The Birth of Chicano Studies

Carlos Muñoz, Jr. remembers when he first began to ponder the meaning of his Mexican roots.

Muñoz, now 80, was living in the crowded Segundo barrio of El Paso, Texas. His family—like thousands of other émigrés—had settled there decades earlier, refugees fleeing violence spawned by the Mexican Revolution.

Neither of his parents had made it past elementary school, but they wanted more for their son. So young Carlos walked across town every day to an Anglo neighborhood where the local school had more resources than barrio campuses.

In that world, Carlos became Charles—rechristened in fifth grade by a white teacher in an attempt to “Americanize” him.

His school records were altered to label him Charles. But nothing else about him changed. “I began to wonder about what that meant,” he recalls. “That was the first time that I started thinking about identity and culture and that kind of stuff.”

It wouldn’t be the last.

The next year his family moved from El Paso to Los Angeles, where they hopscotched among barrios from the Eastside to Downtown to South Los Angeles. And no matter whether his teachers called him Carlos or Charles, their ingrained attitudes about his Mexican heritage narrowed his path.

The counselors at Belmont High School steered Charles away from college prep and toward vocational ed, even though he was an honor student. They suggested he become a carpenter, like his dad.

“If you were Black or Brown and a male at that time, you automatically got to be an industrial arts major,” he says. “You take the basic courses in English, history and government, but you don’t get the algebra and the biology courses.”

He didn’t realize until after he graduated with honors in 1958 that those courses he missed were required for admission to California’s public universities.

It would take six years for Charles to navigate a route—through community college, military service and a white-collar job that paid well but left him unfulfilled—to the campus of Cal State LA.

There, in the midst of a nascent Chicano rights movement, Charles reclaimed Carlos and played a key role in a history-making venture that would create new paths for Latino students: the creation at Cal State LA of the first Mexican American Studies program in the nation.

Its launch five decades ago—which Muñoz, then a graduate student, helped lead—would usher in a new era of ethnic studies across the Southwestern United States and ultimately around the country. Today more than 400 universities have programs dedicated to the study of the history, circumstances and culture of Latinos in America.

“Right now, there’s an awareness of ethnic studies. … But the beginnings of ethnic studies, as a discipline, were right here at Cal State LA,” says Professor Dolores Delgado Bernal, chair of what is now the Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies.

“The discipline offers a lot to students, in terms of their identities, their intellect, what interests they pursue. Taking these courses allows students to say, ‘I can claim and be proud of who I am, and that allows me to better understand and accept others who are not like me.’ ”

“It’s becoming increasingly important to have that interdisciplinary background, and an understanding of other cultures and races,” Delgado Bernal says.

Today Muñoz is a professor emeritus in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He’s an author, political scientist, historian and scholar, specializing in social and revolutionary movements.

But the challenges Muñoz encountered on his journey from the barrio to the ivory tower typify the struggles that many Latino students still face today—and illustrate why Chicano Studies was necessary decades ago, and still has an important role to play.

In its early years, the Cal State LA program was a resource for local students who felt intimidated by college and invisible on campus.

The spotlight on Chicano history and culture allowed them to see themselves through a new lens, one scrubbed of stereotypes. And its sweeping scope connected them to other marginalized groups, illuminating struggles for equality that students found ultimately empowering.

Carmen Ramírez, an Oxnard city councilwoman who attended Cal State LA for two years in the 1970s, said she first learned about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II in a Chicano Studies class. “I was angry about what had happened, angry at not knowing about this until I was an adult.”

Ramírez grew up in Pico Rivera, earned her J.D. at Loyola Law School and spent more than 20 years as a legal aid attorney in Ventura County.

“To me, the thing about Chicano Studies is that it was eye-opening to the truth and history,” she says. “If you don’t know the truth, you can’t fix the future. … We need to know our history.”

And the dividends spread far beyond the campus, the student body and local communities. By its very existence, the Cal State LA program gave national credibility to the concept of ethnic studies as an intellectual pursuit.

“Chicano Studies opened the door to possibilities of employment on university faculties,” said Raul Ruiz, professor emeritus in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at Cal State Northridge, which hired him in 1970. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Cal State LA in 1967, and went on to earn his master’s and Ph.D. at Harvard. Ruiz died this year at 78 years old. (Read an obituary for Ruiz in In Memoriam.)

“Chicano Studies gave us opportunities to teach at the college level. And that was very significant in an era when many of us never had a Latino professor.”

At that time, “there were only about five Mexican Americans in the country with Ph.D.s in the social sciences,” recalls Muñoz, who earned his B.A. in political science from Cal State LA and a Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School.

Like Ruiz and Muñoz, several of the campus movement’s leaders went on to become college professors and scholarly experts in the field.

But even when they were offered faculty positions in Latino Studies, their contributions were often minimized or disregarded.

“Now we’re very visible at universities across the nation,” Muñoz says. “But during my career, I often had to face that perspective— you’re just ideologues, not scholars—from conservative faculty. It was not an easy path.”

For students like Ruiz, the path was equally challenging.

Ruiz had moved to Los Angeles from El Paso as a child in the 1950s. Told he wasn’t “college material,” Ruiz enrolled in Trade Tech, studied mechanical drawing and took a job drafting engineering plans for aviation systems. A year of that made him miserable, so he quit and in the mid-’60s applied to Cal State LA as an English major.

