In 1969, Chicano[i] students at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (UM-Twin Cities) organized a student group called Latin Liberation Front (LLF) to advocate for an increase in in the Chicano student population, which was “estimated at less than twenty”[ii] and a curriculum that included their experience and history. To receive more resources, LLF asserted to UM-Twin Cities administration that the university was neglecting the Chicano student’s educational needs. They advocated for the establishment of a Chicano studies department and had the momentum to create a Chicano Studies Summer Institute,[iii] held on the UM-Twin Cities Campus in 1971.[iv] This is part of my research examining how Chicano students attending historically white Midwestern flagship universities [v] participated in student activism and situated themselves as part of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I explore Chicano student activism at UM-Twin Cities through an analysis of the 1971 “Chicano Studies and Mid-West Higher Education” report written for the University of Minnesota’s Chicano Studies Summer Institute by Alfredo Gonzalez,[vi] a former UM-Twin Cities graduate student and then faculty in the Spanish department. I seek to emphasize the link between racial capitalism,[vii] education, and Chicano consciousness that occurred in the Midwest. I argue that racial capitalism and its relation to the educational system is a needed theoretical framework to fully grasp how the oppression and resistance found in the Southwest was also shared in the Midwest: it provides depth to understand why Chicanos in the Midwest developed a Chicano consciousness despite the distance from the U.S.-Mexican border.
Racial capitalism emphasizes that race and capital are interlinked[viii] as capital “has always been dependent on appropriation of land and the labour of enslaved, indentured, and dispossessed people.”[ix] Researchers have examined how racial capital works in concert with the educational system, and in the case of Chicano students at the UM-Twin Cities this helps to situate them as colonial subjects who refuse to assimilate, linking Chicano student oppression and resistance in the Midwest.[x] Chicano consciousness arose in both the Southwest and the Midwest because Chicanos were racialized and exploited for labor, a key emphasis of racial capitalism. Chicano students’ families in Minnesota were intentionally recruited to the state for labor.[xi] While Mexican families came to Minnesota to work in the railroad and meat-packing industries, the sugar-beet industries were the largest employer of Mexicans in the state. Mexicans workers encountered “’‘many abuses’ and few opportunities for winter work”[xii] and they were given “the hardest, lowest, and most unskilled jobs.”[xiii] This racial hierarchy permeated the educational sphere as education for minority populations was only required to teach knowledge to assimilate and/or produce laborers to maintain capitalist’s wealth and land.[xiv] Across the Midwest, Mexican and Mexican American schoolchildren had to work, which took them out of a classroom.[xv] The students who were able to attend school faced an educational system that prepared them not as future academics, but as future laborers. In St. Paul, teachers tracked Mexican students into vocational training like Mechanic Arts.[xvi] Although educators were “varied in perspective if Mexicans could assimilate…they all agree that they needed to keep Mexicans ‘in their place and under control.’”[xvii] Thus, schools used mechanisms such as IQ testing that portrayed Mexicans “as deficit and health reports that showed them to be transmitters of diseases” to hinder education and employment opportunities.[xviii] After WWII, Mexicans found more work than ever but were barred from certain occupations and discouraged from seeking college degrees. This continued to impact Mexican and Mexican American children in the Midwest throughout the K-12 pipeline, as studies indicated that during the 1960s one in eight Mexican American adults in East Chicago had never attended school, and only one in five finished high school and one in five graduated college.[xix] The early 1970s showed about a sixty percent high school dropout rates in Illinois and for adult Mexican Americans in St. Paul, Minnesota only twenty percent had graduated high school.[xx] This was the type of schooling Chicano youth refused to accept during the Chicano Movement in the Midwest; alongside Chicanos in the Southwest, they no longer accepted the Eurocentric education that treated all of them as racially inferior.[xxi]
