Stanford CCSRE 25th Anniversary Commemorative Book

CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE & ETHNICITY

25TH ANNIVERSARY 1996-2021 STANFORD UNIVERSITY

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CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE & ETHNICITY 25TH ANNIVERSARY STANFORD UNIVERSITY

PREFACE This commemorative book celebrates 25 years of history at the Center.

CCSRE graduate fellow and doctoral student in history, Calvin Cheung-Miaw wrote the text with care. He interviewed numerous students, faculty members, alums and others that played integral roles in the development of CCSRE. He examined dozens of sources in newspapers, newsletters and photo archives to produce this version of CCSRE’s history. We hope that it succeeds in capturing our mission which is to produce interdisciplinary education, research and community engagement with the goal of achieving racial equity. The extremely talented Michi Turner, who has designed our last three annual reports, designed the book. I am grateful to everyone whose input is reflected here and want to give special thanks to Calvin, Michi and our current Executive Director, Daniel Murray for their superb work. While this is not a definitive history of CCSRE, the book reflects some of the struggles and successes that we have had since our founding in 1996.

It has been an honor to be part of the CCSRE community for the last decade since I was recruited as an FDI faculty to be a Professor in Theater and Performance Studies as well as AAAS. It has been an even greater privilege to have served as CCSRE’s Faculty Director for the last five years. My hope is that this document will ensure that our collective history survives for decades into the future and that the students, staff, board members and faculty who comprise our community will continue to thrive as they work to transform the racial landscape for the better.

Please enjoy learning more about the Center in the pages that follow!

Jennifer DeVere Brody Professor of Theater and Performance Studies Faculty Director, Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity Stanford University Muwekma Ohlone homelands

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

FOUNDING CCSRE

Section One: The 1994 Hunger Strike

Section Two: Converging Struggles for Ethnic Studies Section Three: Envisioning a New Ethnic Studies

Section Four: Forging an Institution

2 UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCES

Section One: Finding a Place at Stanford Section Two: The Classroom ...

Section Three: ... And the Community Section Four: The Undergraduate Programs

3 TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE

Section One: The Faculty Section Two: Cultivating Interdisciplinarity

4 MAKING AN IMPACT

Section One: Community Engagement Section Two: The Advisory Board Section Three: Redefining Leadership

CCSRE TIMELINE

9 10 15 19 24

33 34 38 40 43

53 54 58

67 68 71 75

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Caption here:

FOUNDING CCSRE

FOUNDING CCSRE SECTION ONE: THE 1994 HUNGER STRIKE May 4, 1994. The sky was darkening over sophomore Elvira Prieto as she sat in Stanford’s Main Quad. Elvira, who had worked with her parents in the fields and food packing sheds of San Joaquin Valley until coming to Stanford, was on hunger strike along with three other members of MEChA: seniors Eva Silva and Julia Gonzalez Luna, and junior Tamara Alvarado. The four were joined by a handful of activists who had planned the hunger strike with them. Together, they had set up tents in the Quad with the help of some friends who were majoring in Engineering. Tamara had made sure to bring the blanket she had kept since she was eleven years old, while Elvira kept warm beneath a sarape blanket and a sleeping bag – a hand-medown from the family whose house Elvira cleaned as a teenager, and which her mother had mended by hand. Earlier in the day, when the hunger strike was launched, the Quad had been full of supporters,

holding banners demanding that Stanford respect the Chicano/a community. But soon the crowds departed, leaving the small group of activists to itself amidst the Quad’s grand archways and tile roofs, as evening settled over campus.1 Then they saw more students coming in from across the quad, marching towards them. Students from Ujamaa, where Elvira had lived the year before. Stomping and chanting, the marchers brought with them water for the hunger strikers, plus their own sleeping bags and blankets. They were going to spend the night. Over the next three days, more supporters joined: from the Native American community, which was gathering in preparation for the upcoming Powwow, from the Asian American community, from the Women’s Center collective, and others.2

1. A fifth member of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlán (MEChA), Felipe Barragan, participated in the hunger strike through the full three days but was not in the quad that evening. Elvira Prieto, interview with author, January 28, 2021; Andy Dworkin, “Chicano students protest, begin fast,” Stanford Daily, May 5, 1994; Linda Friedlieb, “Empty Stomachs, Brimming Hearts” Stanford Daily, May 6, 1994. Racial and ethnic categories are contested, and patterns of usage change over time. I generally use Chicanx in this and subsequent sections, though I use “Chicana/o Studies” to name the program that student activists demanded.

2. Prieto, interview with author.

Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

Hunger Strikers

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The hunger strike was an assertion of dignity amidst a climate of racism.

The three-day hunger strike, and the support it galvanized among Stanford’s students and faculty, would lead to the founding of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. This would be the lasting legacy of the MEChistas and their supporters. The strike itself, however, had a broader set of demands: the re-hiring of the highest ranking Chicana administrator at Stanford, Cecilia Burciaga; the establishment of a Chicana/o Studies department; a university-wide boycott of grapes, in support of the United Farm Workers; and the establishment of a community center in East Palo Alto.

The hunger strike was an assertion of dignity amidst a climate of racism. In the mid-1990s,

Cecelia Burciagas

Photo: Los Angeles Times

Hunger Strikers

California politics was dominated by anti-immigrant sentiment. In 1993, Republican Governor Pete Wilson signed legislation making undocumented immigrants ineligible to receive drivers’ licenses.

The following year, California voters approved Proposition 187, which deprived undocumented immigrants of access to public schools and other crucial services. All of this affected the Stanford community as well. On May 1st, 1994, students attending Flicks, a student-run film program, started chanting “Go home, beaners!” [sic] when a documentary about farmworkers screened ahead of the main feature.

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FOUNDING CCSRE The immediate “spark,” for the hunger strike, as one spokesperson for the strikers put it, was the university’s laying off of Cecilia Burciaga. The Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and a constant presence at Casa Zapata, Stanford’s Chicanx-Latinx themed dormitory, where she and her husband Antonio were Resident Fellows. Cecilia Burciaga was a mentor to many Chicanx students struggling to find their place in the Stanford community. Her termination, the fallout of university budget-cutting, struck a nerve.3 The Stanford hunger strike occurred in the midst of a wave of similar actions at other college campuses, such as UCLA, UCSB, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Some of the Stanford strikers’ demands were likely inspired by these other hunger strikes. The Santa Barbara students had demanded, for instance, that UCSB fund a local community center and honor the UFW grapes boycott. Still, the demands had local and personal resonance. As Elvira Prieto later recalled, the idea of establishing a community center in East Palo Alto arose from the feeling that Stanford ought “to create opportunities for the children and for the folks in our community, to have a pathway to higher education or to have a pathway to the resources and the wealth that’s here on this campus.”4 Taken together, the strikers’ demands put forward a vision of the university as an institution responsive to the kinds of communities the hunger strikers grew up in, communities grappling with the

President Gerhard Casper and Provost Condoleezza Rice at the 1994 hunger strike. Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

issues of “poverty, unemployment, homelessness,” under-resourced schools, systemic racism, and mass incarceration. The demand for university support for Chicana/o Studies was central to this vision, because it was a demand for a curriculum that would address these issues head on. In this regard, the hunger strike was part of a much longer tradition of student activism going back to the Third World Strike at San Francisco State University, which linked the struggle for ethnic studies with an attempt to transform the nature of the university itself.5 The very act of launching a hunger strike also embodied a second vision of the university, as an institution in which students had a role in making the decisions that governed their lives and educational paths. After Cecilia Burciaga had been laid off in March, students marched to President Gerhard Casper’s office to voice their objection to the decision, and to request university support for Asian American Studies and Native American Studies. Following their protest, students met with Provost Condoleezza Rice to discuss their concerns.

3. Beth Berselli, “A Long history of frustration motivates students to strike,” Stanford Daily, May 5, 1994; “Interviews with five striking Chicana/o students after three days into hunger strike,” Stanford Digital 4. C.J. Conklin, “Hunger Strike Ends, Protesters are Satiated,” Daily Nexus, May 9, 1994. Prieto, interview with author.

5. Dworkin, “Chicano students protest, begin fast”; “Interviews with five striking Chicana/o students.”

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Photo:

Sadly, the meeting with Rice, and other meetings with the administrators, did not yield results. “There seemed to be this idea about hierarchy here that [decision-making] was from the top down,” Prieto told an interviewer during the hunger strike. “We’ve tried their methods of working things out, and their methods are to draw things out as long as possible in order to not give us things,” Alvarado added.6 It was this aspect of the hunger strike, which insisted on student power within the university, that was most contentious for the Administration.

Intense negotiations between the President, Provost and student representatives lasted three days during which students came to believe they could achieve their goals through the establishment of faculty-led committees. At 8 p.m. on Friday, May 6th members

of MEChA voted to end the hunger strike. 7 Over the three days, students successfully brought these issues of deep concern to the top of the university administration’s agenda. In doing so, they activated a much broader community in support of a new vision for the university. At the same time, the administration had convinced the students to pursue their aims through faculty-led committees. Ultimately, this produced mixed results.

The idea of a community center in East Palo Alto would languish and then fade. The committee charged with determining a university policy on the grapes boycott, which recommended that each dining hall receive education on the issue and then vote on whether to serve grapes, would also disappoint the student activists.8

6. “Interviews with five striking Chicana/o students.”

7. Dworkin, “Chicano students protest, begin fast”; Sarah Katz, “Strike ends after three days, agreement reached,” Stanford Daily, May 9, 1994.

8. Prieto, interview with author; Christopher Clarke, interview with author, January 8, 2021.

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FOUNDING CCSRE By contrast, the students’ demand for Chicana/o Studies, and the committees established to consider their demand, mobilised an extant core of faculty who had great enthusiasm for ethnic studies. Although these faculty were studying different racial and ethnic groups and worked in different disciplines, they had begun to interact with each other through an interdisciplinary faculty seminar on comparative studies in race and ethnicity coordinated by historians Al Camarillo and George Fredrickson.

Al Camarillo was the first historian in the United States trained in Chicana/o history. He had arrived at Stanford in 1975. He and Fredrickson won a funding opportunity provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to initiate a two-year seminar on comparative ethnic studies. The seminar proved crucial in building an intellectual community among faculty committed to ethnic studies. When psychologist Hazel Markus came to Stanford from the University of Michigan in 1994, she found little interest in ethnic studies among the Stanford psychology faculty. “When we started to have the seminar,” Markus later recalled, “I saw people from all over the university, in the arts and humanities, and even some people from engineering.”9 Faculty like Camarillo worked with students

Al Camarillo (right), Jeffrey Kossef (left), Pat Jones (center). Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

The legacy of the hunger strike for future generations of students would be the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, CCSRE. to realize the vision of Chicana/o Studies that animated the 1994 hunger strikers. As that vision took concrete shape, it was revised into a new version of ethnic studies program that encompassed Asian American Studies and Native American Studies, with strong links to Stanford’s existing African and Afro-American Studies (the AAAS undergraduate major was administered by CSRE for a time) and later Jewish Studies programs. The program would be distinct from the kinds of ethnic studies programs that already existed at other universities. The legacy of the hunger strike for future generations of students would be the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, CCSRE.

9. Albert Camarillo, interview with author, December 15, 2020; Hazel Markus, interview with author, December 16, 2020.

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SECTION TWO: CONVERGING STRUGGLES FOR ETHNIC STUDIES The Faculty Senate meeting on May 12, 1994 began promptly at 3:16 p.m. John Shoven, Dean of Humanities and Sciences, informed the faculty that he would be assembling a committee to consider the future of Asian American Studies at Stanford, along the same lines as the committee on Chicana/o Studies created in response to the hunger strike.

