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| Student, faculty and staff protest at UT Austin in 1974 Photo by Alan Pogue |
Based on an address May 18, 2013, by Professor Emilio Zamora as part of a symposium at the University of Texas at Austin highlighting the importance of the Mexican American Library Program (MALP) in collecting, preserving, and making available archival knowledge over four decades.
By Emilio Zamora
The MALP began with the formation of the Mexican American Graduate Association (MAGA) in 1972. Approximately ten Mexican American graduate students, mostly from the College of Liberal Arts formed MAGA and joined with the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) and community organizations to support the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS), established in 1971.
Dr. Américo Paredes, a Professor of English and the single most important figure in the development of CMAS and the cause for rights on campus, assumed the position of Director of the center, while José Limón, a graduate student in English, became the center’s Associate Director and administered it on a day-to-day basis.[i]
The community that coalesced around CMAS expressed concern that the university had not established the necessary institutional support to increase the presence of Mexicans at all levels of university life and to advance the study of the Mexican community. The establishment of CMAS was a step in the right direction. It became the focal point of evolving ideas, responsibilities, and opportunities in Mexican American studies. Its academic program, for instance, offered undergraduates formal learning environments and academic specializations, as well as opportunities for graduate students to teach research-based courses.
The center also sponsored public lectures, symposia, and forums, some of which included persons and organizations associated with the Texas Farmworkers’ Union, the United Farmworkers’ Organizing Committee, the Raza Unida Party, and the State Legislature. Despite this energized atmosphere, many of us believed that the establishment of the center remained an insufficient gesture until the university increased the presence of Mexican faculty and graduate students and provided the necessary bibliographic and archival basis for developing the kind of scholarship expected from a major research institution like the University of Texas.
Some faculty members specialized in Mexican American studies, but they were few. Also, with the exception of Paredes in English, Santos Reyes and Rodolfo Arévalo in Social Work, George I. Sánchez in Education, and Manuel Ramírez in Psychology, there were no others on campus. Mexican American graduate students were also under-represented with most of us concentrated in Liberal Arts and Education. Our small numbers, however, did not prevent us from building the personal and political relationships that were critical to the formation of MAGA and its support of CMAS.
The center was involved in early efforts by the university to recruit Mexican faculty and graduate students. Paredes and Limón, for instance, negotiated the first faculty-hiring initiative that assigned faculty positionsin targeted departments with CMAS paying for fifty percent of the faculty’s salary for three years at the end of which time the university would assume the Center’s allotment. Paredes and Limón also contributed to the establishment of a Ph.D.-granting inter-disciplinary program in Mexican American Studies in 1971 that eventually graduated three students until it was discontinued six years later.[ii]
Support from MAGA contributed to the center’s early development. For instance, we formed faculty recruitment committees of between two and four members to visit the History, Sociology, and Political Science departments and urged them to work with CMAS in recruiting Mexican faculty and graduate students. We communicated the concern that departments lacked trained and experienced faculty to guide our theses and dissertations on Mexican topics. MAGA influenced the subsequent hiring of faculty members in Political Science and Sociology and an invitation to a visiting postdoctoral fellow in History. The History Department collaborated with CMAS in bringing the well-known Juan Gómez-Quiñones to campus.[iii]
Andrés Tijerina, Angie Quiroz, and I formed yet another committee. The archives committee mostly emerged out of our experiences as graduate students in a university that had never designated Mexican American studies a focus in archival or bibliographic collection. Moreover, undergraduate students enrolled in our CMAS courses were reporting that they could not find assigned readings in the library. We began to address the problem by preparing a proposal for an archival collection. Angie documented the lack of periodical holdings related to Mexican American studies. Andrés showed that the university had more materials on migrating birds than on migratory workers. I provided a count of approximately 300 Spanish-language newspapers (with names, type of circulation, and years of operation) that appeared in Texas between 1890 and 1930 and noted the incomplete runs of these same newspapers in archival collections in the university.
