A Shared Community: Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota

Abstract:This essay examines the creation and twentieth-century history of the Department of Chicano Studies (currently the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies) at the University of Minnesota. Influenced by contextual factors of geography, demography, the public university system, and the concurrent Chicano movement, its formation was the direct result of struggles by students and a supportive community. Almost from the start, it faced repeated attacks that threatened its survival, based on hypocritical standards and the intensifying influence of neoliberal ideology. Students and their community allies repeatedly rose to the occasion, exposing the hollowness of that ideology, an updated version of long-discredited social Darwinism.