President Casper, speaking next, opted to skip his regular report to the Senate and instead take questions from the faculty. At that point, one of the students sitting in on the senate meeting rose to address the president. The student was senior Patty Tsai, a member of the Concerned Students for Asian American Studies (CSAAS). A week earlier, as the hunger strike stretched into its third day, CSAAS had sent a letter to Casper and Rice expressing support for the hunger strikers’ demands and also listing a series of steps they urged the university to

take in order to strengthen Asian American Studies, including the formation of a committee as a step towards establishing a major. Though Shoven had agreed to create the committee and had scheduled a meeting in late May with the students, CSAAS members were anxious. The end of the school year was fast approaching, and they worried the summer break would diminish the momentum they had coming out of the hunger strike. They wanted to place a resolution on the agenda for the next Faculty Senate meeting, May 19th, to formalize faculty support for Asian American Studies.10 “We, the students, feel that we should have a voice in the direction of the committee,” Tsai began, before asking that the resolution be placed on the May 19th agenda. Senate Chair Pat Jones began pounding her gavel in an attempt to stop Tsai from speaking, but the student pressed on, announcing that CSAAS had gathered 700 signatures on a petition supporting Asian American Studies and asking again if their resolution would be considered

Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

Protest for Asian American Studies

10. Minutes of the Twenty-Sixth Senate of the Academic Council, May 12, 1994, Stanford University; Colleen Krueger, “Asian-American Studies Protest Disrupts FacSen,” Stanford Daily, May 13, 1994.

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FOUNDING CCSRE

Photo: Chuck Painter, Stanford News Service

at Stanford. Four days after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination In 1968, members of the Black Student Union “took the mic” during a university-wide convocation and issued ten demands relating to the at the next meeting. The faculty immediately needs of Black students on campus. In the following adjourned at 3:35, ending the senate meeting less years leading up to the hunger strike, students had than 20 minutes after it had begun.11 pushed for increased admissions of students of color, Though the students’ action proved controversial helped establish the African and Afro-American among Stanford’s faculty, their bold push for Studies and Chicano Fellows programs, replaced a university commitment to Asian American the Western Culture first-year requirement with a Studies demonstrated how the hunger strike had more inclusive curriculum, taught themselves Asian reinvigorated other struggles for ethnic studies at American Studies and Native American Studies in Stanford. The hunger strike, as well as the campaign student-led courses, banished the Stanford Indian for Asian American Studies, energized the movement mascot, fought for community centers and ethnic for Native American Studies. When students theme housing, and challenged inadequate university returned to campus in the fall quarter, residents of responses to racist incidents on campus.13 Muwekma-Tah-Ruk, Stanford’s Native American At crucial junctures, these activist efforts themed dormitory, initiated a weekly seminar converged. In the mid-1980s the Black Student to research the field of Native American Studies.

Union, Stanford American Indian Organization, Students in the seminar organized themselves into Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, and committees that would “investigate how to integrate Asian American Student Association (known such a program into Stanford’s curriculum.”12 collectively as The Big Four) worked with other The struggles for Chicana/o, Asian American, and progressive student groups to formulate the People’s Native American Studies were, like African and AfroPlatform, which called for ethnic studies at Stanford.

American Studies, all part of longer activist traditions In 1987, these organizations put forward a Rainbow Agenda – inspired by Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition “Take Back the Mic,” 1968 – that demanded the creation of a Vice Provost position responsible for addressing issues of minority students; resources for minority recruitment and the creation of a summer bridge program for incoming students; adequate space for the Asian American Activities Center and a corresponding Assistant Dean position, a university boycott of grapes and divestment 11. Ibid.

12. Jamie Taylor, “Native American Studies on the Horizon?” Stanford Daily, October 25, 1994.

13. Steven C. Phillips, Justice and Hope: Past Reflections and Future Visions of Stanford’s Black Student Union, 1967-1989 (Stanford: Stanford Black Student Union, 1990); Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program, “Early Chicano/Latino History at Stanford: A Faculty Perspective” (Stanford: Stanford University, 2020), at: https://purl.stanford.edu/fg886jq1728; Albert Camarillo, interview with author, December 15, 2020; Gordon H. Chang, interview with author, December 8, 2020; Gina Hernandez-Clarke, interview with author, December 10, 2020; Memorandum and petition presented to ombudsman of Stanford University, February 3, 1972, at: https://purl.stanford.edu/cf880vb2104; Leah Halper, “Chicanos want ‘cultural center’,” Stanford Daily, January 25, 1979; Asian American Studies Committee, “Asian American Studies at Stanford,” Fall 1994, copy in author’s possession (courtesy of Leslie Hatamiya).

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Left: Jesse Jackson and students, inspired by the Rainbow Coalition, protest Western Culture program, 1987. Above: Protest against Western Civilization requirement, 1988.

from South Africa, and formal statement from the university president opposing efforts to revive the Indian mascot. In response to student organizing around the Rainbow Agenda, the administration created the University Committee on Minority Issues (UCMI), which extensively surveyed students, faculty, and staff about their experiences at Stanford.

The UCMI issued its report in March 1989, and among its many recommendations were several steps the university could take towards creating a more robust ethnic studies curriculum, including the hiring of twenty additional faculty of color over the next decade.14 The confluence of student struggles found its most dramatic expression during the 1989 takeover

of President Donald Kennedy’s office, which was coordinated by a council of ten students that included representatives from the Big Four organizations. On May 15, 1989, at 7:40 a.m., student activists opened the windows to Building 10 and began climbing into the President’s office. Within minutes, over sixty students had entered. Using the ropes, chains, and wooden two-by-fours they brought with them, the students barricaded the entrances. The students wanted a meeting with President Kennedy to discuss their list of far-reaching demands, which included: the initiation of a faculty search for a chair of the under-resourced African and Afro-American Studies program; the hiring of a new admissions officer through a process that would include representatives of the Black Student Union; the hiring of an Asian American history professor – popularly referred to as the demand for “just one Asian American Studies professor” at Stanford; the creation of a fulltime Dean’s position for El Centro Chicano; and a university commitment to hiring more faculty of color in line with the UCMI recommendations.15

14. Phillips, Justice and Hope; Hernandez-Clark, interview with author; “Final Report of the University Committee on Minority Issues” (Stanford: Stanford University, March 1989), at: https://purl.stanford.edu/mr264tp3283 15. Hernandez-Clarke, interview with author; Baldwin Lee, “Students seize Kennedy’s office, 55 arrested,” Stanford Daily, May 16, 1989.

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FOUNDING CCSRE The university administration reacted swiftly. By the end of the day, 55 students, including several supporters outside the building, were arrested.

After a public campaign to defend the student organizers – and the intercession of sympathetic administrators – Stanford decided not to charge them with violating Stanford’s Fundamental Standard. Those students who were arrested on charges related to the takeover were sentenced to community service.16 The takeover of President Kennedy’s office changed the university in profound ways. Black Student Union (BSU) member Steven Phillips described it as “a watershed moment in Stanford history.” President Kennedy hosted a series of

meetings with student representatives in the final weeks of the spring quarter. In the next year, the university would launch a search for an Asian American Studies professor, move the El Centro Dean’s position to full-time, and include BSU representatives in the search for a new admissions officer.

Just as significant, however, was the spirit of multiracial solidarity that the takeover nurtured.

The orientation towards collaboration remained an important part of the activist cultures of the Big Four organizations, and imparted to new students as they rose into leadership within those organizations.

Thus, when Asian American and Native American students seized the opportunity created by the hunger strike to advance their own struggles for ethnic studies, their efforts were welcomed rather than resented. “We tried really hard to hold each other up and hold each other together,” Elvira Prieto

From left: Cheryl Taylor, Gina Hernandez-Clarke, Richard Siu, 1989

16. Phillips, Justice and Hope; **John Wagner, “Student groups join forces to pull off protest, occupancy, “ Stanford Daily, May 16, 1989.

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Student groups join forces for the 1989 Takeover

later recalled. “And we also were very cognizant, as Chicanas and Chicanos, that we were inspired by our Black brothers and sisters who had been fighting much longer.” The converging struggles of ethnic studies, sparked by the hunger strike, would be the basis of the broad vision that anchored CCSRE.17

SECTION THREE: ENVISIONING A NEW ETHNIC STUDIES: THE CHICANO STUDIES AND ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES COMMITTEES Looking back on the creation of CCSRE, Al Camarillo recalled that students declared “in no uncertain terms” their desire for separate Chicana/o Studies, Asian American Studies, and Native American Studies programs or departments. This fit with how ethnic studies had been implemented at other universities. Some had stand-alone, administratively separate ethnic-specific programs or departments. Other universities had an umbrella ethnic studies department with ethnic-specific programs within it. In most cases, the department 17. Phillips, Justice and Hope, 56; Clarke, interview with author; Prieto, interview with author.

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FOUNDING CCSRE did not stress comparative approaches and the individual programs within the department functioned autonomously. In one instance, at the University of California at San Diego, the ethnic studies department took a comparative approach but did not have individual ethnic-specific programs. There were also universities that housed their ethnic studies curriculum entirely within a larger American Studies program, and for Asian American Studies there was an additional possible form: departments that combined Asian Studies and Asian American Studies.18 The Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, however, would offer a model for ethnic studies that was different from all of these.

CSRE housed distinct, ethnic-specific programs in Asian American Studies, Chicana/o Studies

(later Chicanx and Latinx Studies), and Native American Studies, but it emphasized a comparative approach through a core curriculum that brought students in each of these programs together. In addition, it offered a Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity major that allowed students to take a comparative approach to all of their studies. Finally, CSRE aspired to study race and ethnicity in its international as well as U.S.-specific dimensions.

CSRE incorporated the demands of student activists and built upon momentum among faculty who had an interest in comparative ethnic studies.

As early as May 12th, 1994, less than a week after the hunger strike had concluded, Dean John Shoven described Al Camarillo as having “a pet idea” to make ethnic studies at Stanford a comparative program.

Camarillo’s idea found a receptive audience among faculty members who had attended the Mellon faculty seminars on race and ethnicity that he and George Fredrickson had co-sponsored.19

Photo: Chuck Painter, Stanford News Service

Arrest at 1989 Takeover

18. Camarillo, interview with author; Leslie Hatamiya, “Asian American Studies Programs at Other Colleges,” Fall 1994, copy in author’s possession (courtesy of Leslie Hatamiya).

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The impetus for a new kind of ethnic studies program emerged from the work of the committees set up in the spring quarter of 1994 to deliberate about the establishment of Chicano Studies and Asian American Studies at Stanford.

Political scientist Daniel Okimoto chaired the Asian American Studies search committee.

Okimoto, who had been born in 1942 at the Santa Anita racetrack during the internment of Japanese Americans, did not have a background in Asian American Studies, but he was generally sympathetic to ethnic studies. Okimoto, in turn, brought on a recent Stanford graduate, Leslie Hatamiya, who was returning to Stanford for law school. Hatamiya was put in charge of researching the state of Asian American Studies programs at other colleges and universities. Okimoto and Hatamiya were joined on the committee by professors David Abernethy, David Brady, Gordon Chang, Harry Elam, Van Harvey, Ramón Saldívar, Sylvia Yanagisako, and Ellen Woods, as well as undergraduate Jerry Chen and graduate student Lok Siu.20 Hatamiya, assisted by Chen, surveyed 16 Asian American Studies programs structured in a variety of different ways. In her research summary, Hatamiya noted that professors she spoke with had encouraged Stanford’s committee to develop a structure tailored to the university’s unique institutional environment and resources. Hatamiya’s report contained two other important research findings. First, she wrote, “it is clear that the field of ethnic studies in general is becoming more comparative [...] and less groupspecific. Moreover, the field is becoming more transnational and transcultural.” Second, a number of scholars Hatamiya spoke with recommended, as their ideal, a program with a “race, gender, and cultural studies model” that grouped together ethnic studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies programs and balanced the autonomy of an Asian American Studies program against an emphasis on comparative approaches.21 19. Minutes of the Twenty-Sixth Senate of the Academic Council, May 12, 1994, Stanford University; Camarillo, interview with author.

20. Daniel Okimoto, interview with author, December 10, 2020; Asian American Studies Committee, “Asian American Studies Committee Report,” November 28, 1994, copy in author’s possession (courtesy of Leslie Hatamiya).