MAGA presented the proposal to Provost Stanley Ross in a meeting that included Mexican faculty and graduate and undergraduate students. We addressed the need for continued CMAS support and additional faculty and graduate students, as well as the establishment of an archival collection. Ross, a university official known for his cautious manner, quickly lent his support.
The University Library endorsed the proposal and President Spurr followed by announcing that the university was establishing the MALP. This occurred in September 1974, days before he was removed by the Board of Regents, reportedly for seeking to recruit minority students and the mismanagement of the Special Library Collections.[iv]
Laura Gutiérrez de Witt, the Assistant to the Head Librarian of the Latin American Collection, assumed the responsibility for administering the MALP until 1975 when Angie Quiroz replaced her. Angie was followed by Roberto Urzúa, Elvira Chavarría, Gilda Baeza, Margo Gutiérrez, and Pamela Mann. Martha Cotera also worked as a consultant for at least thirty years, assisting in locating archives and arranging for their transfer to the MALP.
I now turn to the difficulties that we faced so that readers may appreciate them, including the hostile environment that often discouraged us and the attendant stress and trauma that thinned our ranks. Some of our more recent graduate students are facing similar experiences but they cannot fully understand our own by only studying the past through secondary works. We can help bridge the distance of time with reliable accounts of our lived experiences. My intent, then, is to go beyond a recounting of accomplishments and to address the difficulties as measures of the cost of building an emancipatory project.
The demands of our research agenda often exceeded what graduate students in other areas of historical study faced. They typically selected topics for their theses and dissertations with an ample supply of secondary publications and a good number of reference works and archival materials. The secondary historical literature on Mexican American history did provide us some guidance. Works by Manuel Gamio, Paul S. Taylor, Teodoro Torres, Carey McWilliams, Américo Paredes, Emilia W. Schunior Ramirez, and Emma Tenayuca, for instance, demonstrated the rich possibilities for a successful Mexican Americanist career. As important as these authors were, however, they had not yet built a substantial body of literature to present a formidable challenge to the canon in areas like Texas history.
Established authors such as Ruth Allen, Walter Prescott Webb, Rupert N. Richardson, and Seth Shepard McKay, for instance, continued to go largely unchallenged in their misrepresentation and even dismissal of Mexican contributions to U.S. history. Our challenge, then, was to expand on the early work on Mexicans and revise the established works in U.S. history by re-examining existing government and non-government archives and collecting Mexican archival records and oral narratives.
Our non-academic work also involved helping to build CMAS and maintaining student organizations such as MAGA and MAYO. We also nurtured relationships with community organizations that consumed our time but strengthened our moral and social power to persevere. The off-campus organizations included the Mexican American Business and Professional Women of Austin, the Texas Farmworkers Union, the United Farmworkers Organizing Committee, and the Raza Unida Party.
Participating in meetings, organizing events, maintaining reciprocal relations among organizations, and engaging discussions and debates required significant time and effort. Based on our relations with other campuses and more recent conversations that harken back to those times, we know that our academic and non-academic work mirrored similar activities in other places. We also draw on our experiences and remembrances to gauge the gravity of the reaction, including the questioning of our motives, the challenges against our budding research careers, and the acts of rudeness and provocation.
No one faced more pressures and obstacles at the University of Texas than Roberto Villarreal, a fellow graduate student in history from Riviera, Texas. Roberto allowed me to share parts of his story—an account that reflects our collective experience even as it underscores the severity of his experiences. Roberto had received a Master’s degree in Physics in the late 1960s and had worked at NASA in various projects including the development of the landing gear for the moon landing in 1969 and the early planning of the Mars mission. He decided to pursue his love of history and enrolled at Texas A&I University (Kingsville, Texas) in 1970. Roberto began his doctoral work in the Spring of 1972.[v]
On one occasion, a history professor tried to discourage Roberto and me from studying Mexican American history because he thought that our colleagues would doubt that we could speak “objectively,” meaning that we were incapable of observing the conventional standards in history. During our first class meeting, the professor entered into a long and emotional tirade on the problem of studying Mexicans while being Mexican. Roberto and I were taken aback and mostly allowed the professor to continue unchallenged. After the meeting, Roberto asked that I allow him to confront the professor at our next class meeting. A week later, Roberto asked the professor to continue with his observations on objectivity. He complied.
