Chicano Studies Set Firm Roots in Northridge

Wearing dark glasses and rumpled jeans, professor Rudy Acuna strolls down the rows of his classroom at Cal State Northridge like a Mexican American Socrates, teasing his students, provoking them.

He knows how to rile them up and calm them down, how to pepper his lectures with colloquial Spanish to get chummy with them, then how to back off and force them to rethink everything they thought they knew.

The course is titled “History of the Chicano” but it has the feel of a United Farm Workers rally. All 26 students in the class are Latino.

“Most Mexican American people felt ashamed of who they were,” Acuna said recently, recalling the time before the Chicano movement took off in the 1960s. “They used words like ‘Spanish American’ to describe themselves. And then, here comes Cesar Chavez,” he said, referring to the charismatic leader of the United Farm Workers.

Considered the godfather of Chicano studies, the 65-year-old Acuna talks of social struggle to a generation seemingly more concerned with music videos than civil rights.

An overarching lesson woven into every class, every lecture and every dialogue in the Chicano studies department at Cal State Northridge is an emphasis on giving back to the Latino community. If the roster of department graduates is any indication, the efforts have paid off.

Founded in 1969 as one of the nation’s first university-level departments devoted exclusively to the study of Chicano history, literature and social sciences, the Northridge program has evolved into not only the nation’s largest ethnic studies department but also into an incubator for Latino political and community activism in Los Angeles and beyond.

Among those who took classes in the department are state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sylmar), former San Fernando Mayor Raul Godinez, San Fernando City Councilman Richard Ramos, and Xavier Flores, head of the Mexican American Political Assn. of the San Fernando Valley and of Pueblo y Salud, a social service organization in San Fernando.

Walk into almost any Latino-related nonprofit organization in the San Fernando Valley and there are Northridge Chicano studies graduates on staff. An estimated one-fourth of all Latino elementary school teachers in the San Fernando Valley are department graduates.

“It has produced and developed a number of students who have gone out and become leaders in their own right,” said Jose Calderon, an associate professor of sociology and Chicano studies at Pitzer College in Claremont.

The department has grown from just one professor--Acuna--to 19 full-time and 25 part-time teachers. Acuna estimates that there are 150 to 200 Chicano studies majors and 4,000 students enrolled in classes each semester, though some students may be enrolled in more than one course at a time.

The department has its critics, among them conservative political consultant Steve Frank. A former Valley activist who now works in Ventura County, Frank denounces Chicano studies as “Jim Crowe-ism with an accent.”

“It is an effort not to mainstream Chicano students, to keep them segregated from the rest of society,” Frank said. “Acuna is using our university in the Valley as political headquarters for efforts that demean Latino students.”

There are only about 15 Chicano studies departments in the nation. Most universities, such as UC Berkeley, have ethnic studies professors grouped into a single department. Other universities, such as UCLA, have interdepartmental Chicano studies centers made up of professors tenured in other disciplines.

At UC Berkeley just last week, 30 students, including six hunger strikers, were arrested for protesting what they claim is a lack of funding for the ethnic studies department. It has only one professor of Chicano studies.

At Northridge, where there are many more Latinos, the department enjoys strong support.

Clearly, part of the draw to the department is Acuna, probably the best known Chicano studies professor in the nation.

“He had the whole crowd listening and motivated,” said student Hilda Ramirez, 22, remembering the first time she heard him speak at a conference. “He talks about things that still need to be talked about, things you can’t just keep quiet about. That’s what motivates the students.”