21. Hatamiya, “Asian American Studies Programs at Other Colleges”

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FOUNDING CCSRE The committee agreed that Asian American Studies should be part of a larger interdisciplinary program with a comparative focus but there was disagreement over the nature of that larger program. One professor argued that the most appropriate home was American Studies, while most of the committee argued for placing Asian American Studies “in what might be called Comparative Ethnicity and Race. [...] What makes this IDP intellectually exciting is its explicitly comparative, cross-national focus on the intersection of migration, ethnicity, race, gender, identity, diversity, conflict, socio-economic stratification, political exclusion and inclusion.”22 The Chicano Studies committee report argued forcefully for a break with both the existing ethnic studies and American Studies models. Ramón Saldívar, then the Dean of Undergraduate Studies for the School of Humanities and Science, served as the committee chair. Saldívar was joined by professors Lucius Barker, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, George Fredrickson, Renato Rosaldo, and Guadalupe Valdés, students Irene Lara, Stephen Pitti, and Lubia Sanchez, as well as Final Report of the Chicano Studies Committee to the Dean of the School of Humanities and Science November 23, 1994 Contents I. Proposed Structure for a Program in Chicano Studies: Comparative Studies in Race, Gender & Culture A. The Objects of Inquiry of Comparative Studies in Race, Gender & Culture 2 B. The Structure of Comparative Studies in Race, Gender & Culture 1. The Chicana & Chicano Studies Major in I. Proposed Structure forComparative a Program in Chicano Studies: Studies in Race, Gender & Culture Comparative Studies in Race, Gender & Culture 2. The Chicana & Chicano Studies Minor in Comparative Studies in Race, Gender & Culture C. Committee The Spanish Language Proficiency recommends Development The Chicano Studies unanimously the creation of a Chicana Option and Chicano Studies andand minor Stanford University under the administrative D. major A Rationale Vision at of Chicano Studies in a Comparative Context program at Stanford University structure of a broadly comparative to be designated Comparative Studies in II. Linking Chicano Studies to Community-Based Learning Projects Race, Gender & Culture.

III. The Relationship of Chicano Studies to other Programs at Stanford University IV. deliberations, Committee on Chicano From its earliest the Performing Chicano Arts Studies Committee decided that if it were to V. Conclusion recommend the establishment of a formal program of study in Chicano Studies, the VI. Summary of Recommendations

recommended program should not simply duplicate existing programs. Rather, the Committee feltAPPENDICES that any prospective Chicano Studies program at Stanford University should be visionary, innovative, andoftrend-setting, APPENDIX I. A Brief History Chicano Studies capable ideally of leading the Twenty-five years of Chicano Studies development of theA.field into the next decade.

B. A History of Chicano Studies at Stanford: Teaching of Chicana and Chicano- Related Courses

Stanford Center for Chicano Research staff person Charlene Aguilar. Alicia Schmidt-Camacho and Pam Mosher provided research support. Reflecting on the committee’s work years later, Saldívar noted, “very quickly, we realized [...] that the old model, the existing model of siloed, individual, separate ethnic studies programs, was perfectly reasonable and good, but not innovative anymore.” The committee’s feeling was that proposing a cutting-edge model of ethnic studies would not just have intrinsic merit, but would also be more likely to garner faculty support. As the first sentence of the committee’s report to Dean Shoven declared, “The Chicano Studies Committee unanimously recommends the creation of a Chicana and Chicano Studies major and minor at Stanford University under the administrative structure of a broadly comparative program to be designated Comparative Studies in Race, Gender & Culture.”23 In justifying its proposal, the committee argued that American Studies tended to be bound by the disciplines of history and literature, whereas an equal emphasis on social sciences and the humanities was warranted.

The Committee also criticized the model of an Ethnic Studies department or program that merely grouped together autonomous, ethnic-specific units without an overarching comparative framework were “prone to fall back into distinct elements that remained loosely assembled administratively and that lacked a guiding sense of common purpose.” The report continued, “Ethnic Studies has not often been successful in delineating a core around which the separate programs can cohere.” The comparative program the committee proposed was intended to remedy this dilemma. In addition, the committee noted that Stanford’s current faculty had a strong connection to their disciplinary home departments. “We do not have at the present time,” the report concluded, “a sense that the existing Stanford minority faculties would support an Ethnic Studies program of this sort, or that the faculty who might support it would be willing to do so on a longterm basis at the cost of the loss or even diminishing of

In order to assess the current status and future possibilities of the fields of Chicano and II. Alternative Structures for a Program Chicano Studies: Ethnic Studies,APPENDIX the Committee undertook during theinsummer months of 1994 a detailed, Models Considered but Rejected comprehensive survey of existing Chicano Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, A. American Studies Model Rejected and African American Studies programs The Committee also conducted inB. Ethnic and Chicano Studiesnationally.

Models Rejected depth interviews with recognized leaders in the fields of Chicano and Ethnic Studies Chicana and Chicano Studies Related Courses and Courses during the lateAPPENDIX summerIII. and early fallStudies of 1994.

(See Resource Binder for Surveys and Appropriate for Comparative in Race, Gender & Culture 22. “Asian American Studies Committee Report”; Leslie Hatamiya, interview with author, Interviews.) The Committee Reportfor isainformed by its Studies: research on the status of the field.

I. Proposed Structure Program in Chicano Comparative Studies in Race, Gender Culture It responds to the questions posed in &the official “Charge to the Committee” November 10, 2020; Chang, interview with author; Okimoto, interview with author. (memorandum dated June 7, 1994, addressed to the Chicano Studies Committee, 23. Chicano Studies Committee, “Final Report of the Chicano Studies Committee to the Resource Binder) concerning the present state of course offerings; the possibility of new Dean of the School of Humanities and Science,” November 23, 1994, copy in author’s courses by present faculty; the integration of these courses into a formal degree program; the relationship between Chicano Studies, other Ethnic Studies programs, and possession (courtesy of Ramón Saldívar) American Studies; the possible application of the Individually Designed Major, prospective Minors, or Honors Programs in Chicano Studies; the relative preferability of an independent Chicano such 22 S TAStudies N F Omajor R D over U Nother I V Emodels RSIT Y as concentrations within American Studies or Comparative Race and Ethnicity; the role of graduate students in such a program; and the roles of the current Chicano Fellows Program and the Stanford Center for Chicano Research in relation to any new curricular program.

In the judgment of the Committee, the administrative and intellectual structure represented by the recommended Comparative Studies in Race, Gender & Culture model comprises our best alternative for a forward-looking, state of the art program in Ethnic Studies generally and Chicano Studies particularly at Stanford University.

The vote in favor of the comparative model was unanimous. However, two Academic

their existing departmental base.”24 The Chicano Studies committee was divided on Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s suggestion to include “gender” in the program title. Two of the faculty members of the committee argued that the main focus of the program should be on race and ethnicity as objects of analysis. The Asian American Studies committee didn’t include gender in the title of its proposed IDP, but did state that the IDP should make gender a central analytical category. The AAS committee’s attention to gender was likely due to the efforts of Asian American women graduate students who pressed the committee to clearly state the relationship between gender and ethnicity in its proposal. “Analyzing the interconnectedness of gender and ethnic/racial analysis,” the students’ letter to the committee stated, “is crucial for developing a sound academic program that reflects [...] scholarly

developments during the last 20 years.”25 The committees also argued for ramped up hiring of ethnic studies faculty in order to assure a robust and stable core curriculum. The Chicano Studies committee proposed the development of a performing arts committee and a programmatic focus on community-engaged learning.

“I could not have hoped for more reasonable, thoughtful, and constructive reports,” Dean Shoven said in his address to the Faculty Senate on February 23, 1995. He continued, “It is my intention to establish an interdisciplinary program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.” Shoven emphasized the innovative nature of an interdisciplinary, comparative program. At this time, Shoven de-emphasized the importance that both committees had accorded to gender, leaving the term out of his remarks entirely.

He also did not include a Native American Studies program in his recommendation, though he did recommend including African American Studies within the CSRE umbrella based on a report he received from African and Afro-American Studies chair Horace Porter and a separate report from a committee of Black faculty chaired by physicist Art Walker III. While these aspects of CSRE would be the subject of contention, Shoven’s recommendation was positively received by the Faculty Senate, marking a major step towards the formal establishment of CCSRE.26

24. “Final Report of the Chicano Studies Committee.”

25. Jennifer de Vere Brody, communication with author, March 3, 2021; Davina Chen, Jennfer Gee, Lok Siu, and Judy Wu, “Importance of Gender Studies in Asian American Studies,” 1994, included in “Asian American Studies Committee Report.”

26. John Shoven, “The Establishment of an Interdisciplinary Program on Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity,” February 23, 1995, copy in author’s possession (courtesy of Leslie Hatamiya).

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FOUNDING CCSRE SECTION FOUR: FORGING AN INSTITUTION After Dean Shoven’s report to the Faculty Senate on February 23, 1995, new committees were created to develop curriculum and major and minor requirements for Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In addition, a committee began work on a proposal for a Native American Studies major. Doctoral student at the School of Education Renya Ramirez (Winnebago), who was active in efforts to develop the Native American Studies major, approached Professor of Education Teresa LaFromboise about becoming involved.

LaFromboise welcomed the opportunity and took on the responsibility of chairing the Native American Studies committee, where she was able to draw upon her research in Native American mental health and her prior experience teaching in Native American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In addition, LaFromboise

Teresa LaFramboise

later recalled, the experience situated her within an important intellectual community: “I missed local colleagues who appreciated the role of history in human behavior and the design of psychological interventions.” By March of 1996, the chair of the CSRE Executive committee, Al Camarillo, predicted correctly – that students would be able to major in Native American Studies through the CSRE program. Ramirez would later serve as one of CSRE’s first Graduate Teaching Fellows, and Teresa LaFromboise would serve as the founding director of the Native American Studies program.27 The relationship of African and Afro-American Studies (AAAS) to CCSRE was still unclear.

Though Shoven had advocated for including AAAS under the CCSRE umbrella, this position was controversial among the larger community of AAAS students and faculty, who worried that it would exacerbate the problem of insufficient resources.

The proposal ultimately delivered to the Committee on Undergraduate Studies on October 2, 1996 designated AAAS as an affiliated program; students majoring in AAAS could opt for a comparative approach and enroll in CSRE’s core curriculum as part of fulfilling their major requirements. The following year, the faculty of AAAS voted to fully

“I missed local colleagues who appreciated the role of history in human behavior and the design of psychological interventions.”

27. “Native American Studies,” March 1, 1996, in Founding Documents Binder, CCSRE records; Marni Leff, “Ethnic Studies major outlined,” March 13, 1996; CSRE, Newsletter, Spring 2001; Teresa LaFromboise, correspondence with author, May 6, 2021.

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join CCSRE after Dean Shoven assured them that the study of Africans and African-Americans would remain central to the AAAS curriculum.28 Jewish Studies also became an affiliate program of CCSRE. Historian Steven Zipperstein directed the Jewish Studies program in the early 1990s, and he envisioned Stanford’s relatively young program as part of a broader intellectual revitalization of Jewish Studies. “There was no older brooding presence with a [...] regnant set of assumptions about what Jewish Studies must be,” Zipperstein recalled.

“And so we were able to create everything from the ground.” Zipperstein and his colleagues shared some of the same sources of intellectual inspiration with scholars in other ethnic studies programs, including, “the recognition that even otherwise marginalized, oppressed people make history.” Even before the creation of CCSRE, Jewish Studies at Stanford had moved towards a deeper engagement with the broader field of ethnic studies, exemplified by a major 1991 conference on Black and Jewish communities that Zipperstein co-organized with political scientist Horace Porter, then chair of AAAS.29 With the incorporation of the Native American Studies major, and the relationships to Jewish Studies and African and Afro-American Studies in place, the proposal to establish a major in CSRE was presented to the Faculty Senate on November 21, 1996. The senate approved the proposal unanimously. The CSRE undergraduate program and the affiliated Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (RICSRE) jointly constituted the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) The creation of CCSRE constituted an incredible victory for the hunger strikers, CSAAS, and the students pushing for Native American Studies.

Those students had won the creation of a new ethnic studies program at Stanford at a time when the entire university was under intense pressure to cut its spending.30

Steven Zipperstein

Jewish Studies at Stanford had moved towards a deeper engagement with the broader field of ethnic studies.

