Chicano Studies program pioneer Rudy Acuña dies at 93

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña, a pioneering political activist, academic and historian who founded one of the first Chicano Studies programs offered by a major U.S. university, has died at 93.

Acuña’s landmark 1972 textbook “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos” continues to be taught in schools.

He died Monday, said Carmen Ramos Chandler, a spokesperson for California State University, Northridge, where he taught for nearly half a century.

Although Acuña described himself as a teacher, he was also a prolific writer who authored more than a dozen books, several dozen academic papers and scores of essays and opinion pieces.

He founded one of the first Chicano Studies departments in the U.S. at California State University, Northridge, in 1969.

Acuña oversaw the department’s growth as it came to offer more than 170 courses as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees. It is now called the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies.

Colorful and often controversial in both his writings and lectures, Acuña angered white liberals and conservatives alike, and sometimes Chicanos, when he railed against injustices he saw carried out against U.S.-born Chicanos by a white power structure that excluded them and by well-off Latinos he believed made attempts to leave their poorer peers behind.

In one section of Acuña’s “Occupied America,” entitled “US Invasion of California,” he criticized both the conquering Yankee armies that forced the surrender of Mexican forces in Los Angeles in 1847 and the Mexican-born Californians, called Californios, who he said set a standard of brutality against other minorities before their white conquerors arrived.

“Californios compounded their wrongs by violence against Indians,” he wrote.

He said their brutality with people the Californios viewed as inferior gave their white oppressors a blueprint for committing the same kind of violence against them.

An engaging lecturer with razor-sharp wit, Acuña was revered by students, although he sometimes seemed to enjoy riling up his audiences just to make a point.

“I wish the people here were more antagonistic,” he told students at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College in 2003. “In Chicago one guy called me a liar and we got in a fistfight.”

In 1991, he tangled with fellow Chicano academics when he sued the University of California, Santa Barbara, claiming racial, political and age discrimination when the university denied him a tenured position in its Chicano Studies Department.

A judge dismissed the racism and political allegations, but Acuña, who was 59 when he applied for the job, prevailed on the age issue. He was awarded more than $325,000 but denied the professorship after the judge concluded he had so alienated the Chicano Studies faculty that no one there wanted to work with him.

Acuña used the money to set up a foundation that offers Chicano Studies scholarships to California State University, Northridge, students.

The son of Mexican immigrant parents, Rodolfo Francisco Acuña was born May 18, 1932, in Los Angeles. His father worked as a tailor and he grew up in South Los Angeles and the city’s blue-collar East Side.

He attended Loyola High School, a private Jesuit institute near downtown, before earning a bachelor’s degree in social sciences and a master’s in history from California State University, Los Angeles.

He taught at high schools and community colleges in Los Angeles for several years before earning a doctorate in Latin American Studies from the University of Southern California in 1968.

The following year, he was recruited to found CSUN’s nascent Chicano Studies program and quickly began sparring with other academics over the teaching of American history, sociology and other subjects in classes that he said ignored the contributions of Latinos.

“For the past 25 years, I have been at war with American historians,” he once told the American Historical Society. “My disenchantment with these scholars sprang from the 1960s and what seemed a profession more interested in the past than the present.”

It particularly irked him that until the rise of Chicano Studies programs in the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican American students seemed to have been taught almost nothing of their history in the United States.

He mellowed somewhat in later years, saying he discovered that setting himself apart from the academic mainstream was to a degree the same kind of elitism he had accused other academics of practicing.

“As my influence grew within Chicano studies, and indeed within the larger Latin community, my view of the profession became less harsh,” he said. “I appreciated that my training as a historian contributed greatly to my ability to bridge the chasm between the humanities and the social sciences within the field itself — the truth be told, history has two heads.”

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Rogers is a retired AP journalist.