HISPANICOUTLOOK

MAGAZINE
OCTOBER 06, 2008

CONTENTS
_______________________________________________________

* Candidates Shape Policies on Education

10

Is Higher Ed Governance Stewardship or Sham?

13

Getting the Hispanic Vote

14

College Summit – Helping Minority Students

17
Navigate the Road to College

* 2008 Hispanic Heritage Foundation Award

20
Winners Offer Hope & Inspiration

Dr. Manuel Penichet: Innovative Researcher,

26
Devoted Mentor

* Latino Scorecard on Higher Education

28

* UNM Responding to a Call of Urgency

30

Why Chicano Studies? By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

34

* Building a Bridge to College: Simple Steps for Parents

38
 New York City Tech’s Professor Espinoza-Sánchez is First on Five
40
Counts – Inspires Students with Impressive Accomplishments

Latina Business Leader, a Change Agent for Justice

42
and Opportunity

* These articles are available online at: www.hispanicoutlook.com

HISPANIC OUTLOOK 10/06/2008

WHY CHICANO STUDIES?

Hispanic Outlook Magazine, October 6, 2008. Presented at the Annual NACCS Conference (National Association for Chicana
and Chicano Studies), Austin, Texas, March 21, 2008. Posted on Immigration, Education, and Globalization: U.S.—Mexico
site, Saturday, March 29, 2008

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Scholar in Residence, Western New Mexico University (an Hispanic Serving Institution); Professor Emeritus of English, Texas
State University System–Sul Ross; Founding Director of the Chicano Studies Program, University of Texas at El Paso, 1970;
Founding Member, Mexican American Studies Program, Texas State University System—Sul Ross, 1996; Founding Member,
Chicana/Chicano and Hemispheric Studies Department, Western New Mexico University, 2007.

F orty-five years ago when I began university

teaching after some years as a high school
teacher of French, there was no Chicano
Studies. That is, no Chicano Studies as an
organized field of study. To be sure, there were
Mexican American scholars working on various
aspects of Mexican American life and its cultural
productions, scholars like Aurelio Espinosa, Juan
Rael, Arturo Campa, Fray Angelico Chaves,
George I. Sanchez, Americo Paredes, and others.
Important as this scholarship was, it emerged
amorphously, reflecting independent intellectual
interests rather than a scholarship reflec-ting a field
of study. This is not to say that some of these
scholars may not have considered their work as part
of a field of study conceptualized as Mexican
American Studies. Despite its lack of an under-
pinning, it was a field of Mexican American
Studies, its constituent parts subsumed as American
folklore.
This situation created a critical barrier to the
public discussion and dissemination of information
about the presence of Mexican Americans in the
United States and their contributions to American
society. Until 1960 and the emergence of the Chi-
cano Movement, Mexican Americans were charac-
terized by mainstream American scholars–
principally anthro-pologists and social workers–in
terms of the queer, the curious, and the quaint.
That is, regarded as a “tribe,” Mexican Americans
were categorized as just another item in the flora
and fauna of Americana in precisely the same way
American Indians were cate-gorized.
The Chicano Movement–that wave of concien-
tizacion that came to bloom among Mexican
Ameri-cans in the 60's transforming them into
Chicanos– helped to change American perceptions
about Mexi-can Americans. While Mexican
Americans knew much about Anglo Americans,
Anglo Americans knew little about Mexican
Americans. From 1848 to 1912–the period of
transition for the conquest gene-ration of Mexicans
who became Americans per the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848–Mexican
Americans were regarded poorly by the American
public. So poorly, in fact, that the terri-tories of
New Mexico and Arizona were delayed statehood
until their populations were predominantly Anglo
American.
In Two Years before the Mast, Richard Henry

