on to the fact that as times change, it should change with them.”

Their frustration has begun to show. Last spring, demonstrators vandalized the UCLA faculty center and others held a 14-day hunger strike after Chancellor Charles E. Young announced that the school’s interdisciplinary Chicano studies program would not be upgraded to a department, as activists wanted. Young’s ill-timed announcement came on the eve of funeral services for labor leader Cesar Chavez.

The confrontation ended when UCLA officials pledged to create a special Chicano studies center named in honor of Chavez by September--a compromise that has bogged down under the glacial pace of academic review committees. UCLA officials say they now are shooting for next summer.

There have been other incidents, some inspired by the UCLA events. In April, 22 students at Williams College in Massachusetts staged a three-day fast to protest a lengthy search that failed to find a tenured Latino professor to teach U.S. Latino studies.

At Cornell University in New York, intruders last spring overturned cabinets and scrawled the name of an 18th-Century Incan warrior on a wall of the English department, which had been criticized because it has no Latino professors. Last month, an anonymous caller invoked the same warrior--Tupak Amaru--to claim responsibility for a dormitory fire that sent 216 students running into the night unharmed. A Cornell spokeswoman said there is no evidence linking the incidents to ongoing demands from Latino students for more relevant classes.

At Cal State Long Beach, demonstrators organized by La Raza Student Assn. occupied the lobby of the acting president’s office in September to demand he appoint a Latino as his executive assistant. A few weeks later, he did, after opening the selection process to comment from student groups.

In September, a demonstration at UC Berkeley to back a separate Chicano studies department ended after students pulled a fire alarm and broke a window in a campus building. The same day, police arrested six and used pepper spray to break up a melee of 300 high school and college students who had met to press demands and celebrate Mexican Independence Day at Fullerton College.

Meanwhile, Latino students at San Jose State have been a vocal and potent force in that school’s search for a new president.

Last month, a Latino student group at USC asked for perhaps the most symbolic change yet: Renaming the campus’s E.F. Hutton Park for Chavez, who didn’t own a home and was buried in a pine coffin.

Some attribute these incidents to a growing backlash against the rhetoric of Gov. Pete Wilson and other politicians who have blamed illegal immigrants for the state’s fiscal woes. Others say they were triggered by the Los Angeles riots and by Chavez’s death in April.

Carlos Munoz, a leader of the 1960s Chicano student movement and a professor of Chicano studies at Berkeley, said last year’s riots represented a paradigm shift in race relations, long framed in terms of black versus white. Searing images from the unrest showed once again that there are “multitudes of Americas” and that “race also matters to Latinos,” he said.

Meanwhile, the death of Chavez--undeniably the Latino community’s best-known national figure--was a wake-up call for both generations of activists, he said.

“In my generation, Cesar Chavez inspired us by his living example. And now the students of today are being inspired by his death,” said Munoz, 54. He said he saw many UCLA student activists among the thousands of marchers in Chavez’s funeral procession in Delano.

Others see demographics as the underlying reason for today’s activism. Because of a greater emphasis on education, more Latinos are going to college. In the UC system alone, Latino enrollment has more than doubled since 1981, from 5.9% to 13.1% last year, statistics show.

There is also a bulge in the Latino population making its way through grammar and high schools--a bulge that demographers say foreshadows changes in California as a whole in the next 50 years. The percentage of Latino students in high school was 23% in 1980, but is expected to balloon to 41% in 2010.

This generation, said UCLA’s Estrada, is the first to come through an education system that has abandoned the traditional sink-or-swim attitude toward immigrants. Nurtured on programs that stress multiculturalism, these youths view the system as “friendly, adaptable and able to design programs for them,” he said.

Yet they also have a deep yearning for identity and, like many African American students a decade ago, seem engaged in a “search for their roots,” he said. Many, feeling isolated, drop out, leaving Latinos with the lowest graduation rate of any ethnic group, according to a new study by the American Council on Education.

For those who stay, Estrada said, the occasional campus Latino film series or art exhibit does not suffice. They expected more in the academic ivory tower, where the free exchange of ideas is prized, and they have grown increasingly suspicious of a Eurocentric curriculum that seems to give short shrift to the accomplishments of indigenous peoples.

“They began to question whether it was on purpose . . . that these (ancient) intellectual traditions had been kept quiet,” he said.

The result: a resurgence of chicanismo , the notion that a Latino’s personal destiny cannot be divorced from one’s culture or the past. As USC political science major Valerie Cuevas, 20, puts it: “We carry the hopes, the aspirations of our community, as well as the limitations.”

Estrada said he first began to notice a change three years ago, when Latino students suddenly showed great interest in ancient Mexican chieftains, dance and society. Students shunned the 1980s term Hispanic-- which many equated with Latinos who sold out during the Reagan years--and once again claimed Chicano, which they say denotes a “state of mind to resist assimilation.”

