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Can you imagine what it was like to stand up for what you believed was right? To be taught that your people were important enough to be taught? Can you imagine men with badges and guns and tear gas ready to hurt you? To be beaten with batons, to starve yourself so that maybe the university will sit down and listen to you? Can you imagine that you fought so hard to be seen in the history of these United States only to have your children and grandchildren stripped of that knowledge?
You are lucky enough to be in this college, don’t rock the boat. Just keep your head down, go to class, and get your degree. It doesn’t matter that your people are being shot down in the streets, too poor to buy new shoes, or too scared to walk on the same sidewalk as a white man.
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Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies programs are unique in American higher education in one undeniable way: they are the only academic disciplines whose very existence was extracted through sacrifice. These programs were not invited into the academy. They were demanded into it, and the demanding came at a cost measured in arrests, hunger strikes, and blood.
It is long past time for universities and policymakers to reckon with that history, and with the continuing failure to fund what communities bled to build.
Born of Struggle, Not Invitation
The founding of Centers for Mexican American Studies across the nation is not a footnote in higher education history. It is a chronicle of sustained resistance against institutions that consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the discipline until students and communities forced their hand.
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It began in 1968. Throughout the country, racial justice and student activism were front and center, leading to a cascade of activism for ethnic studies programs, including Chicano studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, and American Indian studies. Building from this work, Chicana/o/x activists came together at the University of California, Santa Barbara and published El Plan de Santa Barbara, a document that united diverse activists from around the state and laid out a roadmap for Chicana/Chicano studies (Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, 1969). In response, UCSB created the first Chicano Studies Department in the UC system in 1970. California State University, Los Angeles had established a Mexican American studies program two years earlier, in 1968.
At California State University, Northridge, the price was higher. From 1967 to 1971, Los Angeles police arrested 400 students and faculty members across six major demonstrations. Eventually chaos ensued, fights erupted, and arrests were made, yet this didn’t stop students from being heard. The following morning, 2,000 students gathered in front of the Administration Building, causing the university president to declare a state of emergency. The activism ultimately established the creation of both the Afro-American and Chicano Studies departments (Acuña, 2011).
Perhaps the most dramatic confrontation came at UCLA. UCLA first established an interdisciplinary Chicano studies program in 1973. But the retrenchment in California’s social and budget policies during the 1980s and the recession of the early 1990s took a toll. By 1989, funding had dwindled significantly, and UCLA suspended new admissions to the program. On April 28, 1993, the chancellor announced the program would not receive departmental status. What followed was a sit-in, mass arrests, and ultimately a hunger strike.
On May 25, a small group declared a water-only fast. A village of tents sprang up outside Murphy Hall. Four days in, one protestor collapsed requiring medical attention. The group persevered, and on June 7, more than 400 students, faculty, and community supporters celebrated the creation of the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies. The strike drew the support of state senators, state representatives, city officials, and the Mothers of East L.A., resulting in one of the largest student and community mobilizations in UCLA’s history. Even then, full departmental status was not granted until 2005 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 1993; UCLA Newsroom, 2021).
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| source: UCLA Magazine |
In Arizona, a thriving program was simply legislated out of existence. The Tucson school district’s Mexican American studies program grew to 48 course offerings and became the largest ethnic studies program in any school district in the nation, directly increasing graduation rates and grades across all classes (Cabrera et al., 2014). In 2010, state lawmakers passed a law that dismantled the program and banned a range of related books from classes statewide.
The pattern is consistent across decades and geography: communities bleed to establish these programs, and institutions continuously find ways to cut, consolidate, or erase them.
