(upbeat music)
(gentle upbeat music)
- My name is Luis Alvarez,
history professor at UC San Diego,
where I teach Chicanx and LatinX history.
I'd like to share my story of how I got here.
And since I'm a history professor,
I figured I'd start way back with a story about my family.
My paternal grandparents, Roberto and Maria
grew up in the small town of Lemon Grove, California
during the 1920s and '30s.
It's now just a short drive down the 94 East Freeway
from downtown San Diego,
but back when they were kids,
it was a rural and largely agricultural community,
made up of Mexican immigrants.
There were Mexican American children
and white American residents.
Other than the lemons that were picked
by the mostly Mexican workers,
Lemon Grove may best be known for a court case
that grew from its small elementary school
shared by Mexican and white students.
Both my grandpa and my nonna were students at that school.
In January of 1931,
on the first morning of school
after the Christmas and new year holidays,
white students showed up to the Lemon Grove grammar school
like they normally did.
The Mexican students, including my grandparents, however,
were barred from entering.
Under orders from the Lemon Grove School Board,
they were told they didn't belong
and sent to a shoddily-constructed two room school building
that was several blocks away.
It was to be their new school,
one that was segregated from the white kids.
The Mexican children returned home
where their parents, my great-grandparents among them,
instructed them not to attend the new school,
which many referred to as a (speaking in foreign language)
or a barn.
What followed evolved into the very first successful
school desegregation court case in the United States.
The case of Roberto Alvarez
versus the Lemon Grove School District in 1931.
Because he was a good student, he spoke English,
and, as his friends later joked,
had a decent pair of shoes,
my 12 year old grandfather
was chosen as the plaintiff in the case.
The parents and the families of the Mexican students
mobilized to fight the segregation of their children.
They enlisted the legal counsel
and support of the Mexican Consulate
and they won.
This was more than 23 years before the 1954 landmark case,
Brown versus Board of the Education in Topeka, Kansas,
before that case outlawed racial segregation
of children in public schools.
23 years before Brown vs Board,
this small Mexican community in Lemon Grove
fought for and secured for their children,
the right to equal education.
This is an important chapter
in the history of Chicanx and Latinx, San Diego
and not just because they won,
the Mexican community in Lemon Grove,
took a stand against fierce odds.
They challenged the white power brokers in their community
that ran the school board.
They risked losing their jobs
in the midst of the Great Depression.
They faced the prospect of deportation
during what was a nationwide repatriation campaign
that saw more than 600,000 Mexicans returned to Mexico,
including countless numbers
of Mexican American born children.
And yet they came together
in the tradition of immigrant
(speaking in a foreign language)
to form the Lemon Grove Neighborhood Association
and fight.
My dad still has a banner
from the original Lemon Grove Neighborhood Association
hanging in his garage.
The Lemon Grove case was featured in the 1986 PBS film
called the "Lemon Grove Incident",
a film that I still show in my classes today.
It features the work of anthropologist Robert Alvarez Jr.
my dad, an anthropologist
who was the first to unearth the Lemon Grove story,
and really the first to publish scholarly research
about the case.
That makes me a rare second generation Chicanx PhD.
It also reminds me of the lasting impact
of the Lemon Grove case
and the value of education in my own family.
It's part of the reason I'm here
a Professor of Chicanx history at UC San Diego.
All to say, education was always a priority in my family.
Still, I never knew where I wanted to go to college,
but when the time came,
I was drawn to UC San Diego.
My family moved around a lot when I was a kid.
So, although I was born at the Kaiser Hospital in La Mesa
just south east of downtown,
I never lived in San Diego after I was four years old.
But when it came time for me to choose a college,
UC San Diego called to me,
partly because of the beaches and sun, I think,
but also because of my own family history.
My nonna lived on Irving Street, near Chicano park.
I used to stay with her when I visited town
and I remember her always saying
she would buy extra lard for my visit,
so she could make me her homemade tortillas
and refried beans.
My closest cousins (indistinct)
were still living in Lemon Grove and Spring Valley
in Southeast San Diego.
I have fond memories of family reunions,
watching Charger games together
and tamales on Christmas Eve.
I felt a pull back to the place that I was born,
but had never really lived as an adult.
And these many years later,
I see it was my San Diego roots pulling me back,
but it was also UCSD charting new paths for my future.
You see, when I arrived on campus,
I was intent on being an engineer.
I enrolled in math and science classes,
dead set on becoming a structural engineer,
but then I took history for fun
at the end of my freshman year,
I took a class with Professor David Gutierrez
on Mexican-American history.
I learned about the Chicano movement,
about the border, about immigration.
The class was H-I-L-D 7C,
a class that I now teach almost every year.
Back then it helped me see my own past
and the world around me in new ways.
I learned a lot from Professor Gutiérrez
and I'm happy now that he is one of my closest friends.
I also took Mexican history with Don Ramon Ruiz.
I always thought he was like
what professors in the Ivy league would be like,
with the patches on the elbows of his sport coat,
very formal and formidable and a dazzling lecturer.
From him, I learned about the Mexican revolution
and about the complicated history
between the United States and Mexico.
These two professors lit a fire in me.
I changed my major.
I graduated with a degree in history.
I went on to graduate school in history
and have spent most of my life learning,
teaching and writing books
about Chicanx and Latinx history.
They not only helped me understand history,
as a way to make sense of the present
and imagine a different future,
but they helped me discover what I wanted to do in life.
I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them
and many others that inspired me along the way.
This is part of my story of what happened to me
when I came to UCSD,
but it happens to us all.
We find our way, we learn who we are
and we figure out how we want to live in the world.
The university is filled with amazing opportunities,
people,
and everyone who comes finds their fire,
blazes their own trail
and helps build the world anew with what they learn.
I'm happy to be a small part of that journey now
with the students that I teach in my classes,
I left UC San Diego after I graduated,
I lived in Guanajuato in Mexico for a bit.
I went to the University of Texas for my PhD,
but when the chance arose,
I came back home to UC San Diego.
It's still called to me.
My roots still pulled me back,
but I knew from experience
that there were also new roads for me to travel
and UC San Diego would open them up.
So, here I am,
my teaching and research
is all about Chicanx and Latinx culture,
politics and life.
My first book was called "The Power of the Zoot."
It was about Mexican-American
and African-American Zoot suiters in World War II.
It was about their youth culture and their music
and the clothes that they wore,
but it was also about who and what
was considered American during war time.
If I'm being honest,
that book started when I was a student at UC San Diego,
I interviewed my great uncle, Antonio.
My grandfather's brother, Uncle Tony, you see,
was a Zoot suiter in Los Angeles and San Diego
during World War II
and I wrote about him for a class paper.
My second book is called "Chicanx Utopias."
It tells stories of how Chicanx and Latinx folks
have dreamed of a better world
and found ways to build that world
through music, film, and art.
These are the questions that I first started asking
back when I was a student at UCSD.
Now I'm the one who teaches classes on Chicanx history,
the border,
oral history with Latinx communities in San Diego, and more,
and I would love to see many of you on campus
and in my classes.
And this I'd like to think circles back to where I started
my family's roots in Lemon Grove,
my own history at UC San Diego
and the amazing opportunities we all have
to make more history together.
I didn't know what my future held
when I first came to UC San Diego
and neither may you,
but I do know it was a life-changing ride
because of the professors I met,
the classes I took, everything that I learned
and all that I experienced.
So, as you chart your own course for the future,
I hope it brings you to UC San Diego
and I look forward to meeting you.
(gentle upbeat music)