‘Roast’ a Sentimental Occasion for Alatorre

About 30 years ago, when Richard Alatorre was helping to create a Chicano studies department at Cal State Long Beach, he was among a generation of Latino activists who were knocking at the door of power.

Today, in many respects, he is among those who easily claim a seat at the table of power and must occasionally take a few knocks.

So on Saturday night, about 350 politicians, educators and students met at the campus to celebrate--at Alatorre’s expense.

The retired Eastside lawmaker, known for his foul language and blunt demeanor, was the subject of a fund-raising roast by colleagues and proteges. Such an exercise would have been unheard of even a few years ago, especially given the sometimes controversial career of this barrio activist-turned-professor-turned-politician.

Alatorre didn’t run for reelection to the City Council last year amid an ongoing federal corruption probe into his personal finances, which he has said had no bearing on his decision to leave office.

The thought of being roasted Saturday night didn’t worry Alatorre. He was more sentimental about being back on the campus where he taught in 1969, when Latino students were clamoring for courses that reflected their experience.

“This is a very special campus to me,” he said, remembering the activist spirit that permeated the campus at the time.

Alatorre was only 26, teaching a class of 50 students about Chicano culture and politics.

Back then, he said, “there was a hunger” to be part of the Chicano power movement.

Today’s students have advantages that previous generations didn’t have.

“Strictly being bilingual is a benefit today,” he said, although it was considered a hindrance in the past. “All that is beneficial to their careers.”

The roast was sponsored by the Chicano studies department, which will use the funds raised for academic programs.

As the roast showed, in the flourishing professional landscape that Alatorre helped cultivate during 28 years in politics, reverence is no longer required. It’s official, said the event’s planners: Latinos can now laugh at themselves. They can also afford to contribute, because many former activists are now in leadership positions and part of a burgeoning Latino middle class.

The roast also signals the changing nature of Chicano studies, with a new generation of leaders growing up.

Once saturated with the “Chicano power” activism that helped catapult such early leaders as Alatorre into office, the department has evolved into a resume booster for ambitious students of all colors.

“Thirty years ago, few students would have thought that knowledge of Latino culture would translate into an economic advantage” in such fields as teaching, business and medicine, said Luis Arroyo, director of the Chicano-Latino studies department at Cal State Long Beach.

Now there are such students as Michelle Olivier, an African American occupational studies major who is taking a Chicano history class.

“Since the people I’ll be working with after graduation are of Mexican descent,” she said, “I thought it would be helpful for me to know their history.”

Though still rooted in a drive for self-discovery, Chicano studies now reflect an increasingly practical side: the demand for Latino cultural knowledge and Spanish-language skills in the workplace.

Heather Hammer, an aspiring public school teacher who just got her bachelor’s degree, said that’s why she takes Chicano studies courses. “This is going to help me with my students,” she said.

This move toward the mainstream is unsettling to veteran Chicano studies professors and some students, who believe the discipline should concentrate on social change for Latinos.

“Proportionately speaking, we may be as bad off, if not worse, than we were 30 years ago,” in terms of health insurance, high school dropout rates and unemployment, said Armando Vazquez-Ramos, a roast organizer who heads a Mexican university exchange program at Cal Poly Pomona.

“There’s so much success out there, it tends to neutralize the adversity that Latinos are still facing,” Vazquez said.

He and others say that Chicano studies should return to their activist roots, delving more into community projects and establishing a place in public high schools.

Those were elements of “El Plan de Santa Barbara,” the intellectual blueprint for Chicano studies drafted by a group of Chicano students in 1969, Vazquez said. But outside of the Chicano studies department at Cal State Northridge, the largest of roughly 30 programs in the state, the discipline has not been very community-oriented, say critics.

But Arroyo said those dormant activist goals and the new entrepreneurial spirit pervading Chicano studies can join forces.

That is partly the goal of the Alatorre roast, whose proceeds will be directed to new Chicano studies research projects.