Dormant Latino student organizations started to stir. In particular, campus representatives of MEChA--Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan--began rereading the group’s 1969 founding document, which set the goal of establishing a Chicano studies department at every campus in the state.

At the time activists wrote the 153-page manifesto, students were starting from scratch. There were no ethnic studies classes and Latino faculty role models were virtually nonexistent, said Berkeley’s Munoz. Latino students were banking on a proliferation of Chicano studies programs to lift them from cultural obscurity, inspire a crop of Latino academics and pave the way for their children to go to college, he said.

And to a great measure, they succeeded. There are Chicano programs or departments on at least 41 California campuses, public and private, a recent listing shows. At Berkeley, students can take courses in Chicano history, Latino politics, the Student Protest Movement of the 1960s and Chicano film.

“We have been able to produce a critical mass of Chicano scholars,” said Munoz, who in 1968 was appointed chairman of the nation’s first Chicano studies department, at Cal State Los Angeles. “Now students coming into the ranks have been able to read our books, they’ve been able to study our . . . critiques of American society.”

But the movement sputtered in the 1980s, when Latino students pursued other interests, and today’s crop of activists have found many programs stayed the same or languished, Munoz said.

“They’re saying, ‘We haven’t gone from first base to second base yet, and we want to do something about it,’ ” he said.

Newly inspired MEChA coordinators are referring to the 1969 plan as they turn up the heat on administrators to add Chicano courses or convert existing programs into separate departments.

MEChA has been at the forefront, but it hasn’t been the only group in the activist groundswell. At UCLA and at Fullerton College, hunger strikers and protesters included members of Aztlan Mexica Nation, a loose-knit community organization that teaches ancient spiritual beliefs and Aztec dance.

And there is ample indication that the fervor is seeping into the high schools. About 270 students from Sonora High in La Habra, Anaheim High and other Orange County schools joined the Fullerton College demonstration to protest the lack of Chicano courses in their own curriculum.

“For the next couple of years, you are going to see a lot more protests, a lot more demands for Chicano studies,” said USC’s Duran, 18. “Now you have students coming forward with the same ideology that their parents had.”

In Duran’s case, that is particularly true. His father and his mother were members of the MEChA chapter at San Jose State during the early ‘70s. Now, he is fighting for the same things as a MEChA representative at USC, where for three years the group has pressed unsuccessfully for a Chicano studies department.

Although he credited his parents’ generation for working “miracles,” Duran said it was responsible in part for Chicano studies lapsing into a torpor. Activists 20 years ago failed to train leaders to take their place, leaving some battles unfinished.

“When I speak to my mother about what I’m doing on campus, she says I sound like her when she was talking to her mom,” he said.

“If you get Chicano studies on campus, you have to bring in Chicano professors,” Duran said. “And if you have Chicano professors, you have people Chicano students can relate to.”

The demands have some officials scrambling. Ed Apodaca, an associate vice president at San Francisco State, said he urged his campus president to do something “proactive” after seeing student frustration at a Chicano/Latino Convocation in Los Angeles last year.

At that gathering--designed to draw together Latino business executives, legislators and educators--nearly 300 students showed up with questions about the lack of Chicano classes, he said. Soon after, San Francisco State established a $100,000 Cesar Chavez Institute to help Chicano students and bring lecturers to campus.

Yet change is typically slow. UC administrators have tried to groom prospective minority professors through a special mentor program, but Latinos still make up only 4% of the faculty.

CSU has increased its share of Latino faculty members from 4.8% in 1990 to 5.3%, but that still lags behind the 15.1% Latino student population in the 20-campus system. UC and CSU officials blame a small pool of qualified Latino faculty applicants for the lack of more progress.

Latino activists say they will continue to press for more classes and, in particular, to have interdisciplinary programs such as UCLA’s upgraded to independent departments. Such a designation carries more weight in the academic community and allows administrators to design new courses and directly hire faculty, they said.

Only one UC campus--Santa Barbara--has a Chicano studies department. Initial efforts to do the same at Berkeley have hit a snag because of budget problems. In the CSU system, seven of the 19 campuses that offer Chicano studies have a separate department.

Administrators such as Fullerton College President Philip W. Borst say they are willing to listen to Latino demands and consider strengthening Chicano studies programs. But he fears today’s student activists will be too impatient with the plodding pace of academe.

“I have a feeling it’s hard for them to take yes for an answer,” Borst said.

But Munoz said he is “gratified” that the children of the first generation of activists are so determined. “We planted the seed and this generation appears to be picking up where we left off,” he said.

“Our legacy of the 1960s has become real in their hands. It’s like a race, and they have picked up the baton.”