The Viejo Turns 30 California's First Chicana/Chicano Studies Department Comes of Age
CONTACT: Timothy McKernan, (619) 594-5204
SAN DIEGO, CA, February 25, 2000 - The year 1970 marked a time of change in America. The idealism that had characterized the decade before had long since evaporated. The era of flower power was over; the summer of love had given way to a winter of discontent. An unpopular war raged in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were fresh in the minds of many, and urban areas throughout the nation simmered with the racial tensions that had erupted in places like Detroit and a Los Angeles suburb called Watts.
The importance of cultural awareness, an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, was a rising tide on college campuses throughout the United States. In 1970, a group of dedicated activists at what was then San Diego State College struggled against long odds - and at times even against each other - to create the first academic department in California dedicated to the study the culture of Mexicans in America.
From the very beginning, what to actually call the department was a controversial subject. Some preferred "Mexican-American Studies" while others sought to incorporate the word "Chicano," a term dating back to the end of the 19th century.
"There was a great influx of Mexican labor in the southwestern United States at that time," said Jose "Pepe" Villarino, one of the department's founding fathers. "They were illiterate, uneducated and very poor. The affluent Mexicans who had established themselves in the big cities did not want to be associated with these people and referred to them despairingly as 'Chicanos.' It used to be a very negative word among middle-class Mexicans, but many people now glorify it as part of a proud heritage distinct from the white majority. Even today, 'Mexican-American' is a very charged term."
Developed and approved by university administration as Mexican-American Studies, this department in 1998 formally changed its name to Chicana/Chicano Studies.
"It might be insignificant to some, but it is an important distinction," Villarino said. "It is symbolic of the Mexican experience in America."
Getting Started
Although the Mexican-American Youth Association - the organization that would become Movimiento Estuduantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) -- had been organized on the San Diego State campus in 1967, the seeds for department were sown in the spring of 1968, when Villarino brought eight busloads of students to a conference at Montezuma Hall. Brawley, an agricultural community some 150 miles east of San Diego, was home to many Mexican immigrants.
"The faculty at Brawley was working hard to get our students to consider life after high school - actually just getting them through high school," Villarino recalled. "One of our biggest challenges was convincing those kids that there was a higher education experience that could be meaningful to them. It's hard for young people now to understand how pervasive the racism was then. You just didn't see many Mexican students on college campuses, and of course fewer Mexican faculty."
Soon after the conference, SDSU Spanish and Portuguese Professor Gustavo Segade called Villarino about the possibility of teaching at the university and together the two men recruited faculty for the fledgling department. Buttressed by El Plan de Santa Barbara, written in 1969 by Chicano activists that served as both blueprint and bible for organizers on campuses throughout California, the pair also received the steadfast support of many in the university's administration, including President Malcolm A. Love.
"President Love was a very sensitive man," Villarino remembers. "There was a lot of opposition from some administrators and some faculty to creating the department, but he never wavered. We were very encouraged that he thought having a Mexican studies department was so important to the campus and to the community."
The effort needed all the support it could get. The early days were fraught with contentious battles on campus and even within the fledgling department itself.
In his book San Diego State University: A History in Word and Image, SDSU history Professor Ray Starr wrote the department's origins were far more tumultuous than those of other ethnic studies programs that surfaced about the same time.
The Chicano students believed the student newspaper, The Daily Aztec, was unfair in its reporting of them, and in what Starr characterized as "the most destructive event of the era," laid siege to the Administration building.
The Aztec, on the day after the May 3, 1972 event, reported MEChA students became incensed at the treatment they received at an Associated Students Council meeting. Fights broke out, windows and the glass doors of the building were smashed, a bookcase was sent on fire "and there were droplets of blood in the foyer entrance." Copies of the Aztec were burned in trashcans at several locations throughout campus.
"The situation got so bad that the state Superior Court enjoined one MEChA student from being disruptive on campus," Starr wrote. "Perhaps Associated Students Vice President (B.J.) Nystrom explained the conflicts: 'There weren't a lot of minorities at State, and then all of the sudden there were. They wanted to be heard, and no one was listening.'"
In the days following the event, Alurista, the renowned poet and Mexican-American Studies faculty member, authored an editorial published in the Aztec. The riot, he wrote, was "... a direct result of SDSU's negligence to consider the needs and aspiration the Chicano people." Alurista's editorial included a list of demands on the university that included "a definite policy-making relationship between the student body of SDSU and its administration."
The Bitter Divide
That demand cut to the heart of a contentious battle being waged within the department itself. A faction of faculty and students with a Marxist philosophy - those who wanted that "definite policy-making relationship" that they perceived as part of the self-determination precept put forth in El Plan -- struggled against members of the Mexican-American community to control the direction of the young department. The Marxist faction dismissed the Chicanos as reactionary; the Chicanos felt the Marxist approach smacked of a betrayal of the culture the department was created to perpetuate.
Richard Griswold del Castillo, who joined the department in 1974 and today serves as its chair, said the bitter divisions weakened both sides.
"MEChA students actually had a leadership role in the department administration," he remembered. "They helped make policy, develop curriculum, even helped to hire and fire faculty. All that really accomplished was to invite more scrutiny and criticism from the administration. A lot of faculty quit or were fired."
A new department chair, Robert Cerros, was recruited to help bring the two sides together. Cerros was not exactly welcomed with open arms.
"He was perceived as an interloper by the students at first," Griswold del Castillo said. "He wanted high-level academics on the faculty, and he thought the political infighting was a colossal waste of time. He was very unpopular for awhile. He had his office door kicked in, his tires slashed. He had to live in a motel during his stay here.
"He was a little unorthodox - he'd call me at midnight and want me to meet him at a pool hall to discuss department business," Griswold del Castillo added. "But he was an effective leader. When he left SDSU, he left behind a department that was first-rate academically."
Beyond the University
Underneath that academic foundation runs a current of service to the Chicano communities throughout San Diego. Griswold del Castillo said the department's students and graduates are encouraged to be active in the causes that move them.
"I can't think of any Chicano organization here that doesn't have some of our people in it - the Chicano Federation, Barrio Youth Station, Centro Familiar, Centro de Salud, Centro Cultural de la Raza - and the list keeps getting longer. We are very aggressive in getting our students involved in tutoring and outreach activities to get the message to young Chicanos that higher education is here for them if they work hard and prepare for it."
Where 30 years ago, as Villarino pointed out, Chicano students were seldom seen on college campuses, their presence at San Diego State has become clearly evident. MEChA remains an active voice in campus politics, and in fact Chicano representation on the Associated Students government has risen to unprecedented heights. In 1998, Celinda Vaszquez became the first Chicana elected student body president of the second-largest university on the west coast.
If the pride, dedication and resilience that has characterized the department for over 30 years could be distilled into a single episode, it may be one involving the murals painted by Chicano students years ago on the walls of the university's student center. Recently, as the question of whether to paint over the murals worked its way through student government committees, MEChA students hatched a plan to save them.
"MEChA brought in Aztec dancers and a Catholic priest to bless the murals," Griswold del Castillo said. "Then they went to the student government and said, 'You can't paint over these now. They are sacred.' It was really a very ingenious way to preserve a piece of the department's history."
Like those murals, the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies is a valuable part of the soul of San Diego State University.
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