Roberto allowed him to continue for a few minutes and then pointed to a stack of basic books that he had brought to class. He reminded the professor that the titles had appeared in the course syllabus as the leading studies in major fields of U.S. history. He added that all of the authors stated or suggested in their introductions and prefaces that they approached their work with the premise that the established interpretations were mistaken or misleading. Roberto ended his presentation by asking if the professor expected us to be less than the leading authors because we were Mexican. He promptly apologized, wished us the best, and never again talked about how we were inherently unable to be good historians, although he later led an effort to remove Roberto from the graduate program.
Roberto faced another discouraging professor in a readings course on U.S. history. The professor distributed weekly lists of books on basic themes in U.S. history and the students were to select one, prepare a report, and participate in class discussion. The last theme in the semester was Mexican American history. The professor initiated the discussion as he usually did, with an opening statement. This time he stated that “Mexicans became a cleaner people while in military service during WWII, they have been building more indoor toilets since then.” Roberto responded that this was stupid, illogical, and wrong, and added that he would demonstrate the inappropriateness of the observation by stating it in different terms, that is, “Mexican people are cleaner than Whites because Mexican women clean their own homes and then they clean the homes of Whites.” Although Roberto had earned A’s in his ten previous book reports, the professor assigned him a B. When Roberto asked for an explanation, the professor stated that he had not been “effective” in class discussions.
Soon thereafter, in the Spring of 1974, Roberto, myself, Gómez-Quiñones, and Devra Weber (one of Juan’s students from UCLA) presented papers in the first two panels on Mexican American history ever organized at a Western History Association conference. Roberto’s presentation was controversial. He reviewed labor organizing among Mexican Americans between 1940 and 1960 and challenged the view that their association with Whites during the war made them cleaner or had awakened them, as the historian Manuel Servín had suggested in his recent book entitled The Awakened Minority. Servín and at least five members of the history faculty from the University of Texas were present.[vi]
One week after the history meeting, a faculty committee informed Roberto that the department was considering withdrawing him from the graduate program because he was not serious about graduate work. Roberto recalls that a friendly professor reported that a faculty member accused Roberto of being under the influence of Gómez-Quiñones, “a radical Mexican American historian,” and that he was more interested in “extracurricular activities” than in his graduate studies. When Roberto went before the committee asking for an explanation, a committee member pointed out that he had been a Raza Unida Party candidate for state office and that he had been campaigning in his South Texas district. When Roberto noted that he had finished his course-work, earned mostly A’s, was in good standing with the Graduate Office, and was preparing for his comprehensive examination, they agreed to allow him to continue, but they warned him to be more serious about his work.
Roberto withdrew from the university believing that in the prevailing academic culture, such a warning meant that the department would eventually find cause to remove him. His decision was a loss to Mexican American history, but he made a logical decision based on the undue hostility that he faced. At any rate, he lived his life well. Roberto raised three bright and beautiful daughters and pursued a successful career as an educational consultant, film-maker, librarian, political activist, and writer. He has authored eleven self-published books, produced a feature-length movie with his daughter Alicia, established a library on Mexican American history in Riviera, and currently serves as the Chair of the Democratic Party in Kleberg County. Roberto recently began writing a new book entitled “The Education of a Mexican American” that will include a fuller account of his time at the University of Texas.
Conclusion
We can cope with the memory of our difficulties by thinking about Hemann Sweatt and his trying legal challenge against the exclusion of Blacks at the University of Texas’ law school. Like him, we stood in the teeth of power of the State of Texas and the university with the sure knowledge that we were on the right side of history. It also helps to know that the MALP continues to advance our archival knowledge through the significant publication record that it has helped to produce, its collaborative relationship with the numerous other university archives that have emerged since the 1970s, and the community-wide recovery efforts that it has helped to generate.
Our original purpose also continues. We are still identifying, preserving and making available the papers and publications of individuals and organizations who took to the public square to speak on behalf of Mexicans as an aggrieved minority and working class group.
