University of Minnesota: Department of Chicano and Latino Studies, Interview with Edén Torres and Karen Mary Davalos

Abstract

© 2021 by the University of Texas Press scramble was on to establish a curriculum, hire faculty, and appoint a chair. Activists chose the name “Department of Chicano Studies.” This is important because it signaled a clear connection to Chicano movement politics and a rejection of colonial thinking. It was much more common at the time to see “Mexican American Studies.” It also signaled a departure from previously existing units like Latin American Studies, Hispanic Studies, and Spanish departments. The first Chicano Studies courses were offered at Minnesota in fall 1972. Though other large universities outside the Southwest had programs, Minnesota’s became the first Department of Chicano Studies beyond that population base. It has remained one of few departments in the Midwest over the past fifty years. In this region, the dominant form of education and research in the field has been a model in which programs and institutes are subsumed under or merged with other units. Though the administration first offered to establish a program where the study of Mexican Americans could be pursued as an area emerging within an existing field or contained within another department, the students held firm to their demand for a freestanding department. They understood very well the politics of their position at that moment. They were laying a strong foundation for future students, creating a professional space for emerging scholarship to be taken seriously, and claiming their social and political autonomy. One of the early chairs of the department was Rolando HinojosaSmith, a Chicano literary giant recruited from Texas. He was not, however, a strong proponent of Chicanx politics and had relatively little interaction with the community. Another early faculty member, Marcella Trujillo, an important Chicana feminist voice, was well known for writing that challenged a toxic form of machismo in the culture and in Chicano movement leadership and politics. Because of Trujillo’s early participation, Chicana feminism was University of Minnesota: Department of Chicano and Latino Studies, Interview with Edén Torres and Karen Mary Davalos