28. CCSRE and AAAS maintain a close working relationship. Christopher Clarke, “The Creation of Stanford’s Program in Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity,” Stanford School of Education Case Study 2006-12, December 13, 2006; Minutes of the Planning Committee Meeting, November 28, 1995, in Founding Documents Binder; Shoven to Anne Fernald, “Proposal to Establish the Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity,” October 2, 1996, in Founding Documents Binder; Adam Kemezis, ““Afro-American Studies to Join with CSRE Program,” Stanford Daily, March 3, 1997.

29. Steven Zipperstein, interview with author, December 3, 2020.

30. Brian Singer, “Close FRI, Advisory Board says,” December 6, 1995

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FOUNDING CCSRE

David Palumbo-Liu

The overall climate of austerity, however, posed serious challenges for the future of ethnic studies at Stanford. Hiring faculty proved to be the greatest challenge. The Asian American Studies Committee and Chicano Studies Committee recommended three additional faculty hires for each program.

The Walker committee report requested additional faculty to bolster the AAAS program. Dean Shoven balked at these recommendations. “I am unable to make multiyear, multiposition promises in this uncertain budgetary climate,” he informed the Faculty Senate. Shoven also added that faculty hiring would be done through the departments, and none of the new faculty appointments would be to CSRE.31 This last proviso, regarding departmental authority over hiring, produced its own set

of challenges. In the fall quarter of 1995, the sociology department offered the Asian American Studies billet to a candidate about whom the Asian American Studies group had serious reservations.

“When asked specifically if she considered herself an Asian Americanist, she said ‘No, although I do some work in the field.’” David Palumbo-Liu reported to Al Camarillo and Yvonne YarbroBejarano. He continued, “She had no idea of what courses she might teach in Asian American Studies at Stanford.” The candidate ultimately decided to take a position at another university, but the incident raised the question of what role ethnic studies scholars ought to play in hiring faculty assigned to traditional departments.32 Despite these challenges, some crucial appointments were made within a few years. Paula

31. “Final Report of the Chicano Studies Committee,” 13; John Shoven, “The Establishment of an Interdisciplinary Program on Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.”

32. David Palumbo-Liu to Al Camarillo and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, January 9, 1996; Concerned Students for Asian American Studies (CSAAS) to Dean John Shoven, “Re: Faculty Search for Asian American Studies Program” November 7 ,1995; CSAAS to Dean John Shoven, January 29, 1996, all in Founding Documents Binder.

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Moya, a specialist in Chicana literature, joined the English department, and sociologist Matthew Snipp arrived from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Both would take on leadership roles within CCSRE. In addition, the Political Science department hired Carolyn Wong, who had helped build the Asian American Studies program at Berkeley as an undergraduate, but who would later depart Stanford for Carleton College.

Another challenge was maintaining the involvement of faculty in program-building.

Historian Gordon Chang later recalled the pressure that junior faculty faced in trying to manage competing commitments to CCSRE and their home departments: “This was a tremendous, really big pressure on faculty. Because we had our own personal commitment and interest and wanted to work with students, but also knew that we were dependent upon the [home] departments. And most of us, David [Palumbo-Liu], myself, others, we’re all non tenured. So we had to think about ‘How are we going to get tenure [...] when we were doing something in a field of study that many [others] did not consider to be really legitimate?’”33 RICSRE was established as part of CCSRE in part to continue to attract faculty involvement in the program, by forging a multidisciplinary, intellectual hub, initially under the co-directorship of George Fredrickson and Claude Steele. In an interview, Steele recalled that a major priority for him as founding co-director was to build RICSRE

Claude Steele

Gordon H. Chang

Photo: Chuck Painter, Stanford News Service

into a dynamic community. “It was going to be the place that faculty and graduate students would come together, and form a community that wasn’t there before,” Steele said. “And that would be the intellectual leadership of CCSRE. It had a very core function in the design of the

“RICSRE was going to be the place that faculty and graduate students would come together, and form a community that wasn’t there before.”

33. Chang, interview with author; Markus, interview with author.

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FOUNDING CCSRE

Dorothy Steele

program.” Even with a sparkling lineup of speakers and provocative seminar discussions, it took no small amount of work to develop a durable intellectual community. Associate Director Dorothy Steele, who would later become CCSRE’s first Executive Director, played a key role in fostering relationships among the RICSRE community. In an interview, Hazel Markus remembered the tremendous effort that Steele devoted to RICSRE: “You have to keep trying to get people to stay together. And we did a lot of that. Dorothy Steele would often call up faculty and say, ‘Remember who’s coming this Thursday [...] Please show up, we need you.’”34 Undergraduates benefited from a growing number of programs that supplemented academic course offerings. CCSRE secured a $3.2 million dollar grant from the James Irvine Foundation, which funded, among other initiatives, two programs that linked academic study to public policy and community service: the Public Service Summer Internship (PSSI), and the Public Policy/ Leadership Summer Institute on Race and Ethnicity

Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

Dorothy Steele would often call up faculty and say, ‘Remember who’s coming this Thursday ...

Please show up, we need you.’

in America (PPLI). Both these programs offered students opportunities to work with community organizations or government agencies on issues of racial justice, and to meet elected officials and others attempting to formulate public policy within the context of a racially and ethnically diverse society.35 Undergraduates were also drawn to CCSRE through a core curriculum that emphasized comparative approaches. During the first years of the program, students could take Sylvia Yanagisako’s class on theories of race and ethnicity; David Palumbo-Liu’s seminar on comparative ethnic autobiography; Teresa LaFromboise’s course on Racial and Ethnic Identity, or Al Camarillo and George Fredrickson’s co-taught “Introduction to Race and Ethnicity in the American Experience.”

In 2001, CCSRE launched its signature

34. Markus, interview with author; Claude Steele, interview with author, April 14, 2021. An award in Dorothy Steele’s name was established in 2017.

35. Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Newsletter, Summer 1999

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Sylvia Yanagisako, 1997

Guadalupe Valdes, 2001

introductory course, which brought faculty from a range of disciplines to lecture about how race and ethnicity were analyzed within their fields. The CSRE major proved to be extremely popular, and the number of students majoring in CSRE or the ethnic-specific tracks surged. In 1997, there were 15 students either majoring or minoring in CSRE. By spring quarter of 2002, the number of students majoring or minoring in CSRE or the affiliate programs had grown to 125.36 A major breakthrough for CCSRE came in 2001.

Harvard had been attempting to recruit Claude Steele, an esteemed researcher in psychology, and Steele asked the university’s leadership for substantial financial support for CCSRE as part of retaining him at Stanford. The university was able to provide CCSRE with an operating budget of $250,000 and then worked to raise funds for a $5 million endowment. The funding was crucial in providing stable, full-time staffing for the center, including the creation of an executive director position.37 In 2002, Al Camarillo stepped down from the directorship of CCSRE after leading the institution

Renatoo Ronaldo, 2001

George Fredrickson, 1996

through its first six years. Students had flocked to the major, the Introduction to CSRE class was freshly minted, and the model of ethnic studies championed by Stanford had inspired other institutions such as Columbia and Yale to follow this model. Reflecting on the accomplishments of the CCSRE community, Camarillo concluded, “The study of race and ethnicity in comparative and international contexts and through interdisciplinary methods is now firmly ensconced at Stanford.”38

36. CCSRE, Newsletter, Summer 1999; CCSRE, Newsletter, Summer 2002 37. The operating budget allocation was equivalent to the funds that would have been made available annually from a $5 million endowment. CCSRE, Newsletter, Summer 2002; Claude Steele, interview with author.

38. CCSRE, Newsletter, Summer 2002

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UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCES: EMPOWERMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCES: EMPOWERMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE SECTION ONE: FINDING A PLACE AT STANFORD When Cynthia Azali-Rojas arrived at Stanford in 1995, acclimating to Stanford, where wealth and privilege seemed woven into campus culture, was difficult. “I missed my family, my community,” Azali-Rojas later recalled in an interview.

As a young person in Houston, Azali-Rojas developed an awareness of how being poor and Mexican led to her being treated differently. She spent her time in the library reading books like Malcolm X: The Final Speeches. At Stanford, she was drawn to courses that focused on race and ethnicity, and when Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity became a full-fledged major in 1997, she jumped at the opportunity to enroll. “All my classes fit into CSRE and its purpose,” Azali-Rojas said. “It was more aligned with the questions I was asking, things that didn’t quite feel right. [...] It gave me a place where I could anchor myself.” CSRE’s focus on a comparative approach also broadened Cynthia Azali-Rojas

Azali-Rojas’ horizons. Classes on Arab literature and Native American literature “exposed me to cultures and peoples that I normally would not have access to. [...] It did open up a world for me.”

“I was seeing my family, I was seeing my neighbors.”

Between her junior and senior year, Azali-Rojas interned with the Labor / Community Strategy Center (LCSC) in Los Angeles. LCSC was in the midst of a campaign to fight disinvestment in the LA public transportation system by organizing bus riders to not pay the bus fare if no seats were available. Even as an intern, Azali-Rojas plunged into the campaign, going out each day to talk to bus riders about how systemic racism produced the material conditions of their lives and recruiting participants for “no seat, no fare.” The community of bus riders seemed like a microcosm of all the worlds Azali-Rojas had grown up around: Black, Latinx, Korean, and other working-class riders sat together on the packed buses each day. Now these communities were working together to change their lives. The experience of organizing – and participating in – civil disobedience was powerful. “I was seeing my family, I was seeing my neighbors,” in the faces of the bus riders, Azali-Rojas recalled. After graduating in 1999 as part of the second cohort of CSRE majors, she returned to work at LCSC for six years, helping to reconceptualize the campaign as a public health and climate justice campaign.1 Cynthia Azali-Rojas was one of many Stanford undergraduates who combined the distinct critical perspectives they gained as a CSRE major with a passion for engaging intensely with the world,

1. Cynthia Azali-Rojas, interview with author, December 28, 2020.

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whether through activism, art, policy-making, or in their professional careers. For these students, community empowerment, historical understanding and using theory as a ground for practice lay at the heart of their experience in CSRE. This was true for Jill Shenker, who graduated as a CSRE major in 2000. Shenker’s commitment to social change grew from her Jewish upbringing in the 1980s in conservative Colorado Springs, which nurtured, in her words, “a whole set of moral values tied to the experience of the Jewish Holocaust and the commitment to not be a bystander to injustice.”

At Stanford, “the combination of academic study and student activism in parallel” was transformative for Shenker. Activism was, she would later reflect, “the space of practice,” to which she brought the same kinds of questions raised in her comparative ethnic studies classes: “How are you assessing [...] the dynamics between different organizations on campus? How do you create an intersectional campaign that will connect these various groups and their interests? And what are the tensions that arise?”

At Stanford, “the combination of academic study and student activism in parallel” was transformative for Shenker.

After graduating from Stanford in 2000, Shenker found her way to working with La Colectiva de Mujeres in San Francisco, a group of Latina immigrant women seeking to ensure dignified conditions in their work as domestic workers. When Shenker joined, the women were beginning to organize themselves and other domestic workers. Connecting with other domestic workers’ organization across the U.S., La Colective

Jill Shenker

helped form the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance to build a movement powerful enough to win structural change. Shenker was the Alliance’s first staff person. NDWA built a movement to win minimum wage, overtime, and other basic labor rights for domestic workers. In the domestic workers’ movement, Shenker experienced how important historical knowledge is to understanding and transforming the present. She noted “the ways that the ongoing devaluation of and institutional lack of protections for the industry [of domestic workers] is fundamentally tied to the history of slavery and racism in this country,.” Such ideas impacted their strategy – from inspiring bold demands, to strengthening a commitment to Black organizing, to working on culture change as well as policy change.2 Kiyan Williams arrived at Stanford nearly 15 years after Azali-Rojas had matriculated. In the years since the first cohorts graduated, CCSRE had grown, adding many more affiliated faculty to its roster and strengthening its support of student artists through its relationship with the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), which grew out of the Committee on Black Performing Arts and allowed students to major in CSRE while pursuing arts

2. Jill Shenker, interview with author, January 27, 2021.

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UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCES: EMPOWERMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE practice. Williams took advantage of this opportunity.