The Chicano Students that entered UM-Twin Cities participated in and were influenced by local community activism as Mexican Americans did not idly accept the discrimination by their white communities. By the 1950s, Mexicans and Mexican Americans had to move out of their homes in St. Paul due to flooding but instead of being able to return, they found the city began to gentrify the former predominately Mexican American neighborhood by replacing their homes with business and industries.[xxii] Not willing to stand aside, Mexican Americans organized to fight local St. Paul city administrators against gentrification. By the late 1960s, Chicano students were also encouraged by how Black students were responding to oppression on the UM-Twin Cities campus when African Americans picketed Morill Hall demanding more recruitment and educational curriculum changes that represented them.[xxiii] The LLF reacted to the lack of Chicano representation on the UM-Twin Cities campus, and they demanded funds from the UM-Twin Cities administration. Chicano students decided that the next step for them would be the establishment of a Chicano Studies Department, which led Alfredo Gonzalez, to apply for and receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create what was called “The Chicano Studies and Midwest Institute,” which he led.[xxiv]
Chicano Studies and Midwest Higher Education Institute
From July 28 to July 30th in 1971, faculty, staff, students, and community members across the country[xxv]attended the institute to consider the feasibility of creating a Chicano Studies Department. The report “Chicano Studies and Mid-West Higher Education,” reveals that they recognized that their value to the Midwest was through their labor and were looking for ways to address educational inequities. Chicano students, faculty, and community members gathered at this summer institute affirmed their Chicano identity, one shared with any Chicano geographically in the United States, but they specifically wanted to make it known to the public and academia that unequal educational experiences were also faced in Midwest.[xxvi]
On the first page of the report, Gonzalez narrates, “The presence of the Chicano in the Mid-West is an obvious but neglected fact that must be studied in order to understand his participation in the economic development of the region through agriculture and industry.”[xxvii] In this report, the first dimension of their presence in the Midwest was tied to economic and contributions they made in building the region. The word choice of “neglected” indicates an erasure of the Chicano experience in the Midwest despite the fact that Chicanos had been physically in the Midwest decades at that point and were not newcomers. During this time, the Midwest had been seen as a homogenous white space which “allow[ed] for normative claims about the state of nation and foster[ed] projects of structural violence from white supremacy to imperialism and nativism.”[xxviii] This view of the Midwest as a homogenous white space both erases’ people of color’s history and hides how racial capital is used in the Midwest as a weapon of colonialism.
Because Chicana and Chicano presence in the Midwest had been hidden from public view and scholarship alike, Gonzalez asserts an urgent need for Chicanos in the Midwest to be seen:
From his oldest settlement in Kansas City, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Omaha, Nebraska, Detroit, Michigan, St. Louis, Missouri, Columbus, Ohio, Mason City, Iowa to us, in Minnesota, the Chicano voice is shouting to be heard. From all over the Mid-west, Chicanos say: “WE ARE HERE! AQUI ESTAMOS! La Raza de Aztan![xxix]
This passage highlights the Midwestern Chicano consciousness with the term “La Raza de Aztlan,” a term often used to proclaim a Chicano identity. Gonzalez associates La Raza with various midwestern states and how Aztlán was also found there. It also illustrates that Chicanos in the Midwest were reclaiming a link to indigeneity as activists in the Southwest did and asserting a tie to Mexico. While Midwestern Chicanos were migrants and immigrants rather than natives, racial capitalism allows us to locate their belonging to the Midwestern land through their participation in Midwest economy and life. Chicano labor was central to the Midwest agricultural economy, building of the railroads, and manufacturing as these industries relied heavily on Mexican and Mexican American labor.
