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As Carlos Muñoz, jr., professor of ethnic studies, retires at the end of this semester after 30 years of teaching at UC, the last 24 at Berkeley, he can look back with some satisfaction at what his generation of Chicano intellectuals accomplished in the academy. They founded departments of ethnic studies, developed Chicano and Chicana studies, and helped increase the presence of both Latino students and faculty in higher education. “We opened the doors,” he says. Muñoz has been banging on the doors to education all his life. Born in poverty in El Paso, Texas and raised in the barrios of East Los Angeles, he was the first in his family to finish high school, where he excelled. A football and baseball player, he was the first Mexican-American student body president, and one of a handful of Chicanos to make the school’s honor society. But, along with other students of color, he was shunted into the “industrial major” and away from college-preparatory classes, leaving him ineligible to attend a four-year college. After dropping out of community college and serving in the Army, Muñoz returned to Los Angeles, where he participated in early anti-Vietnam war protests and took part in civil rights demonstrations while earning a B.A., with honors, at California State University, Los Angeles. He then decided that the time had come for Mexican-American youth to form their own movement and to fight for educational change. He and a small group of organizers decided to protest a situation they knew first hand— “the racist and inferior education our youth received.” On May 3, 1968, they led a walkout of a thousand students from Abraham Lincoln High School, a predominantly Mexican-American school in East Los Angeles. That walkout soon spread to other schools, lasting a week and a half and involving ten thousand students. “This was beyond our wildest dreams,” says Muñoz. “We thought it was just going to be a small protest. We wanted to dramatize to the L.A. Board of Education that reforms needed to take place so that Mexican-American kids could get academic preparation for college and could also learn about their own history.” It was the first major Mexican-American urban mass protest against racial oppression. Three months later, thirteen of the strike’s organizers, Muñoz among them, were indicted for conspiracy to disturb the peace of Los Angeles and to disrupt the city’s educational process. Muñoz will never forget when police burst into his home to arrest him. “There I was in jail, with those accused of murder, armed robbery, and rape, because I had simply stood up for equal access to education,” Muñoz recalls, still shaken by the experience. He and the other strike leaders each faced 66 years of prison. Bail for the “Los Angeles 13” was paid by Senator Eugene McCarthy; two years later, charges against them were declared unconstitutional by the state appellate court, and were dropped. While in jail, Muñoz vowed to earn a Ph.D., which would enable him to do serious scholarship on Mexican- American history, politics, and culture. Accepted into a number of Ph.D. programs (including those at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford), Muñoz chose the Claremont Graduate School; he became only the fifth Chicano in the United States to earn a doctoral degree in political science. In 1970, he accepted a faculty position at UC Irvine. THINGS WERE DIFFERENT AT THE UNIVERSITY IN 1970. Latino students then were barely visible; now they make up 14 percent of the student body. But a backlash in the past decade, Muñoz warns, threatens the advances he and his colleagues struggled so hard to achieve. “After Proposition 209 and the battles of the 1990s,” Muñoz says, “the doors to higher education are barely open now. And if this remains the case, the seeds are present for the making of a two-tiered society in California, with uneducated Latinos and other minorities on the bottom.” There were only a handful of Latino teachers at UC thirty years ago, but they now form 7 percent of the faculty. There are extra burdens for these professors, says Muñoz, who joined the Department of Ethnic Studies at Berkeley in 1976. He says faculty of color need to be “twice as good” as other faculty. “Not only do we have to produce as scholars—publish or perish—but we also commit ourselves to teaching, to our students, and to community service.” Muñoz says that he and his colleagues act as absentee fathers or brothers to Latino students, many of whom feel alienated on campus and turn to Latino faculty for advice on much more than homework. “And this service in no way gets counted when it comes to professional advancement, tenure, and salary increases.” Muñoz is best known as a scholar for his widely praised book, Youth, Identity, Power (1989), a history of the Chicano movement. The book won the Gustavus Myers Book Award for “outstanding scholarship in the study of human rights in the United States,” and was the basis for a 1996 PBS series on the history of the Mexican-American civil rights movement. It is his experience in that movement that connects Muñoz to students who weren’t yet born when he led the first Mexican-American protest to improve education. “As a student-activist myself,” says Nora Sandoval ’97, “I was inspired by Professor Muñoz’s personal experience and by his continued dedication to the struggle for equal rights and justice. And, in class, he is a passionate teacher.” Former Berkeley faculty member and administrator Roberto Harro ’58, who was instrumental in bringing Muñoz to Berkeley, jokes that Muñoz should have been a preacher. “What impresses me about Carlos,” says Harro, “both inside the classroom and outside, is the zeal with which he speaks for those who have lacked a voice. As a scholar, he has helped create a new body of knowledge that deals with the way in which all immigrants, not only Latinos, have been assimilated and socialized into this country.” At a retirement party for Muñoz last month, Latino students praised him for his decades of scholarship and activism, for being a role model, and for “keeping it real.” A graduate student spoke of Muñoz’s unique contribution with these words: “Thanks for teaching me how to be human.” Although he is a youthful 60—and still able to play full-court basketball at noon in the Recreational Sports Facility—Muñoz has decided to retire this spring for two reasons. One is that he has accomplished his major goal of contributing to the development of ethnic studies in the academy; the other is that he wants to devote himself more fully to intellectual work. After leaving Berkeley, Muñoz hopes to try his hand at new forms of writing: poetry and the novel. He has begun a biography of Ernesto Galarza, a writer best known for his book Barrio Boy and a man Muñoz says shaped the Mexican-American intellectual and political movement in this country; and Muñoz plans a book on a subject that has been a constant theme in his life and work: multiracial democracy in America. “I think we’ve come a long way,” Muñoz says, reflecting on what he and his fellow scholar-activists have accomplished. “We came from nowhere and made an impact in the academy.” At the close of his retirement party, he summed up his UC career: “It’s been a long and rocky road, full of pain, but also of adventure and joy.” His final words to the assembly, with his right hand raised in salute, were: “We shall overcome.” |
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