Williams had grown up in Newark, around Afro-diasporic communities with roots in West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, as well as diverse Asian American communities. During their first year at Stanford, they enrolled in a course on the history of Black women’s lives, taught by Prof. Allyson Hobbs.

Williams still remembers the impact the course made on them, because, in

“My approach to art making begins with engaging with archival material, doing deep historical research into the sites that connect with Afro diasporic history.” their words, “this class introduced me into a way of understanding my life, my own history that I hadn’t experienced before.”

Prof. Hobbs’ class also influenced Williams’ personal approach to art practice. It was in that class where they first got a taste of doing historical research with primary sources. “My approach to art making begins with engaging with archival material, doing deep historical research into the sites that connect with Afro diasporic history,” Williams said. This approach, attentive to place and history, informs Williams’ public art project Reaching 36

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y

Above: “The Fire Next Time,” 2020,

by Kiyan Williams.

Left: “Kiki” 2017, a portrait of Kiyan Williams, by Eliyah Ndoumbé.

Toward Warmer Suns, which was first installed in Virginia along the James River, where the first enslaved Africans touched land in what would later become the United States. One archive that Williams encountered during their senior year, a collection of video interviews with Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs, formed the basis for their performance piece Reflections. Looking back on their experience as a CSRE major, Williams described the program as allowing them to “develop a practice through which art-making became a form of embodied theorizing, but that brings together the material practice of making things with a critical approach of understanding race, gender and sexuality.”3 Willow Young (Maternal Tribe: Lac du Flambeau 3. Kiyan Williams, interview with author, January 19, 2021.

Ojibwe, Paternal Tribe: Lakota) began thinking about race from a young age, while growing up in the small town of Sultan, Washington. She remembers seeing her dad being followed by store clerks when they were shopping. Eventually, her dad explained that he was there to shop, not steal. At the same time, Young participated in the Skykomish Valley Indian Education Program, which helped her connect with her community’s cultural traditions and nurtured a love of learning. These experiences gave her “a passion for understanding my lived experience and others’ lived experiences, and how race and ethnicity have shaped our country, our world and each of us as individuals.” The CSRE major was a perfect fit. “I was able to find a likeminded community of people who were struggling with the same questions that I was struggling with, questions about identity and belonging, and racism and prejudice,” Young recalled.

After graduating, Young began working in the

Willow Young

“I was able to find a like-minded community of people who were struggling with the same questions that I was struggling with, questions about identity and belonging, and racism and prejudice.” advertising departments in the newspaper industry.

After several years, she transitioned into working in advertising for Microsoft, where she has been for the past twelve years. Currently, Young is Senior Learning and Development Manager of Microsoft’s advertising department, where she has put her background in CSRE to work advancing diversity and inclusion within the company. Last year, she helped launch a global employee resource group called Indigenous at Microsoft and currently serves as co-chair. She also worked on the company’s first conference focused on diversity and inclusion, called Include. “My passions are very interwoven into what I do,” Young said of her career.

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UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCES: EMPOWERMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE SECTION TWO: THE CLASSROOM ...

On April 4, 2001, Al Camarillo welcomed students to the first lecture of a new course called “Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.” CSRE offered a number of introductory core courses that took a comparative approach to ethnic studies, but Intro to CSRE was unique in its attempt to be comprehensive and interdisciplinary.

Over the next 9 weeks, students heard 15 different guest lectures from faculty in the departments of anthropology, history, political science, psychology, English, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and Spanish and Portuguese. The lecturers took students from the origins of anti-Semitism in early Modern Europe to the Jim Crow South, apartheid South Africa, to the Zapatista uprising and 20th century ethnic cleansing. Students would hear about anthropological theories of race, changing categories of race on the census, immigration policy, the intersections among race, gender, and class, the relationship between race and U.S. foreign policy.

They would study linguistic racism, theories of identity, stereotype threat, and cultural constructions of the self.4 It was a whirlwind tour that captured what so many faculty and students found exhilarating about CSRE – an emphasis on interdisciplinary, international, and comparative dimensions of ethnic studies. Hazel Markus, who was one of the guest lecturers in the first Intro to CSRE course, felt the course left students with the impression that “the most exciting scholarship going on in the country had to do with race and ethnicity.”5 After English professor Paula Moya became director of undergraduate programs at CSRE, she and Markus co-taught the Introduction to CSRE course, maintaining the basic structure of the course

that Camarillo had established. For Moya and Markus, as much as for the students in the course, teaching Intro to CSRE was an opportunity to gain exposure to cutting edge research on race and ethnicity across a variety of disciplines. “We were madly taking notes. We were learning from them,” Moya remembered later. Hearing their colleagues lecture sparked a new understanding of race and ethnicity for Moya and Markus. “We realized there

4. “Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity course syllabus, Spring 2001, in Box 4 Folder History 65, Al Camarillo Papers ARCH 2018 205, Special Collections, Stanford University.

5. Hazel Markus, interview with author, December 16, 2020.

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was a common process they were all describing,” Moya recalled. Race, they came to believe, was a “continual, ongoing process” that worked on every level, from laws and census categories to “how you read someone, whether you think they are pulling out a gun when they are pulling out a cell phone.”

Moya and Markus called these processes “doing race,” or as they would later describe the conceptual shift they made: race was a verb, not a noun.6 The second time Markus and Moya taught the course, they came up with the idea of trying to collect the lectures in order to share them with a broader public. It took, Markus recalled, a healthy

by comparative approaches that went beyond a focus on a single group, and which brought humanities and social science scholars into dialogue.7 Each year, a team of Stanford scholars teaches the course, often with more than 100 students enrolled. Spring 2021’s iteration, taught by Samer Al-Saber, incorporates visual material to accommodate the on-line, virtual constraints of a class taught in the era of COVID-19.

Past CCSRE Undergrad Program Directors include Jennifer DeVere Brody, Tomás Jiménez Paula Moya, David Palumbo-Liu, Vaughn Rasberry, José Davíd Saldívar, and Jeanne Tsai.

Samer al-Saber

dose of “lunchtime diplomacy” to get their colleagues to turn lecture notes into polished essays, but the Introduction to CSRE lectures formed the core of an anthology that Moya and Markus put together.

They co-wrote an essay for the book laying out their concept of “doing race,” a term that also served as the title for the anthology. Markus would later describe the volume as putting the “Stanford stamp” on the study of race and ethnicity, through making the case that critical race studies would be enriched

Race, they came to believe, was a “continual, ongoing process” that worked on every level.

6. Paula Moya, interview with author, December 14, 2020 7. Markus, interview with author. Hazel Markus and Paula Moya, eds., Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).

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UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCES: EMPOWERMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE SECTION THREE: ... AND THE COMMUNITY The approach to ethnic studies encapsulated in Doing Race served as a pillar of the undergraduate experience in CSRE. Another pillar was the growth of critical service learning under the leadership of Dr. Tania Mitchell, who became CCSRE’s Director of Service Learning in 2007. She later became CCSRE’s Associate Director of Undergraduate Education.

The funding for Mitchell’s position came out of a $2.5 million donation by the Raikes Foundation – a non-profit founded by Stanford alum Jeff Raikes and his wife, Tricia whose daughter majored in CSRE. As an undergraduate, Jeff experienced the challenges of navigating through Stanford academically and socially as a student from a small Nebraska town. He was profoundly shaped by living in Ujamaa which gave him the chance to learn about racial inequity from close friends. Stanford differed from his homogenous home community where he felt that he “grew up in the era of ignoring racial difference; being taught the value of “color blindness.” The Tania Mitchell

Raikes’s support for CCSRE was based on their understanding of the value that an explicit focus on race and ethnicity could have on the larger society. They wanted to build support for a position dedicated to community-engaged learning since they believed that students would benefit from more opportunities to test whether or not in class offerings “worked” off-campus in hands-on settings where theory and practice could intersect. Ultimately, they wanted to invest in “Stanford’s capacity to educate its students to be excellent leaders in a multiracial world.” Jeff believes that “failing to confront how different people experience the world based on their backgrounds denies us our humanity and walls off important understanding that we all need to engage with the world – in work and life.”

CCSRE had emphasized community engagement from its founding – exemplified in the Public Policy/ Leadership Institute and Public Policy Summer Internship program, founded in 1998 and 1997 respectively. Mitchell’s deep engagement with the field of service learning, however, meant that she was able to take CCSRE’s community engagement program in new directions.8 Prior to arriving at Stanford, Mitchell had served as Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Service Learning Leadership at California State University at Monterey Bay, where she oversaw the creation of the country’s first academic minor in service learning. It was at CSU-MB that Mitchell began to rethink the conventional understanding of service learning, which presumed that the typical student engaging in service learning came from privileged background and would, through the service learning experience, confront the reality of poverty or inequality for the first time. Mitchell wondered how assumptions about service learning programs would shift if one recognized the experiences of students of color, or what she called “minoritized

8. CCSRE, Newsletter, Winter 2008.

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students,” who might themselves have come up through the local community center where the university’s service learning program was sending college students to tutor. She also began to wonder what service learning could be if programs put at the center a commitment to using the university’s resources to make communities a better place, rather than primarily focus on student learning and development through service.9 Mitchell’s intervention in the field of service learning cohered an approach that would become widely known as critical service learning. Critical service learning, Mitchell would write shortly after arriving at Stanford, “embraces the political nature of service and seeks social justice over more traditional views of citizenship.” The heart of critical service learning was “a social change orientation, working to redistribute power, and developing authentic relationships.” For Mitchell, an ethnic studies program was a natural place to develop a practice of critical service learning. As she noted, the first ethnic studies programs – in part because an academic literature in ethnic studies had yet to be written – valued community engagement as a crucial piece of the process through which knowledge emerges.10 Through careful collaboration with Stanford faculty and local community partners, Mitchell put her vision of critical service learning into practice.

Three experiences in particular illuminated the new possibilities of service learning. In 2010 and 2011, students in David Palumbo-Liu’s course “Asian American Culture and Community,” worked with the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, which was in the process of opening a community center and affordable housing on the site where San Francisco’s International Hotel, or I-Hotel, once stood. The I-Hotel once housed elderly Filipino and Chinese residents in San Francisco’s Manilatown; a 1968 eviction order precipitated a decade-long housing struggle that culminated in the elders’ dramatic evictions and the building’s demolition in 1977.

Undeterred, activists from the struggle organized the

Jeff and Tricia Raikes

Manilatown Heritage Foundation and, decades later, purchased the lot.11 Students in Palumbo-Liu’s class read a mix of history, film, fiction, and poetry in order to understand Asian American cultural production as aesthetic and political engagements with dynamic communities. Alongside their coursework, students met with the current I-Hotel residents and built relationships with them in movie and karaoke nights, distributed information to Chinatown residents about the services provided at the community center, helped transcribe interviews and study archival photos for the book Filipinos in San Francisco, assisted artist Jerome Reyes with installing an art exhibit made from bricks recovered from the original I-Hotel. As student Kristina Peralta commented about the experience, the course provided students an opportunity “to serve and become active participants in the community that we hope to eventually impact once we graduate from Stanford.” According to Mitchell, the multi-faceted emphasis on relationship-building with the I-Hotel community and the multi-year partnership with the Manilatown Heritage Foundation led students to

9. This and the following paragraphs draw from Tania Mitchell, interview with author, January 26, 2021.

10. Tania Mitchell, “Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models,” Michigan Journal of Service Learning (Spring 2008): 50-65, quotes on 51, 62.

11. Ju Yon Kim, “Learning History: Service Learning in San Francisco’s I-Hotel,” CCSRE Newsletter (Fall 2010): 7-8.

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develop authentic and lasting connections, with some students even becoming staff for the organization.12 Another long-term partnership was created with East Palo Alto’s Mural, Music, and Arts Project (MMAP), then under the leadership of Sonya Clark-Herrera and Olatunde Sobomehin. With the support of Prof. Samy Alim, Stanford students contributed to a number of MMAP programs, creating a space for mentorship via artistic practice.