2
Dana described the Mexican Americans as “an idle,
thriftless people” who could make nothing for them-
selves (1959: 9). And in 1852, Colonel Monroe re-
ported to Washington that “the New Mexicans are
thoroughly debased and totally incapable of self-
government, and there is no latent quality about
them that can ever make them respectable. They
have more Indian blood than Spanish, and in some
respects are below the Pueblo Indians, for they are
not as honest or as industrious” (Congressional
Globe, 32nd Con-gress, 2nd Session, January 10,
1853, Appendix, p. 104).
Four years later, W.W.H. Davis, United States
Attorney for the Territory of New Mexico, wrote a
propos his experiences with Mexican Americans
that “they possess the cunning and deceit of the
Indian, the politeness and the spirit of revenge of
the Spaniard, and the imaginative temperament and
fiery impulses of the moor.” He described them as
smart and quick but lacking the “stability and
character and soundness of intellect that give such
vast superiority to the Anglo-Saxon race over every
other people” (New Mexico and her People, 1857,
85-86).
In 1874, General William Tecumseh Sherman
quipped before a committee of the House of Repre-
sentatives that Mexico be prevailed upon to take
back the territory of New Mexico (Arnold L. Rodri-
guez, “New Mexico in Transition,” New Mexico
Historical Review, XXIV, July 1949, 186). And in
1902, Sena-tor Albert Beveridge of Indiana
objected to statehood for the New Mexico Territory
on the grounds that “the majority of people in New
Mexico could speak only [Spanish]. . . . Illiteracy
was high and the arid conditions of the southwest
imposed serious limita-tions on agriculture” (Robert
W. Larson, New Mexi-co’s Quest for Statehood
1846-1912, 1968: 215).
Even after 64 years as Americans, Mexican
Ame-ricans were considered foreigners in their own
land. Little thought was given to the fact that Mex-
ican Americans were not immigrants to the United
States, that they were a “territorial minority” cum
Americans as a booty of war, that the border had
crossed them, and not the other way around. By the
20th century, mainstream Americans had forgotten
that as a consequence of the U.S.–Mexico War of
1846-1848 Mexi-co was dismembered, giving up
more than half of its territory to the United States: a
territory now consti-tuting the states of Texas, New
3
Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and
Colorado, as well as parts of Wyoming, Kansas,
and Oklahoma, a territory larger than France,
Spain, and Italy combined.
During the period of Americanization from
1912 to 1960, Mexican Americans fared little better
despite their efforts to become Americans. During
this period, from 1913 to 1930, more than a million
and a half Mexicans made their way north from
Mexico to the United States, owing to the
destabilization of Mexico during its civil war from
1913 to 1921. This influx of Mexicans to the
United States plus the population of Mexicans who
were part of the conquest generation came to
constitute the primary population of Mexican
Americans that has given rise to their present
demographics in 21st century America.
We have no definitive count as to the numbers
of Mexicans who came with the dismembered terri-
tory. Figures range from a low of 75,000 to
300,000. The dismembered territory was certainly
not void of population, considering the cities that
were part of the annexed territory–San Antonio, El
Paso, Santa Fe and the San Luis Valley of
Colorado, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa
Barbara, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, and
Pueblo, Colorado, not counting the hundreds of
smaller communities dotting the land-scape.
The third factor in the demographic growth of
Mexican Americans was the 20 year immigration
compact between the United States and Mexico that
brought thousands of Mexican “braceros”
(laborers) into the country between 1942 and 1962.
This demographic troika of Mexican Americans
(conquest generation, civil war refugees, and
braceros) now numbers some 30 million, its growth
due principally to fertility abetted certainly by a
small but steady annual ingress of immigrants since
1962.
These 30 million Mexican Americans are 66%
of the American Hispanic population. That is, two
out of three American Hispanics are Mexican
Americans. These are not undocumented workers;
they are Ame-rican citizens. But in the current wave
of nativist hysteria, American Hispanics including
Mexican Americans are regarded as aliens whose
expedient deportation is desirable in the national
interest. As American citizens, Mexican Americans
have been thrown into the mix with undocumented
Hispanic workers not only from Mexico but
throughout Latin America, under the rubric of
“illegal immigrants.” This is “Why Chicano
Studies?” Americans need to understand that
Mexican Americans are not a new population. That
they have been part of the American enterprise for
160 years. And this is why after almost 40 years I
am still convinced about the need for Chicano
Studies.
W hen I joined the English Department at
New Mexico State University almost
half a century ago, I was the only
Mexican American in the department and unaware
about Mexican American Studies, though I had
studied Spanish literature, Mexican literature, and