Community Anchors Running on Empty
These Centers are not simply academic units; they are community infrastructure, and they function as such every single day. The Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin was intended toconnect students to the Austin community through outreach and public events, building on its legacy of collective action. At UT Arlington, CMAS was established by the Texas Legislature as the university's focal point for interdisciplinary education, research, publication, and public outreach relating to Mexican Americans, and serves as a bridge between UTA and the Latino community in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
Before it was shut down, Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, CMAS collaborated with faculty, student affiliates, and community organizations to produce events, training, and programs that promote a deeper understanding of Mexican American culture and supported the K-12 to higher education pipeline and first-generation college student success. The University of Arizona's MAS department works collaboratively with community organizations to address issues and produce knowledge benefiting historically marginalized communities, and engages public policy on criminal justice, immigration, and systemic inequity.
These Centers do more community work per dollar than nearly any other academic unit on campus. Yet they have operated for decades on the edge of survival.
A UT Austin graduate described his undergraduate experience as "frustrating," noting that there "seemed to be such battles for funding for the Center for Mexican American Studies, and that was disillusioning." That battle never ended. In early 2026, UT Austin announced the consolidation of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, along with African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies, into a single new department. "It's important to realize that in joining these communities together, especially by force, you're creating a system in which they have to fight, sometimes with each other, for funding, and that is ridiculous and unfair," said one scholar at the national rally held in protest on UT's own campus. At the University of North Texas, facing a $45 million budget shortfall, the university cut its Mexican American Studies minor, along with Africana Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Asian Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.
The fallback position of college and university administrations has always been the same: Chicano/a Studies simply isn't needed, and there is simply no funding. It has been a struggle and a test of wills for Chicano/a Studies to survive.
The Students Are There. The Resources Are Not.
What makes this institutional abandonment most indefensible is that student demand is not in question. The data are unambiguous.
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Research shows that Ethnic Studies coursework benefits students through better school attendance, higher standardized test scores, higher GPAs, higher graduation rates, and even a reduction in interpersonal prejudice. A peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that assignment to Ethnic Studies substantially increased high school graduation, attendance, and the probability of enrolling in college (Dee & Penner, 2017). A longitudinal University of Michigan study involving 459 ninth-grade students, the majority Mexican or Mexican American, attending high-poverty schools, found that students enrolled in Ethnic Studies experience significant growth in critical reflection, which is linked to academic success, civic engagement, improved well-being, and support for equity-promoting policies (Cabrera et al., 2014).
In Texas, a 2024 youth-led research project found that students not enrolled in MAS courses wanted to learn more and enroll, but because school districts aren’t required to offer them, students may miss out on all the benefits (Valenzuela, 2023). In El Paso, only five schools across the two largest districts offer MAS, and teachers are sounding alarms that students are being cut off from their own history. Surveys of schools offering the MAS course found that a significant number could not run the class because no teacher could be found to teach it, or because students didn’t enroll due to lack of awareness or scheduling conflicts. Educators piece together curriculum without textbooks, relying on crowdsourced materials and digital resources.
Meanwhile, the majority of Mexican American and Ethnic Studies programs, most established after the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, are dramatically underfunded and understaffed, with many having one or no core tenure-track faculty. Nationally, only 5% of four-year institutions offer an Ethnic Studies major, figures researchers have called alarming given decades of Latino enrollment growth and demographic change across the Southwest.
A Choice, Not a Coincidence
Centers for Mexican American Studies were built on sacrifice: walkouts, riots, arrests, hunger strikes, and decades of community organizing. They were won fight by fight, campus by campus. Today they serve as the connective tissue between universities and the communities that bled to create them, preserving oral histories, training educators, conducting policy research, mentoring first-generation students, and anchoring cultural identity for millions of Americans.
The question is not whether students want this education. They do, and the research proves it. The question is not whether these Centers serve communities. They do, visibly and measurably. The question is whether the institutions entrusted with public education will finally make the choice to fund what has always been funded last, if at all.
Fifty years of hunger strikes, arrests, and advocacy should be enough to earn more than a footnote in a budget that gets cut the moment the economy tightens. The discipline that required the most sacrifice to establish has received the least institutional investment to sustain.