Then, as now, the Cal State LA campus was walking distance from one of the largest urban Mexican American communities in the United States. But few students in that community were being prepared for college.

The university experience seemed so remote that Eastside parents who could see the hillside campus from their yards thought “the building on the hill was the Sybil Brand Institute” for incarcerated women, Cal State LA Professor Ralph C. Guzmán told the University’s College Times newspaper in 1968.

Guzmán, who helped draft early Chicano Studies proposals, was one of just a handful of Latino faculty members then.

Ruiz was the only Mexican American kid in most of his classes, he said.

“I remember as an English major, the sense of me being up against everything. I remember making a presentation and the other students came at me hard with criticism,” Ruiz said. “I remember saying to myself, ‘Next time you’re going to know more than everybody else.’ ”

Ultimately, that would motivate him to develop a rigorous background in research. But as a new student, he found the social isolation to be a destabilizing experience.

After a professor told him he was smart “but basically illiterate,” Ruiz spent hours alone in the library—after classes and before his post office job—teaching himself to write.

“I would practice writing sentences and improving them until I could write a paragraph, and then an essay,” he said. It took him six months to develop the skills he needed. The skills he should have been taught in high school.

Cal State LA already had a robust interdisciplinary program of Latin American Studies, with classes that focused on Mexican culture but had little connection to the American experience.

“It was a marvelous program. It opened up my consciousness,” Ruiz said. But he came to realize that he knew more about Mexicans in Mexico than he did about families like his, “Mexicans in my own community.”

Beyond the University, in his own community, unrest and outrage were brewing. Mexican Americans had found their voice and were beginning to challenge the status quo. And nowhere did that coalesce more vividly than in the neighborhoods around Cal State LA.

“It was actually right here in the city of Los Angeles where the Chicano movement started,” noted legendary civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, when she visited campus to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Chicano Studies in September 2018.

The Chicano Studies program helped empower young activists and bring national attention to the challenges and concerns of Mexican Americans, she said.

Ruiz remembered what that felt like. “We were becoming part of this growing social movement that was sweeping the country, with massive anti-war protests and civil rights marches,” he recalled.

Community organizers rallied Eastside families to join the demonstrations. Student groups on campus worked together behind the scenes for change.

“I was not a radical person,” Ruiz said. “But you couldn’t help but become involved, or at least think about it.”

In March 1968, that awareness came to a head, as thousands of students at five high schools within a six-mile radius of Cal State LA walked out of classes and took to the streets, to challenge an educational system that didn’t recognize their worth or value their needs.

Thirteen adults would be arrested, jailed and charged with conspiracy for helping organize the walkouts. Muñoz—who’d proudly changed his name back to Carlos—was among them.

By then Muñoz was a Cal State LA graduate student and a U.S. veteran, who understood why students were walking out. The kid whom counselors steered away from college prep classes in high school was now on his way to becoming a university professor—and he was on the front lines of the battle to improve education for younger Latinos.

Police arrested Muñoz at gunpoint three months after the walkouts, as he sat at the kitchen table in his apartment doing his political science homework, and his wife and two young children slept upstairs. Muñoz spent two years on bail and faced a possible prison term of 66 years, until an appellate court dismissed the charges as a violation of the defendants’ First Amendment rights.

The walkouts alarmed the educational establishment, but energized the local community and moved education to the front of an activist agenda.

Cal State LA students, faculty and administration partnered with community groups to help broaden opportunities.

That summer Cal State LA’s student government voted to allocate $40,000 for an Educational Opportunity Program that would provide the support needed by students who were motivated but underprepared. Sixty-eight Latino and Black freshmen were admitted through the program that first year.

And University leaders agreed to work with student activists to get the Chicano Studies program up and running. The pioneering program was launched in the fall of 1968—with four courses and funding from student government.

Muñoz wound up teaching the program’s introductory course in the fall of 1968: Mexican American 100. Graduate student Gilbert Gonzalez taught Mexican American 111, a course on Mexican American history, and Professor Guzmán taught two upper-division classes.

“I was a first-year grad student in political science,” Muñoz recalls. “I had no teaching experience. I didn’t even know how the University worked. ... We were very, very fortunate that there were progressive people in the administration. They were very helpful in generating support.”

In fact, the Chicano Studies movement at Cal State LA created a blueprint for collaboration—in an era when campus clashes were the primary tools of social and academic change.

Students worked with parents and with University leaders. Chicano and Black student groups supported one another. Both groups wanted a voice, a bigger presence on campus and a curriculum that reflected their culture and history.

Today, the Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies offers more than 150 courses, taught by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Its academic legacy is strong and its graduates have contributed immeasurably to the University, the region and beyond.

The number of students majoring in Chicano Studies has grown by almost 40% over the past 18 months, said Department Chair Delgado Bernal at the anniversary celebration.

“Maybe that’s because of the political climate,” she surmised. “Students are looking to understand it, and to have the skills, knowledge and rhetoric to respond.”

Over the years, the department has opened new career paths for students, elevated the status of Chicano scholarship and empowered successive generations in ways that only understanding your culture and history can do.

Its success reflects the foresight of its founders and the University’s ongoing commitment to academic rigor, inclusion and equality.

“Our whole purpose was assisting our community, supporting the aspirations of students and asserting our right to be here,” Muñoz says of the department’s creation a half-century ago.

“We said let’s do something so our younger brothers and sisters won’t be victimized by racism, the way we were.”

Sandy Banks is a columnist at the Los Angeles Times.