One such student, future music star Jidenna Mobisson, taught spoken word and the art of hiphop to East Palo Alto youth through MMAP. In another project, Stanford students worked with MMAP to create a stunning mural on the side of the East Palo Alto Police Department. The mural, titled ‘Justice’, drew on student interviews with

youth offenders, community members, parole and court officers, and police officers, to re-conceptualize the meaning of justice in and with the East Palo Alto community. The mural envisioned justice in non-punitive terms, as encompassing equal education, a clean and healthy environment, and a dignified life. Aria Florant, a Stanford student who worked with MMAP, described how the experience changed her: “I realized that service learning was a rigorous academic project that required careful thought and practice [...] In EPA they have an incredible community of elders who have been in the community for a long time. There are so many organizations and people who care, and incredible cultural diversity.”13 The most explicitly political of service learning

12. Kim, “Learning History,” 8; Mitchell, interview with author.

13. Dena Montague, “Tania Mitchell: Celebrating the Heart of Service Learning at Stanford,” CCSRE Newsletter (Fall 2012): 8-10, quote on 9; Mitchell, interview with author.

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Kathleen Coll

classes that Mitchell helped develop was a course on grassroots social movements, taught by anthropology lecturer Kathleen Coll. The course tapped into the growing energy in the domestic workers’ movement, which focused at that time on passing the California Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. The proposed legislation, which was eventually signed into law in 2014, provided overtime pay rights to domestic workers. In the scholarship on service learning, there was a debate over what constituted meaningful service learning. Did stuffing envelopes provide a meaningful service learning experience? Did cleaning bathrooms?

Mitchell and Coll took the position that “all activities that supported efforts to pass the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights” counted as meaningful service. Providing childcare for a domestic worker or serving food at a meeting was as valuable, from their perspective, as marching in the streets or lobbying legislators. Students in the course could understand that providing childcare or serving food would allow domestic workers themselves to participate more fully as active leaders, and thus model for students the value of grassroots social movements.

The deep commitment to the practical work of movement-building was complemented by a farreaching and rigorous analytical perspective developed through coursework, which mirrored the political education members were receiving through their own organizations. Readings and discussions with member leaders covered the connections among domestic work, slavery, migration, and colonization, a feminist analysis of care work, and a disability lens on ideas of dependence, interdependence, and citizenship.

CCSRE has maintained and deepened opportunities for undergraduate service learning.

Daniel Murray, the Center’s Director of Community Engaged Learning and now the Executive Director, created the Center’s Praxis fellowship that allows students to work for four months with social justice organizations. Rigoberto Marquéz, the current Associate Director of Academic Programs and Community Engaged Learning, continues the tradition.

SECTION FOUR: THE UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS Apart from the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity major, CSRE offers four other ethnicspecific majors that still incorporate a comparative lens. Below, we explore what the different majors have meant for few of the many undergraduates that have pursued them.

Asian American Studies encompasses the historical and contemporary experiences of a diverse group, including immigrants who “arrived in the U.S. during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as agricultural laborers, white-collar professionals from different Asian countries who immigrated in the 1960s, political refugees from Southeast Asia, and the high-tech ‘parachute families’ and ‘bodyshoppers’ of the late-1990s.” Students majoring in Asian American Studies receive “indepth, interdisciplinary training in the varied cultures and histories of Asian America.”14 For many Asian American students coming to Stanford, Asian American Studies provided a crucial intellectual and political community. As a high school student in New York City, Jane Kim was concerned with issues of economic and social inequality, but learned little about Asian Americans in her school curriculum. She came to Stanford in part because it had a large Asian American and student 14. “Self-Study Report for the Asian American Studies Major,” 2005, quotes on 26, in CCSRE Files.

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UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCES: EMPOWERMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE Jane Kim

“Learning Asian American history was incredibly important to me, because it provided me examples of how Asian Americans have always been organizers and leaders in this country.”

of color community, and quickly became involved in the struggle to establish Asian American Studies.

“Learning Asian American history was incredibly important to me,” Kim said in an interview, “because it provided me examples of how Asian Americans have always been organizers and leaders in this country.” Learning the history of multiracial coalitions also made an impression on Kim. “The other stories that I find to be incredibly important,” Kim recalled, “are the coalitions that have emerged at different points of US history, such as the largely Chicano and Mexican farmworkers and Filipino farmworkers [forming the UFW] in the Central Valley, but there’s so many examples of when people of color come together in labor struggles to fight.”15 Hai Binh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and immigrated to Chicago at the age of 11 with her sisters and parents, who both got jobs washing dishes in the Windy City. Adjusting to Stanford coming from Chicago’s public school system was difficult. She had a hard time finding other students who had gone to urban public schools, or working-class students who had immigrated when they were older. It was hard to fit in culturally, when other students talked about

15. Jane Kim, interview with author, January 26, 2021.

16. Hai Binh Nguyen, interview with author, January 20, 2021.

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going on ski trips as if it were normal, when Nguyen had never been on a ski trip. “I was also struggling a little bit academically. I didn’t know that if you didn’t do well in your classes there were tutors that could have helped me. I just felt like it was my own struggle.

And I just felt like I was like I didn’t really belong at Stanford.” Asian American Studies classes, Hai Binh recalls, “was how I was able to understand what was happening with me personally. To be working-class and an immigrant at an institution like Stanford that was not made for me [...] it validated my experience and what I was feeling.”16 Hai Binh Nguyen

After graduating from Stanford, Kim worked as a youth organizer in San Francisco’s Chinatown Community Development Center, where she put her AAS background to use developing the program’s political education, with a special focus on local Asian American history. Kim then ran for the San Francisco school board, coming in first in a field of fifteen candidates on her second run. As a school board member, Kim championed a restorative justice model as an alternative to suspending and expelling students; she also was a leader in the effort to implement ethnic studies in San Francisco Unified School District. After serving on the school board, she served two terms on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Kim’s time on the Board of Supervisors saw her win stronger tenant protections and create affordable housing, push to make San Francisco City College free for SF residents – funded by a transfer tax on buildings worth more than $15 million – and writing the legislation that increased the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2018. She’s continued to work on issues of economic justice and to build a bench of women of color progressive leaders across the state of California.17 Hai Binh Nguyen went from Stanford to working as a constituent liaison for an Oakland City Councilmember. She then played a central role in launching San Francisco Rising, an organization that builds electoral power of working-class communities of color in San Francisco. She is now an attorney with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau where she enforces the laws that govern financial products like loans and mortgages. Nguyen’s background in Asian American Studies has helped her ensure the CFPB is attuned to the realities of a diverse society: “Some of the work that we have at the Bureau is, ‘How do we better get financial education information to limited English speaking communities?’”18 Past directors of Asian American Studies include Anthony Antonio, Gordon H. Chang, Purnima Mankekar, David Palumbo-Liu, and Jeanne Tsai.

Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies began as Chicana/o Studies, and in 2012 broadened to include the study of groups that trace their origins to Central and South America as well as the Caribbean. As Chicana/o Studies, the major was conceptualized as “investigating issues pertinent to the Mexican-origin population in the United States [...] for students who are interested in the historical experiences of Mexican Americans, their intellectual, artistic, and literary contributions as well as in issues that dominate current policy debates such as immigration and bilingual education”19 Finding Perla Campos Chicana/o Studies at Stanford changed the way Perla Campos thought about herself. Campos grew up in a small Texas town, which she described as “super conservative” with a very small Hispanic population, and where her mother worked as a custodian at the local school. Campos was tracked into the gifted and talented program, which segregated her from the other Hispanic students at her school. At Stanford, Campos found a class on Latino politics, which was her introduction to the history of the diverse Latino communities in the U.S., the realities of injustice and inequality as well as the possibilities glimpsed during moments of unity.

“I remember being in that class,” Campos said in an interview, “and feeling shame. [...] I was so ashamed that I didn’t know what it meant to be Latina and the power of that identity. [...] I never questioned why I wasn’t being taught that before, in my mainstream education.” Chicana/o Studies faculty Prof. Gary Segura and Prof. Tomás Jimenez played crucial roles as mentors for Campos, lighting a fire in her to learn more about who she was.20

17. Jane Kim, interview with author.

18. Hai Binh Nguyen, interview with author.

19. “Self-study Report for the Chicana/o Studies Major,” 2005, quote on 36, in CCSRE Files.

20. Perla Campos, interview with author, February 16. 2021.

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UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCES: EMPOWERMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE Francisco Preciado became interested in Mexican American history while attending high school in nearby Newark, CA, when he came across the history book Decade of Betrayal, about the mass deportation of Mexican Americans during the 1930s. He had become interested in questions of racial inequality earlier, while still in middle school. “My school was close to majority Latino, but in my classes, the advanced classes, there were only 3 Latinos out of 33 or 34 students.” Preciado had long felt a connection to Stanford because his father, who worked as a gardener for Stanford, often brought him to campus. But his experience in courses was often alienating. “I’m coming from a working class background and in a seminar or in a small group discussion someone jumps in and says, well, with my experience, working with the governments of Greece and Spain and Italy, here’s what I have to add. And my experience was working the summer helping my mom and dad and not going outside the local area.” It was CSRE faculty like Luis Fraga and Guadalupe Valdes that helped Preciado feel like he actually belonged and had something to offer.

He was also drawn to Chicana/o Studies because of its roots in student activism. “The reason we’re even allowed to be at this spot,” Preciado said, “is because people before us fought for us to have this space.”21 After getting her B.A. in Chicana/o Studies, Campos completed a co-terminal Master’s in Education, with a thesis that focused on the experience of students returning to Mexican schools after several years in the U.S. educational system. She then began her career at Google in marketing. While working on consumer marketing in Spain, she attended a meeting with the creator of the Google Doodles (the images that replace the Google logo on the search engine’s homepage).

He asked her who she would like to see as a Doodle, and Campos replied without hesitation, “Selena.” Campos recalled how she explained her choice: “I said, because I’ve never seen myself on the Google homepage. And I think that there’s a 46

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Francisco Preciado

“We can elevate stories of communities who have been forgotten purposefully, and celebrate them.” lot of people in the U.S. who feel the same.” Her argument proved persuasive, and she later became the Global Marketing Lead for Google Doodles.

“My mission has been to continue to push the envelope,” Campos explained. “We can elevate stories of communities who have been forgotten purposefully, and celebrate them.”22 After Preciado graduated from Stanford, he worked on environmental justice issues in East Palo Alto, and later attended law school at UC Berkeley.

After law school, he served on the school board of his hometown, where he sought to ensure the school district would provide an education to all graduates that would prepare them for college. Most recently, 21. Francisco Preciado, interview with author, January 13, 2021.

Preciado has worked in the labor movement. From 2015 until 2020 he served as Executive Director of the Service Employees International Union Local 2007, which represented Stanford employees – including his father. Preciado sought to push Stanford to value its workforce as crucial parts of the Stanford community: “Are you [Stanford] operating as an employer trying to do the right thing, or just as an employer that’s just looking at the bottom line?”

Preciado is now Executive Director for the Engineers and Scientists of California Local 20, IFPTE.23 Past directors of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies include Tomás Jiménez, Ana Minian, Jonathan Rosa, Renato Rosaldo (interim director), Gary Segura, Guadalupe Valdés, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano.

The Jewish Studies major was established in 2012, although the Jewish Studies program at Stanford predates the founding of CCSRE. The program was first housed in Religious Studies, and its primary focus had been graduate, rather than undergraduate education. The graduate program in Prof. Steven Zipperstein’s words, recognized that “to master the study of modern Jewish life requires all kinds of skills; you don’t necessarily need classical languages.”

In addition, the program facilitated the acquisition of a trove of valuable archival collections.24 Over the years, Jewish Studies graduated a small but significant group of majors and minors.