Unlike the Southwest, that had a bourgeois class due to Spanish influence and generational wealth, Midwest Mexican Americans “…remained overwhelmingly working people” as they were brought to the Midwest primarily as unskilled laborers and unable to create a middle class.[xxx] Gonzalez’s report mentions generations of midwestern workers:
Our people first came to the Mid-West in the cattle drives to Kansas, from there to the meat packing firms in Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, then to the sugar beets fields in Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota, the vegetable fields of Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio and fields and factories of Michigan as well as railroad work and mining in some Mid-West states. Now we are here.[xxxi]
The brief history presented in this quote demonstrates that Chicanos in the Southwest and Midwest were not separate groups but the same types of people, as Chicanos in the Midwest were used for labor in meat-packing factories, sugar-beet fields, and railroad construction. Gonzalez ends his address by saying, “Now we are here.” This final sentence is significant because it illustrates how Gonzalez located Midwestern Chicanos in the history of Mexican American experience. He also asserts that they are here to stay in the Midwest and alludes to how they have come to the point of rejecting labels that had been put on them. This passage also showed how racial capital impacted Chicanos in the Midwest as Chicanos in the Midwest were racialized and exploited for the profit of capitalists. If Chicanos in the Midwest had not been exploited through labor and were subjected to inequitable access to education, the need for Chicano Studies departments or Chicano services would not have existed. They emphasized this point throughout the institutes’ report, and Gonzalez concludes his report by pointing out their contributions to the Midwest through labor over generations, which is what gives them the right to have equal representation and access to higher education. The report suggests that the only way to fix this inequity is “met primarily by…the establishment of Chicano Studies Departments.”[xxxii]
The Midwest Higher Education institute in 1971 set the foundation for future activism later in the year of 1971 and beyond. By October 1971, Chicano students demanded a Chicano studies department by more forceful means and kept pushing the university to act until the administration agreed to fund the establishment of the first Chicano studies department in the Midwest in 1972. Through the lens of racial capitalism, we can understand this report and the success of the students at UM-Twin Cities in establishing a department as events that work to shift the relationship between labor and education. These events also reveal that Minnesotan Chicano students felt a collective Chicano consciousness with each other, and with others across the nation. By including states like Minnesota in the history of Chicano Student activism, we expand the story of the Chicano movement and demonstrate the shared consciousness and quest to reverse the de-skilling that had been imposed on Chicano communities via a colonial education. After generations of segregation and unequal education, Chicano students at the UM-Twin Cities were fighting back against this colonial education alongside their southwestern brothers and sisters by demanding more student representation to reclaim their history through a Chicano studies department.
Notes
[i]. Chicano refers to a political identity of Mexican Americans who rejected assimilating into Anglo society to create an identity of taking back land stolen in Mexico’s annexation, pride in their culture, and their right to self-determine. For more on the term Chicano, see: Carlos Muñoz, “The Chicano Movement: Mexican American History and the Struggle for Equality,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17, no. 1-2 (2018): 31-52. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle Toward Liberation, (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972); Laura Gomez, Manifest Destinies, The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 2.
[ii]. Dionicio Nodín Valdés, “A Shared Community: Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota,” Diálogo, 24, no. 2, (2021), https://doi.org/10.1353/dlg.2021.0013, 23
[iii]. Previous to 1971, The National Endowment of the Humanities funded Chicano Studies institute across the Southwest, which was the model used for the UM-Twin Cities institute.
[iv]. University of Notre Dame in Indiana established a Chicano studies graduate program in 1970. University of Minnesota is often seen as the first in the Midwest because it was for undergraduates. For more information on the founding of the Chicano Studies Department at the University of Minnesota-twin cities: see Dionicio Nodín Valdés, Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000) and Valdés’s “A Shared Community: Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota,” Diálogo, vol. 24, no. 2, 2021, pp. 21-35, https://doi.org/10.1353/dlg.2021.0013.
[v]. I also examine the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For more on Land-grant colleges see: Margret Nash, “Entangled pasts: Land-grant colleges and American Indian dispossession,” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 4 (2019): 437-467.
[vi]. Gonzalez would later become the founding chair of the UM-Twin Cities Chicano Studies Department when the department was established in 1972. This report was for public consumption and written to fulfill the requirements of the National Endowment of the Humanities grant.
[vii]. Racial capitalism is concept often attributed to Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism. For more on racial capitalism, see: Jodi Melamed, “Racial capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1.1 (2015): 76-85; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
[viii]. Robinson, Black Marxism, 3.
[ix]. Jessica Gerrard, Arathi Sriprakash, and Sophie Rudolph, “Education and Racial Capitalism,” Race Ethnicity and Education, vol. 25, no. 3 (2022), 428.
[x]. Gerrard, Sriprakash, and Rudolph. “Education and Racial Capitalism,” 428.
[xi]. Much of the early recruitment was from Mexico as well as states like California and Texas. From the earliest migration from Mexico to the state of Minnesota, Mexican migrants and their children were often put in housing of inferior quality next to their work locations and segregated from the predominantly white towns. For more information, See: Valdés, “Shared Community,” 23.
[xii]. Dionicio Nodín Valdés, Mexicans in Minnesota. (St. Paul: Minnesota State Historical Society Press, 2005), 5.