Latin American literature as well as English
literature and American literature. My parents
taught me about Mexico. I knew that a branch of
mother’s family had settled in San Antonio, Texas,
in 1731. But about Mexican Americans in general, I
knew nothing except that we had relatives in
Chicago and Pittsburgh (whom we visited often), as
well as in Texas.
In my comparative studies classes at the
University of Pittsburgh between 1948 and 1952, I
learned nothing about Mexican Americans except
what I learned from the long-time Mexican
American com-munities there. But none of that
information spurred my curiosity to learn about the
history of Mexican Americans in the United States.
The apodictic value system of the United States
held me firmly in its grip, reinforcing the mantra
that I was an American. Later, a Chicano poem
would ask: If George Washington was my father,
why wasn’t he Chicano? And later, I would ask:
Why do our teachers and textbooks emphasize a
special relationship between the United States and
England as the mother country. In a coun-try of E
Pluribus Unum (One out of many), the United
States has many mother countries. The population
of the United States is the world.
I n 1970 I was recruited to be founding director
of the Chicano Studies Program at the
University of Texas at El Paso, first such
program in the state (and still there). By this time, I
had become conscientized as a Chicano. From 1967
on, I had become identified as a Quinto Sol Writer,
that is, among the first wave of Chicano writers of
the Chicano Renais-sance which had its beginning
4
in 1966 with the creation of Quinto Sol Publica-
tions headed by Octa-vio Romano. By 1970, I had
written extensively about Mexican Americans and
their plight in the United States. In the Fall of 1969
I had taught the first course in Chicano literature in
the country. By 1970, I was finishing up Back-
grounds of Mexican American Literature, first
literary history in the field (University of New
Mexico, 1971).
In 1969, California had organized the first Chi-
cano Studies Program in the country. In the
following two years many more Chicano Studies
Programs were inaugurated throughout the
Hispanic Southwest. But all was not serene in
Aztlan–the name Chicanos chose to identify the
Hispanic Southwest, that territory dismembered
from Mexico as a consequence of the U.S. War
with Mexico (1846-1848) and annexed by the
United States per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidal-go
signed on February 2, 1848.
The Handbook for the organization of Chicano
Studies was developed in California as El Plan de
Santa Barbara (The Plan of Santa Barbara). This
was the blueprint we used in developing the
Chicano Studies Program at the University of Texas
at El Paso in 1970. Our guiding principal per the
Plan de Santa Barbara was: a Chicano Studies
Program not control-led by Chicanos is not a
Chicano Studies Program.
Not surprisingly, Chicano students, faculty, and
community leaders pressed hard for Chicano
control of the Chicano Studies Program at the
University of Texas at El Paso, despite institutional
and system resistance. That resistance was so
obstructive, that only a student takeover of the
administration building with the president as
hostage in December of 1971 precipitated the
necessary impetus for the institution-alization of
Chicano Studies.
Reluctantly, the intransigence of the university
turned to half-hearted support for Chicano Studies.
Our aim was to embed Chicano Studies courses in
as many departments as we could. Our recruitment
efforts were effective, bringing to the UT El Paso
campus Chicano luminaries like Rodolfo de la
Garza in Political Science, Donald Castro in
English, Hector Serrano in Theater, and Tomas
Arciniega in Education. We increased the number of
Chicano faculty substantially, but still nowhere near
a percentage reflecting our numbers in the
American population or our numbers in El Paso–a
community more than 75 percent mejicano at the
time.
More than half the students at the University of
Texas at El Paso in 1970 were mejicanos, but
Mexi-can American visibility on campus was
restrictted to the maintenance workers, janitors, and
gardeners. Our objectives for Chicano Studies were
twofold: not only would Chicano Studies help us to
enlighten both Chicanos and non-Chicanos about
who we were, but Chicano Studies would enable us
to promote our visibility beyond maintenance
workers, janitors, and gardeners. Moreover,
Chicano Studies would provide the missing pieces
of American history anent Mexi-can Americans.
Chicano Studies would show Ameri-cans the rich
heritage of Mexican Americans and the splendor of
their indigenous past. This was one way to bring
Chicanos into the consciousness of the American
mainstream, though Chicano Studies was not
explicitly a mainstream venue. Chicano Studies was
the alternative to the mainstream. That was Octa-
vio Romano’s argument in the editorial of the first
issue of El Grito in 1967. Since the American main-
stream rejected Chicanos, Chicanos would establish
their own institutions and outlets for their cultural
productions. Chicano achievement was not
predicated on the approval of the mainstream.
While Chicanos wanted to be in the mainstream
they would not be brown copies of whites in the