The Pattern Repeats: What Is Happening at UC Berkeley
The story of Ethnic Studies under siege is not only a Texas story or a historical one. It is unfolding right now on one of the most storied campuses in the country. In September 2025, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons disclosed the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration as part of a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus, without notifying those affected until weeks after the disclosure had already occurred. Among those named was renowned Jewish feminist scholar Judith Butler, whose family lost members in the Holocaust. As Dr. César A. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a first-year student there, has written: the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement chose federal favor over the safety of its own community (Cruz, 2026).
That same year, Berkeley indefinitely closed the Multicultural Community Center, a student-built, student-run hub of multiracial organizing located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, won by students in 1999 after a hunger strike. When the administration eventually announced it would reopen the center, political art reflecting the movements that created it had been stripped from the walls. Administrators justified the erasure by saying they wanted to make the space “more welcoming,” using the same language used to neutralize Ethnic Studies programs across the country. As doctoral student Sarah Halabe noted plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students” (Cruz, 2026).
Then, in April 2026, Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies department announced it would not renew two lecturer positions for the coming academic year, citing “financial deficits,” eliminating ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department. Lecturer Diana Negrín discovered her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself; neither the department nor the dean’s office had told her. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, put it starkly: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department” (Cruz, 2026). Meanwhile, construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex on campus unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person, on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. The university had funding for a five-court sand facility, but not for the lecturers who teach the history of the very communities whose bones were found in the ground beneath it.
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| Source: Department of Mexican American and Latino Studies |
Berkeley is not an outlier. It is a mirror. What is happening there: the disclosure of student names to federal investigators, the gutting of a student-won multicultural center, the defunding of Ethnic Studies under cover of budget language. It is the same pattern this op-ed traces across decades of Texas and national history.
The tactics change; the goal does not. Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed” (Cruz, 2026). That sentence could have been spoken by a lecturer at UT Austin, Cal State Northridge, or UCLA in any decade since 1968. When the institutions that claim to champion free inquiry are the first to comply with repression, it is community, not administration, that must hold the line.
That is not a coincidence. It is a policy. And it is one we have the power to change.
References
Cruz, César A. “What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back.” Medium.com, May 1, 2026. Republished by Angela Valenzuela, Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, May 5, 2026. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/05/what-cal-is-this-year-of-repression-at.html
Dr. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a UC Berkeley first-year student, chronicles a pattern of institutional capitulation at UC Berkeley during the 2025–26 academic year: the university’s disclosure of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to federal investigators; the indefinite closure and subsequent depoliticization of the student-built Multicultural Community Center; the nonrenewal of two Ethnic Studies lecturers citing budget deficits; and the discovery of Ohlone ancestral remains beneath a construction site for a new beach volleyball facility. Cruz frames these events as interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. The essay calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to organize collectively in defense of Ethnic Studies and the democratic mission of public higher education. Published on the blog of Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Professor of Education at UT Austin and a leading scholar of Mexican American education and equity policy.
Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. La Causa Publications, 1969.
Dee, Thomas S., and Emily K. Penner. "The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum." American Educational Research Journal 54.1 (2017): 127-166 [pdf].
Cabrera, Nolan L., Jeffrey F. Milem, Oiyan Pong, and Ronald W. Marx. “Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson.” American Educational Research Journal 51, no. 6 (2014): 1084–1118. (University of Michigan longitudinal study referenced in op-ed.)
Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. State University of New York Press, 1999.
Valenzuela, Angela. “Struggles For/With/Through Ethnic Studies in Texas: Third Spaces as Anchors for Collective Action.” Teachers College Record 125, no. 3 (2023). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01614681231181793
Acuña, Rodolfo. The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe. Rutgers University Press, 2011. (Source for CSUN founding history and 1967–1971 campus activism.)
UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Hunger Strike for Chicano Studies Department Collection, 1993. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0b69p9s1
UCLA Newsroom. “Hail to the Hills: Starving for Justice.” UCLA Magazine, March 28, 2021. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/hunger-strike-chicana-chicano-studies
University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “About: History of MALS.” Liberal Arts, UT Austin, 2024. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/about/