[xiii]. Dionicio Nodín Valdés, Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 150.
[xiv]. For more on the history of minority and ethnic education see: David Adams Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Revised and Expanded (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolia Press, 1988); Nick Estes, Our History is the Future (Brooklyn: Verso, 2019); Sharon Lee, An Unseen Unheard Minority: Asian American Students at the University of Illinois (New Brunswick; Rutgers University Press, 2022); Eileen H. Tamura, “Asian Americans in the History of Education: An Historiographical Essay,” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1, 2001, pp. 58–71.
[xv]. Across the Midwest, Mexican and Mexican American schoolchildren had to work, which took them out of a classroom, as demonstrated by a Minnesota education report that stated, “child labor has been the accepted practice in the beet fields of Minnesota in spite of our child labor and compulsory school laws.” (Minnesota state report as quoted in Valdés, Barrios Norteños, 2).
[xvi]. Valdés, Barrios Norteños, 158.
[xvii]. Valdés, Mexicans in Minnesota, 13.
[xviii]. Valdés, Mexicans in Minnesota, 14.
[xix]. Valdés, Barrios Norteños, 193.
[xx]. Valdés, Barrios Norteños, 193.
[xxi]. For information on Mexican American and Chicano education see: Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Carlos Muñoz, “The Chicano Movement: Mexican American History and the Struggle for Equality,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, vol. 17, no. 1-2 (2018): 31-52; Richard Valencia, and Guadalupe San Miguel, “From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to Hopwood: The Educational Plight and Struggle of Mexican Americans in the Southwest,” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 68, no. 3: 353-413.
[xxii]. Valdés, “A Shared Community: Chicano Studies”, 21-35.
[xxiii]. Valdés, “A Shared Community: Chicano Studies”, 21-35.
[xxiv]. Gonzalez was awarded $9,000 for this grant. In the 1969-1970, the National Endowment of Humanities had supported other Chicano studies institutions in states such as Arizona and Colorado—These reports were found in the UM-Twin Cities archives and served as the model for Minnesota students.
[xxv]. The institute’s records indicated one hundred and seventeen participants with eighty-eight representing the Midwest (fifty-five from Minnesota) to twenty-nine out of state represented with the most from California. They had Mexican American organization from local community organization Hermadas Unidas to the local Health Clinics, Minnesota Migrant council, Mid-west council of la Raza. See: Alfredo Gonzalez, “Chicano Studies Institute Report”, Mexican American Institute, 1971-1972 (Box 16, Folder 15). University of Minnesota Libraries, University Archives., 14).
[xxvi]. Panels at the institute included session such as “Chicano and the University”, “Future development of Chicano studies in the Midwest”, “The university and the Chicano student’s problems” to “Mexican American culture and history in the Midwest”
[xxvii]. Alfredo Gonzalez, “Chicano Studies and Midwest Higher Education”, Chicano Studies and Mid-west Higher Education. Chicano Studies Dept. Research Project (Box 1, Folder 4). 1980. University of Minnesota Libraries, University Archives., umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll609:793, 1.
[xxviii]. Britt E. Halvorson, and Joshua O. Reno. Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 2.
[xxix]. Gonzalez, “Chicano Studies and Midwest Higher Education,” 1.
[xxx]. Valdés, Barrios Norteños, 2.
[xxxi]. Gonzalez, “Chicano Studies and Midwest Higher Education,” 3.
[xxxii]. Gonzalez, “Chicano Studies and Midwest Higher Education,” 2.
Bibliography
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—. Chicano Studies and Mid-west Higher Education. Chicano Studies Dept. Research Project, 1980. University of Minnesota Libraries, University Archives, umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll609:793.
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Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Valdés, Dionicio Nodín. Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
—. Mexicans in Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota State Historical Society Press, 2005.
—. “A Shared Community: Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota.” Dialogo, vol. 24, no. 2, 2021, pp. 21-35. https://doi.org/10.1353/dlg.2021.0013.
Valencia, Richard and Guadalupe San Miguel, “From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to Hopwood: The Educational Plight and Struggle of Mexican Americans in the Southwest.” Harvard Educational Review 68, no. 3: 353-413.
Brava! Well written and eye opening.