mainstream.
Now, almost forty years later, looking back on
the progress and evolution of Chicano Studies I
wonder how much mainstreaming has taken place.
And whether mainstreaming has been the ignis
fatuus it has always been for Chicanos. In a recent
edition of The American Tradition in Literature
published by McGraw Hill, the 2500 page
anthology did not include one American Hispanic
writer (that is, an Hispanic writer who is of the
United States and not from Hispanic America). Not
till page 2299 do we see an Hispanic writer: Isabel
Allende, the Chilean writer who now lives and
writes in the United States. Not one Chicano writer
appears in the McGraw Hill anthology which
purports to be the American tradition in literature.
This situation would be like including Chinua
Achebe in the anthology as representative of
African American writers.
Five decades later Chicanos are still invisible to
5
the American mainstream, although a number of
Chicano writers have made their way into that
mainstream. Despite Chicano nationalism, there is a
wave of Chicanos who desperately seek approval of
the white mainstream which progressively validates
Chicanos who most reflect its values. In the
background, however, silent running, are those die-
hard Chicano venues like Arte Publico Press and
The Bilingual Review Press which continue to
nurture the aspirations of Chicano writers still
marginalized by mainstream presses.
In 1968 the absence of minority writers in an-
thologies of American literature, especially those
anthologies used in colleges and universities, was so
exacerbated that the minority caucuses of the Na-
tional Council of Teachers of English banded to-
gether as the NCTE Task Force on Racism and
Bias in the Teaching of English, issuing a blistering
report entitled Searching for America which
detailed just how bad the situation was. Along with
Carlota Carde-nas Dwyer and Jose Carrasco, I was
a founding member of that Task Force. The NCTE
Report inclu-ded the piece on “Chicanos and
American Literature” by Jose Carrasco and me,
later reprinted in The Wiley Reader (1975).
In 1970 I sent a piece on “Chicano Poetry:
Roots and Writers” to Richard Ohman then editor
of College English. He returned the manuscript
with a note saying he didn’t think the article would
be of much interest to the readers of College
English, besides he was already considering a piece
on Chicano literature for an upcoming issue of
College English. The piece turned out to be an
essay on Chicano literature by a non-Chicano. The
following year I presented “Chica-no Poetry: Roots
and Writers” at the First National Symposium on
Chicano Literature organized by Ed Simmen at Pan
American University in Edinburg, Texas, and
published as part of the proceedings along with the
presentations of Tomas Rivera and Jose Reyna. In
1972 the piece was reprinted in Southwes-tern
American Literature. In the meantime, I fin-ished
my work on Backgrounds of Mexican American
Literature (University of New Mexico, 1971), first
study in the field.
By 1971 the Modern Language Association had
sanctioned a Chicano Caucus, as had the American
Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.
It appeared that the Chicano voice was gaining in
volume. It also appeared that conceptions of Chica-
nos were changing. Helping that change along was
establishment of La Luz magazine in Denver in
1972, the first Hispanic public affairs magazine in
English, organized by Dan Valdes as Publisher and
me as Associate Publisher. Over the ten years of my
tenure with La Luz we published dozens of pieces
by Chica-nos in various genres. In 1973
Washington Square Press brought out my anthology
of We Are Chicanos which included many of the
early luminaries of the Chicano Renaissance.
W hile there was headway in making the
Chicano presence in American society
more visible, Chicano venues began to
shrink as that visibility gave more prominence to
Chicanos who became more attractive to
mainstream purveyors. By the 1990's Chicano
venues for literary production had dwindled to a
handful from what had been hundreds of ephemeral
“garage presses” intent on promoting the jinetes of
Chicano literature. By the 1990's there had not been
a dramatic integration of Chicano perspectives into
the academic disciplines. The dozens of Chicano
Studies programs (including those that were
departments) dwindled as well to a few, although
today there are two doctoral programs in Chicano
Studies. Nevertheless, since the 1990's there has
been a retreat from using Chicano Studies as a
disciplinary anchor for promulgating the story of
Chicanos in America.
Chicano Studies has become a subset of His-
panic Studies and Latino Studies, seemingly more
palatable terms than Chicano Studies much the way
the term Latin American became a more palatable
term than Mexican American when the League of
United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was
organized in Cor-pus Christi, Texas, in 1929. The
term Chicano has been lost in the lexicon of
Hispanicity and Latinismo. More attention seems to
be paid now to members of Hispanic groups in the
United States with minimal population numbers
compared to the 30 million Mexican Americans
currently in the U.S. population (not counting the
