How 50 Years of Latino Studies Shaped History Education

When Dolores Huerta took the stage at California State University at Los Angeles to address a room of more than 600 people at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies department on Thursday, she began with a reflection. “It was actually here in the city of Los Angeles where the Chicano movement started,” she said. That activism was the only reason she was in the room at all, the reason this Chicano studies program—the first in the nation—had come to be in the first place.

Cal State LA’s program, founded in 1968, came at the beginning of ethnic studies at American universities. It presented a different approach to teaching history by focusing on one ethnic group and its relationship to the rest of the United States, instead of the previously standard “dates and places” approach to American history. This spread across the country; now there are dozens of Latino studies programs and departments at U.S. colleges. Since the founding of Latino/Chicano studies, a similar approach has been used to develop other ethnic studies programs, such as African American studies and Asian American studies. The students who take these classes, the vast majority of whom come from the marginalized communities being studied, have the opportunity to study their own identity and political histories, often for the first time in their academic careers.

These departments offer their own courses and house their own majors; instead of focusing on Latin American politics or the history of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, students learn about what it means to be a Latino in the United States. Each differs from campus to campus, though; some are not “departments” but “programs”, meaning that faculty members are jointly appointed from other departments. The names of the departments also vary dramatically, depending on when and where they were established; for example, Chicano studies departments came along in response to the Chicano movement of the 1960s that fought for civil rights, Puerto Rican studies became popular among New York public campuses, and Latino studies departments were established to study Latinidad as a transnational identity.

This kind of scholarship wasn’t taken seriously by academia before this time, says Dolores Delgado Bernal, the chair of Cal State LA’s Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies, and it didn’t come easily. Change came along because students—both black and Latino—pushed for better curriculums at both Cal State LA and local high schools that served hundreds of Mexican American students.

Cal State LA's campus is located near one of the most pivotal events in the Chicano movement: the East L.A. school walkouts of early 1968. Mexican American students living on the east side of the city were angered by their schools’ conditions; apart from facing prejudice from teachers and administrators, the dropout rate was as high as 60 percent in some of the area’s schools, which were made up of over 75 percent Mexican American students; they were also often put into trade classes in lieu of college prep ones. Over the course of a week, 15,000 students walked out of classes en masse carrying signs that read “WE DEMAND SCHOOLS THAT TEACH” and “WE ARE NOT ‘DIRTY MEXICANS.’” They came with a list of demands: no more beatings for speaking Spanish, more Mexican American teachers and administrators, and a curriculum that included Mexican American history and bilingual education. Local Chicano college students who had helped to organize the high schoolers also called for similar additions to their curriculums. ...