As with other archives, mediating influences such as budgetary considerations, reconfigured areas of collection, the collection practices of related archives, and the availability of archival materials means that MALP will continue to provide us one part of the provisional understandings of the Mexican American and now the Latino/a voice. The MALP, however, continues to reflect the purpose of the founding graduate students who sought to establish a memory site for advancing our understanding of history.
Graduate students cannot assume the entire credit for the MALP. We should also recognize CMAS and the University of Texas Libraries and community organizations like the Mexican American Business and Professional Women of Austin. Martha Cotera, the Chair of the organization and its Mexican American Studies Steering committee, deserves special note. She delivered significant community support to the CMAS and the MALP and most probably influenced President Spurr to fund the MALP with her demanding correspondence.
We must also credit the Student Government and MAYO for demanding improved minority representation at the university. We would be remiss if we did not express our appreciation to President Spurr, who authorized the MALP at the same time that he made his embattled plea to the university community, “The University will take affirmative steps within the faculty, staff, and student body to encourage the full representation of all the economic, cultural, and ethnic groups in our society.[vii]
We must also acknowledge the untiring labor of the MALP staff during the last thirty-nine years, especially their close working relationship with the Latin American Collection that helped both become premier archival sites in the United States. We also pay special tribute to the families and organizations that safeguarded the historical records and entrusted them to the MALP. Finally, we are grateful to dedicated and able researchers for helping us better understand the Mexican American community on its own terms.
Finally, we celebrate the increased attention that Mexican American history has received and acknowledge that the university’s investment validates not only the struggles of the early 1970s, but the Latino community’s rightful place in the history of the nation. The students and everyone else involved in establishing the MALP were responding to segregation and exclusion, but we also acted with a faith in something not yet fully seen, an emancipatory outlook that the historian Emma Perez calls a de-colonial imaginary, a set of defensive, opposition, and visionary ideas meant to change the course of Mexican American history.[viii]We drew confidence from community support and the democratic values of fairness and justice, from an imaginary that is now manifest in the wonderful evolution of our archival voice at the University of Texas.
Emilio Zamora is a Professor in the Department of History and Fellow, Barbara White Centennial Professorship in Texas History, at the University of Texas at Austin. This 1974 photo shows UT students, faculty and staff rallying in support of six undergraduate Chicano and White students who took over the UT President’s office. They were protesting the university’s failure to recruit more Chicano students and faculty and its slow support of Mexican American studies on campus. If you can zoom in, find the circle near the center of the photo: that’s Emilio, wearing a white shirt and arms crossed, recording history in his mind’s eye.
[i]. My account of the history of the MALP, CMAS, and MAGA are mostly drawn from personal notes and my memory, as well as numerous conversations with Limón, Tijerina and Villarreal. The MALP is housed in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Although its emphasis is on Mexican Americans, the collection also includes materials on other U.S. Latino groups. Along with the Benson Collection, it claims approximately 20,000 books and journals, 2,500 reels of microfilm, over 70 archival collections, and audio and videocassettes, posters, photographs, and slides.
[ii]. Graduates of the program included José Angel Gutiérrez, a full professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington, and Emilio Zamora, a full professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. I do not recall the name of a third graduate nor could the Office of Graduate Studies at the university identify her.
[iii]. The Political Science Department hired one of its graduates, Armando Gutiérrez, as an Assistant Professor and the Sociology Department brought Drs. Jorge Bustamante and Gilberto Cárdenas from Notre Dame University to assume positions as Assistant Professors. Professor Gómez-Quiñones came from UCLA with a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.
[iv]. “The Firing of the President,” The Alcalde, November/December 1974, pp. 8-9.
[v]. My account of Roberto’s experiences makes use of a draft of his forthcoming autobiography, Villarreal, “The University of Texas,” Chapter VII, In The Education of a Chicano.
[vi]. Servín, The Mexican-Americans; An Awakening Minority (Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1970); An Awakened Minority; The Mexican-Americans (Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1974).
[vii]. “The Firing of the President,” pp. 8-9.
[viii]. Perez, The Decolonial Imaginary; Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).