purported numbers of undocumented Mexicans in
the country). Of the 45 million American Hispanics
counted in the Census, two-thirds of them (66
percent) are Mexican Americans.
The subalternization of Chicanos in Hispanic
Studies emphasizes the point: Why Chicano Stud-
ies? Why? Because Chicano Studies is being cut off
6
a medio grito, as it were, aborting its premise and
promise. This does not mean, of course, that the
study of Chicanos cannot go on without academic
programs of Chicano Studies. But rooted in an
academic setting of respect and encouragement,
Chicano Studies pro-vides the ground and lens from
and through which to illuminate the historical
processes that have brought Chicanos to this point
in American history. These are the same heuristic
considerations that undergird other disciplines.
However, suspicions about the ideological
agenda of Chicano Studies have wormed their way
into the debate over Chicano Studies, raising
questions about objectivity, questions Chicanos
raised in the 60's and 70's about the institutional
disciplines that did not include the presence of
Chicanos in their purview. This does not diminish
the value of continuing the construction of a
Chicano narrative; it just inter-poses inhibitions to
that construction. The Chicano Studies programs at
the University of Texas at El Paso and California
State University at Northridge have endured
because of their academic rigor and the passion of
their faculty. This is not to say other Chi-cano
Studies programs lack rigor and passion.
Whether a Chicano Studies program should be
disciplinary or interdisciplinary remains a question
of academic inquiry and perspective. At the
University of Texas at El Paso the Chicano Studies
Program became interdisciplinary. But my concern
is: without Chicano Studies in the academy, who
will advocate for Chicanos therein? In the current
public debate over immigration we see the growing
hostility to-wards Chicanos who are perceived as
part of the undocumented hordes of Mexicans
invading the United States as Lou Dobbs and CNN
T
characterize the situation.
he immigration debate avers the proposition
that Americans, by and large, know little
about Chicanos other than what they learn
about them through public media. Everywhere
today, Chicanos are being assailed by nativists and
jingoists who see them as progeny of “black”
Spaniards and savage Indians. Chicano Studies
becomes, therefore, the instrument through which
Americans can come to see Chicanos in their own
right rather than through the normative view of
mainstream Americans.
For the past 39 years I’ve taught Chicano
literature to undergraduates, Master’s students, and
doctoral candidates. Most of these students have
been Chicanos. The students we also want to reach
are non-Chicanos. But they have not signed up for
Chicano Studies courses in numbers to suggest that
we are reaching them with our story. This is also
why we need to keep and strengthen Chicano
Studies, why Chicano Studies must be imbricated
into the study of the American experience.
Last semester (Fall 2007) I taught on-line the
introductory graduate course to Chicano Studies
which is part of our Interdisciplinary Master’s Pro-
gram at Western New Mexico University. All the
graduate students were Chicanos. This indicates the
work the Chicano Faculty Caucus has to do in
promo-ting to all our students, especially non
Chicanos, the Chicano courses in our embryonic
Chicano Studies Program.
Como una hija querida, tenemos que defender
Chicano Studies porque si no, perderemos nuestro
futuro. That’s too important a future to lose, too ex-
acting a price to pay. This is the exact moment of
history for Chicanos to rise to the occasion.
Inaction sustains the status quo. Now, more than
ever, we must band together in common cause.
Chicano Studies deserves no less.
Everywhere, there are xenophobic and fascist
forces that threaten the existence of Chicano
Studies. Mainstream suspicions about the
ideological agenda of Chicano Studies has become
paranoiac. In Arizona there are legislative initiatives
to remove from the schools programs deemed to be
seditious, programs that promote divisiveness and
breed revolution, pro-grams like Chicano Studies–
any ethnic studies pro-gram that challenges Western
values. One Arizona legislator believes that such an
initiative will restore the image of the United States
as a “melting pot.”
As Chicanos we must ask ourselves: what is
driving this current wave of xenophobic fear? At
this point in time, it is diminution of this fear that is
the essential mission of Chicano Studies.
T
hirty-eight years after my initial experience
with Chicano Studies at the University of
Texas at El Paso, I have become part of
an
effort in Chicano Studies at Western New
Mexico
University, an Hispanic Serving Institution whose
student body is about 51 percent Hispanic. I’m ex-
cited by the venture as are my Chicano colleagues
on campus. Our joint efforts as a Chicano Faculty
Caucus brought the Chicano Studies program into
being. It’s a nascent program ready to take on the
challenges of the 21st century, secure in the
knowledge of its his-torical past. Chicano Studies
has never been about windmills or revolution; it’s
about our place in the American sun.
Copyright © 2008 by the author. All rights
reserved.