Yoav Schlesinger grew up in New Jersey, where his father served as rabbi in the Conservative movement. Immersed in Jewish culture and tradition throughout his childhood, he had little intention of linking his academic studies directly to Judaism. Reading the Torah and the Bible in his first-year humanities course under the guidance of Prof. Mark Mancall, however, he realized that an academically-driven Jewish Studies focus opened up entirely new ways of encountering Jewish texts and traditions. Schlesinger found his relationships with the faculty and staff in Jewish Studies to be particularly meaningful. Prof. Arnold Eisen became a close advisor. A class on reinventing Judaism in light of feminism led Schlesinger to a connection with Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, with whom

Yoav Schlesinger

he has subsequently co-led high Holiday Services at Stanford for over a dozen years.25 Schlesinger had not expected to pursue a career connected to his Jewish Studies major, but he ended up working with organizations rooted in the Jewish community for 15 years. After a stint as the youth director of a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, Schlesinger worked in development and fundraising for the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. This led him to work as a consultant on development and strategic planning for a wide range of organizations, particularly Jewish organizations ranging from Jewish Community Centers to Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund grantees, as well as the Executive Director of Reboot and The Kitchen. He also founded a first-of-itskind quarterly subscription box of Jewish goods and rituals, creatively reimagined. While working on this business, he developed a product that he remains particularly proud of: “On Yom Kippur War, on the Day of Atonement in particular, you’re meant to hold two thoughts at the same moment,” Schlesinger explained in an interview. “There is a story about Rabbi Simcha Bunim Bonhart of Peshischa who kept slips of paper, one in each pocket and on the first is, ‘The world was created for me.’ And the other is ‘I am but dust and ashes.’

Holding those two realities simultaneously is one of the many essences of that observance. I took that idea, and found a manufacturer who could press small iron figurines. One was an hourglass, and one was a globe.

22. Perla Campos, interview with author.

23. Francisco Preciado, interview with author.

24. Steven Zipperstein, interview with author, December 3, 2020.

25. Yoav Schlesinger, interview with author, February 18, 2021.

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UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCES: EMPOWERMENT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE So that subscribers could inhabit that same space of the rabbi [...] It took a grounding in Jewish ritual tradition and thought and history and reinvented it for a modern audience who could then embrace those ideas.”26 Past directors of Jewish Studies during its affiliation with CCSRE include Charlotte Fonrobert, Ari Kelman, Aron Rodrigue, Vered Shemtov, Steve Weitzman, and Steven Zipperstein.

Native American Studies comprises “an interdisciplinary approach to the study of history, culture, and legal status of native peoples in the Americas. In the United States, Canada, and in some Latin American nations, the descendants of aboriginal Americans have a special relationship with their national, and in some cases, local governments that sets their communities apart as quasi-sovereign entities. It is important to note that examining intellectual issues across tribal boundaries constitutes study across national boundaries insofar as each tribe is a separate nation and distinctive culture within North, Central, and South America.”27 Founding director of Native American Studies, Teresa LaFromboise, described the significance of her time directing the program: “This experience allows me to work with outstanding Native American students, faculty, instructors, and support staff of the Native American Culture Center and keeps me apprised of developments in Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies globally. My top priority in this leadership role has been to offer a viable series courses in Native American Studies that support knowledge discernment through a Native American scholarly lens.”28 NAS at Stanford emphasizes both a comparative approach in placing Native American experiences

alongside those of other groups, but also in stressing the tremendous diversity of Native America and/or indigenous nations and cultures across the globe. Both of these aspects appealed to Wendy Charlotte Fonrobert Greyeyes (Diné).

Greyeyes had graduated from Navajo Preparatory School, one of the first college preparatory schools in the U.S. for Native Americans, and it was there she first took an interest in learning about Navajo culture and history, which was incorporated into the school’s curriculum. At Stanford, Greyeyes lived in Muwekma House and began to learn about the history of California Indians. Gaining “a deeper understanding of the social issues [affecting California Indians] that were really different from the Navajo Nation and from Arizona tribes,” tribes that Greyeyes was more familiar with, made an impression on her. “There were a lot of assumptions being unraveled. That was what excited me about Native American Studies.” One issue affecting California Indians that Greyeyes got involved in was the debate over Indian gaming. Through NAS, Greyeyes had an opportunity to meet and interact with the California tribes that were attempting to assert their rights to build casinos.29 For Eric Manolito (Diné), Native American Studies was a major with obvious real world practicality. He came to Stanford from a small town in New Mexico named Cuba, initially thinking of majoring in Computer Science or English. After

26. Yoav Schlesinger, interview with author.

27. “Self-Study Report for the Program in Native American Studies,” February 2005, quote on 55, in CCSRE Files.

28. Teresa LaFromboise, correspondence with author, May 6, 2021.

29. Wendy Greyeyes, interview with author, February 19, 2021.

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“There were a lot of assumptions being unraveled. That was what excited me about Native American Studies.” his first year, he began wondering, “What is it I want to do when I leave [Stanford]? [...] I definitely had the idea of returning back to New Mexico and trying to help out my tribe. And so that gave me an idea: I could look at the Native American Studies program.” Manolito found that the NAS program would “help me prepare for when I leave the campus, by building relationships with different tribal peoples.” Being part of the larger CCSRE community, and the comparative approach that CCSRE embraced, helped Manolito make connections between Native American Studies and other ethnic studies. He spent a lot of time with students in MEChA, and eventually went with a group of students to Chiapas, Mexico, to meet the indigenous community participating in the Zapatista uprising.30 After graduating from Stanford, Greyeyes got involved in efforts by Arizona tribes to establish Indian gaming in that state. Her mentor from Stanford, sociologist Matt Snipp, also encouraged her to consider a career in academia. Greyeyes began graduate work in sociology, though she took time off from her program to gain a wide range of practical experience: in the Navajo Nation’s Office of Education, Research, and Statistics, and then in the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Education. Her experience with the inner workings of state, trial, and federal government informed her scholarly interests, and she is now a professor of sociology at University of New Mexico.

“We create organizational designs that can hinder our idealistic goals towards sovereignty,” Greyeyes said in an interview. “Someone can come in with so much

idealism and want to make everybody fluent in Navajo language. But in these tribal communities sometimes these rules and jurisdictional boundaries really do hinder these idealistic goals. And I don’t think people understand the different domains and the layers.”31 Manolito has stayed involved in education after graduating from Stanford. He first worked with the non-profit Futures for Children, developing experiential learning programs for Navajo youth as well as students in the Zuni Pueblo, Hopi Pueblo, Mescalero Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho communities. Most recently, he has worked as a consultant and liaison for the New Mexico state government’s Office of Substance Abuse Prevention.

In this position, he works with the Paxis Institute to develop prosocial behavior and nurturing classroom environments. As compared to his previous work at Futures For Children, his current work is limited to the New Mexico region, though Manolito noted that there are 22 different tribes in New Mexico.

In working with such a wide range of cultures, Manolito’s training in Native American Studies has served as a foundation. “One of the big things with Native American studies is that it really prepares you to approach working with tribes. It’s a stepping stone, looking at the literature, looking at stories, understanding a culture and a history.”32 Past Directors of Native American Studies include Teresa LaFromboise and Matthew Snipp.

30. Eric Manolito, interview with author, December 28, 2020.

31. Wendy Greyeyes, interview with author.

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Director’s Note................................................1

A

s founding director of CCSRE and chair of the undergraduate program, I step down from a leadership role at the Center after six years knowing that faculty, staff, and students have built a truly dynamic, innovative institution at Stanford University.

From humble origins in 1996–1997, when the CSRE undergraduate program boasted a mere thirteen majors and the Research Institute had no full-time paid staff, we can look back with pride at how an enormous commitment of time and energy paid off in the development of a thriving center devoted to teaching and research.And, with generous support from the President, Provost and Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, in recognition of the achievements of CCSRE, the Center now sits atop a solid foundation of intellectual strength and financial stability as one of the premier scholarly programs of its type in higher education.

Advisory Board ................................................2 Reflections on Al Camarillo ..........................3 Conferences and Events ................................4 African and African American Studies ........7 Asian American Studies ..................................8 Chicana/o Studies ............................................9 Profile: Paula Moya ..........................................9 Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity ..................................................10 Taube Center for Jewish Studies................11 Native American Studies..............................11 Alternative Spring Break ..............................12 Profile: Brook Hooper ..................................13 Undergraduate Opportunities....................13

The study of race and ethnicity in comparative national and international contexts and through interdisciplinary perspectives is now firmly ensconced at Stanford. As a Center that promotes second generation ethnic studies-related research and curriculum, CCSRE has served as a model for the development of several new programs at other universities across the nation in recent years.

Commencement 2001 & 2002 ............16, 17 RICSRE Programs and Activities ................18 RICSRE Executive Board..............................19 Faculty Seminar Series..................................19 Profile: Sara Johnson-La O ..........................20 Demographics Report Series......................20 RICSRE Fellows Program ............................21 Profile: R. Richard Banks ..............................22

CCSRE is uniquely positioned at the forefront of knowledge for understanding the role of race and ethnicity in the U.S. and in other societies.This state of knowledge is aptly reflected in the curriculum of the Center’s undergraduate program. With more than 120 courses to choose from, the number of students who have declared one of the four new majors and minors (established in 1996) or the longstanding Program in African and African American Studies over the past six years has soared.

In 1996–1997, for example, a total of 27

Faculty Research Networks ........................22 Graduate Programs ......................................23 Graduate Dissertation Fellows ..................23 Profile: John Jost ............................................24 CSRE Teaching Fellows ................................24 Alumni Notes ................................................25 Affiliated Faculty ............................................26 Administrative Staff ......................................27

Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity

newsletter / winter 2008

CCSRE / Building 240, Main Quad / Stanford, California 94305-2152 http://ccsre.stanford.edu/

Newsletter /Winter 2007 MLK Jr. on poverty, human rights and social justice

pg 4

hiphop: an uncompromising prism for social and political analysis

pg 12

how will developments in biomedical science affect our thinking about race?

pg 26

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Stanford University

Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity

Summer 2002

A Note from the Director

PAUL DAVIES

Newsletter

C O N TEN TS

students declared one of these five majors and minors. In Spring quarter 2002, CSRE/ AAAS/JS claimed 125 majors and minors.

The Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity has also grown impressively in recent years.As sponsor of many research and policy-oriented conferences and projects, faculty and graduate student fellowship programs, faculty research networks, and activities in support of graduate student career development, RICSRE has developed into a multifaceted institute.

In support of its mission and in recognition of the important work carried out by RICSRE, the University committed a $5 million endowment in 2001 that will provide base funding for staff and program activities in perpetuity.

When CCSRE was initiated six years ago, our goal was to make the Center one of the preeminent sites in American higher education for the study of race and ethnicity. Most of what we envisioned for the future of the Center in 1996 has become a reality, and as I leave the position of director, I give thanks to the many faculty, staff, students, and our distinguished national Advisory Board who helped me build an exciting new intellectual enterprise at Stanford University.

Al Camarillo

center for comparative studies in race and ethnicity stanford university spring 2009

Stanford University

sanctioned murder

11

research in Compton

19

politics of immigration

22

artist Orlando Lara

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CCSRE 10 Year Conference Embracing Diversity: Making and Unmaking Racial, Ethnic and Cultural Difference

Education and Opportunity: A Forum on the Kerner Commission Forty Year Report page 16

page 6

Educational Excellence and Social Responsibility: The Influence of Ethnic Studies on Service Learning

Presidential Politics Exploring Race, Class, Faith and Gender in the 2008 Election page 18

page 10

Virgen Medallion by Orlando Lara: a Virgin of Guadalupe medallion left behind by migrants walking through the Arizona desert

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Fall 2014 Newsletter / Stanford University

fall 2012 - stanford university

ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss inside: Al Camarillo Reflects on 15 Years of CCSRE page 5

Making an Impact: Ina Coleman and a National Audience

José David Saldívar Discusses “Junot Díaz: A Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Symposium” page 15 Main Quad, Building 360, Stanford, CA 94305-2152 visit: http://ccsre.stanford.edu

page 17

Language Matters: Sociolinguists and Scholars of Race and Ethnicity Gather for CREAL’s Inaugural Symposium

A Conversation with the New Chair of the National Advisory Board – Emory Lee

Center for Comparative Studies page 5 in Race and Ethnicity page 21

Community Engaged Learning Program page 10

2012-13 and 2013-14 Anne and Loren Kieve Distinguished Speaker Lectures pages 19-22

Religious and Ethnic Coexistence Initiative page 28

FALL 2016 NEWSLETTER STANFORD UNIVERSITY

A Conversation with the Chair of the National Advisory Board – Emory Lee page 5 Community Engaged Learning Program page 12 2014-15 and 2015-16 Anne and Loren Kieve Distinguished Speaker Lectures pages 19-23

ST A N F O R D U N IV E R S ITY

Newsletter

CONTENTS

Affirmative Action Panel ................................3 CCSRE Reading Room ..................................4 Conferences and Events ................................5 African and African American Studies ........7 Asian American Studies ..................................8 Chicana/o Studies ............................................9 Native American Studies ................................9 Profile: Harry Elam ........................................10 Taube Center for Jewish Studies................10 Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity ..................................................11 Profile: Orlando Lara ....................................12 Undergraduate Opportunities....................13 Summer Internships ......................................14 Learning Expedition to Belize ....................16 Commencement 2002–03 ..........................17 Research Networks ......................................19 Faculty Seminar Series..................................20 RICSRE Fellows Programs ..........................21 Profile: Monica McDermott ........................22 Stanford Integrated Schools Project ........22 Demographics Report Series......................22 Profile:Teceta Elaine Rudder Thomas ......23 CSRE Teaching Fellows ................................23 Interdisciplinary Pedagogy ..........................24 Graduate Dissertation Fellows ..................25 Alumni Updates..............................................26

I responded with a few quickly formed arguments about differences between Europe and the U.S. and the importance of studying troubling things. He wasn’t persuaded but I found what he said about Europe interesting. In Germany especially, the shadow of the Holocaust may render the term ‘race’ too charged for use in naming things. But his remark gave me another worry: perhaps he spoke for more than just Europeans. In the U.S. too, there could be an ambivalence about studying race, perhaps even about seeing race.

The Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s is something that most Americans are now proud of. Its aim was to undo the oppressive racialization of American society.

And from this aim followed a certain logic: since it was racialization that had so marred our society, perhaps we should try not to see race in our daily lives, and in the management of society. Perhaps we should be colorblind. And, because race is often a complex and frustrating topic, Americans can quickly weary of it. So maybe the comment of my German friend had a quite broad constituency.

Administrative Staff ......................................26 Affiliated Faculty ............................................28

Director’s Note.........................................1

N

ot long ago, a social psychology colleague of mine from Germany paid me a surprise visit to my office. A chatty campus tour ensued, one stop of which was the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). Explaining that I was a Director of the Center, I enthused about its programs, knowing they were right up the alley of his interests. His enthusiasm, however, was muffled. Something bothered him. When we settled back in my psychology office, he finally asked “How can you have the word ‘race’ in the title of your Center? In Europe, this would just bring up too many associations to a bad past. Can’t you study the same thing without using that word?”

Advisory Board..........................................2 Minority Alumni Conference...................3 L.A. CICERO / STANFORD NEWS SERVICE

Advisory Board ................................................2

Newsletter

CONTENTS

VISITING CCSRE Director’s Note................................................1

Who Tells the Tales?.................................4 Comparative Studies.................................5 Disciplinary Boundaries Course..............5 AAAStudies........................................6 Asian American Studies.............................7 speak—with regard to scholarly and scientific understandings of race and ethnicity.

We hear the “notes” of this emerging knowledge very clearly—both in relation to our society and other societies of the world.We are genuinely excited by the progress, progress that we believe is increasingly contributed to by our own multi-disciplinary CCSRE community and its emerging role as a convener of critical national discussions.

Chicana/o Studies......................................8

My visitor reminded me, however, that people sitting farther from the band don’t hear what we hear, and may have other preconceptions about an enterprise like CCSRE. So, in the interest of bringing others closer to the “band” of CCSRE, and to convey what the excitement is about, I thought I might describe its nature and some of the things it is achieving— all the while, working toward a sharper answer to his question.

Prizes and Awards...................................15

Its story begins with a simple fact: the increasing diversity of ours and other societies means that the pursuit of knowledge increasingly encounters the relevance of race and ethnicity—in understanding everything from the nature and spread of disease, through the major themes of American history and literature, the nature of psychological functioning, the changing form of international conflict, to the challenges of a globalizing economy.Yet on a campus like ours, this means that the schol-

Colorblind Racism Conference.............23

In contrast, my colleagues and I at CCSRE are sitting close to the “band”—so to

Continued on page 27

CCSRE

CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE AND ETHNICITY

Winter 2004

From the Director

ST A N F O R D U N IV E R S ITY

CCSRE

3

C E N T E R F O R C O M PA R AT I V E S T U D I E S I N R A C E A N D E T H N I C I T Y

Native American Studies........................9 Jewish Studies...........................................10 Public Policy Institute...............................11 Summer Internships................................12 Galarza Lecture........................................12 Tristan Ivory Profile.................................13 CSRE Commencement 2004.................14 CSRE Alumni Updates...........................16 Research Networks.................................17 Visiting and Senior Fellows.....................18 James Campbell Profile...........................19 Faculty Seminar Series............................20 Research Projects....................................21 Policing Racial Bias Conference.............22 Teaching Fellows......................................23 Graduate Dissertation Fellows..............24 Robert Smith Profile................................24 Winter Film Series...................................25 Interdisciplinary Pedagogy......................26 CCSRE Staff..............................................27 CCSRE Affiliated Faculty.........................28

A Note from the Director

All along, the Center has shown the signs of an idea right for its time: fast-growing undergraduate enrollments; very broad and committed faculty involvement; prospering ethnic studies programs; the Research Institute’s (RICSRE) success at raising funds from endowment commitments to research grants. It has been a thriving village. And now as it approaches the end of its first decade, the village shows signs of even greater maturity and distinction.

First, we had a major recruitment success this year. Along with the Communication and Sociology Departments, we were able to recruit Marcyliena Morgan and Larry Bobo to our faculty this year, both from Harvard. As many of you readers know, this recruitment is something our village has long wanted to happen. Marcy will be joining the Communication Department and CCSRE. She is the founding Director of the Hip Hop Archive, which she will be bringing with her to Stanford. This collection is an important resource within our Center and in the broader cultural studies community. Larry will be joining the Sociology Department, and next year, he will be taking over my

Director’s Note.........................................1 Advisory Board..........................................2 In Memory of Barbara Finberg................2 King Research Institute............................3 Research Institute......................................4 Faculty Seminar Series..............................5 Visiting Fellows..........................................6

Claude M. Steele, Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Psychology

Visiting Fellows Alumni Updates............7 Graduate Student Fellowships.................9 Stephanie Fryberg Profile......................10

Good leadership is important to any academic unit. But for a developing Center like ours, the availability of faculty interested in playing leadership roles is critical to its viability. In this respect, CCSRE has enjoyed great good fortune, having benefited from the leadership of so many faculty members over the years in our various programs. Adding Marcy and Larry to our village, underscores this strength. And it confirms, I believe, another level of our development: our ability to play a central role in the recruitment of strong faculty to Stanford. More and more our recruits—both faculty and graduate students—mention the centrality of CCSRE in their decision making. (This is not to mention the testimonials of our

Chicana/o Studies.....................................19

Continued on page 26

Claudine Gay Profile...............................11 FMS at Stanford.......................................11 Faculty Research Networks..................12 Reading Room Exhibits..........................13 Hai Binh Nguyen Profile........................14 Comparative Studies...............................15 AAAS .........................................................16 Asian American Studies..........................17 Brenna Clani Profile.................................18 Native American Studies.......................20 Desert Horse-Grant Profile..................20 Jewish Studies...........................................21 Public Policy Institute...............................22 Summer Internships................................23 CSRE Commencement........ ...................24 Prizes and Awards...................................25 CSRE Alumni Updates............................26 CCSRE Staff..............................................27 CCSRE Affiliated Faculty.......................28 Building 240, Main Quad Stanford, CA 94305-2152 http://ccsre.stanford.edu/

Winter 2006

A Note from the Director

E

vents here at home and around the globe remind us of the necessity of understanding how ethno-racial distinctions shape human social experience.

We were all profoundly moved by the images from the Gulf Coast States as our fellow citizens huddled in desperation and neglect at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Perhaps no other event in recent memory has so profoundly challenged the myth that we are a society that no longer needs to concern itself with battling the twin ills of poverty and racial inequality. Indeed, in this visual media dominated culture, the jolting scenes from New Orleans represent a highly evocative blow to an American self-image all too comfortable in the misplaced assumption that we have already solved the raceproblem.

We at CCSRE took the tragedy in the Gulf Coast States as a “teaching moment.” With special support from Provost John Etchemendy and the Continuing Studies Program, we launched a special 1 unit course open to the entire Stanford community as well as to the public called “Confronting Katrina: Race, Class, and Disaster in American Society.”

Although launched with little more than a week of preparation time, faculty around the university and our talented and dedicated staff, pulled together a hugely successful forum for discussing a major social and political event. At this writing we have held three of the four scheduled panel discussions. Over 100 undergraduates enrolled for credit and attendance at the session has averaged around 350 people.

In the light of faculty participation in the panels from Humanities and Sciences, the Graduate School of Business, the Hoover Institute, and the School of Law, CCSRE has once again taken the lead in informing the Stanford community about critical social issues of ethnicity, race, class, and inequality.

Like the images from Katrina, recent events in France remind us of the challenge ethno-racial division presents around the world. Any serious engagement

Lawrence D. Bobo, Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor and Director, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Program in African and African American Studies

with the challenges of intensified globalization must, plainly enough, also come to grips with how identities defined by ethnicity, religion, nationality, and race shape understanding and significant social behavior. Indeed, it should by now be a truism that those who would be leaders in business, in government, and in the nonprofit sector in the future must be adept at understanding, truly appreciating, and effectively navigating situations of contact with diverse peoples and cultures.

CCSRE will continue to be a vital and vigilant site for research, teaching, and social innovation with regard to improving multicultural knowledge and sophistication in society. Although we have undergone several transitions in leadership, CCSRE benefits from a remarkably deep and strong base of faculty support and involvement.

So much so, in fact, that we cannot always find an easy way to accommodate the faculty who want to serve in leadership roles, participate in events, and draw on our resources. As a new director, let me say, this is just the sort of dilemma one wants to face.

One sign of the strength of programs within CCSRE is the addition of Professor Clay Carson’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute as a third major wing of CCSRE. The King Papers Project has long represented an important link between Stanford University Continued on page 3

stanford university fall 2011

page 6 CSRE Service Learning Courses Bring Together Academic Research and Social Justice page 9 The Global Becomes Local as International Hip Hop Flows to Stanford page 11 Professor Al Camarillo Wins 2011 President’s Award for Excellence Through Diversity page 16

page 4

Nicole Shelton Profile...............................7

position as Director of CCSRE. He will also be bringing something with him—the Dubois Review. He and Michael Dawson of Harvard launched this journal last spring, and it has met with instant success. In just a few issues, it has become one of the most important journals for the study of race relations in the nation. Management of the journal will now be split between Harvard and Stanford. Larry and Marcy arrived on Christmas day, and at this writing, we at CCSRE are looking forward to a welcoming reception.

From Harriet Tubman to Parliament Funkadelic: Lonnie Bunch Envisions a National Museum of African American History and Culture

The Color of Change: The Faculty Development Initiative (FDI) Succeeds in Bringing Six New Scholars to Stanford

Newsletter

CONTENTS

I

t takes a village to recruit,” said Professor Hazel Markus at our last summer’s retreat. She was reflecting on CCSRE’s recruitment efforts over the past year. But the same could be said of other CCSRE functions—our undergraduate programs with their strong advising components; our visiting faculty fellows program that has become an intellectual “hot spot” on campus; our faculty networks and seminar series that contribute so much to interdisciplinary life at Stanford. It takes a village of faculty and staff who—at various times over nearly a decade now of the Center’s existence—have contributed mightily to the Center’s development, making it one of the premiere Centers of its kind in the nation.

stanford university fall 2010

Rethinking Stanford’s Curriculum for a New Century and a Global Citizenry

CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE AND ETHNICITY

Winter 2005

Paul G. Davies

CCSRE

Courtesy: Harvard University

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y

Capturing CCSRE through Annual Reports 1999-2020

CCSRE’s Newest Affiliate CREAL Launches Workshop on Race, Ethnicity and Language in Schools

Celebrating 25 Years of the King Papers Project at Stanford page 15

page 27

page 10

CENTER FOR

COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE & ETHNICITY

CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE & ETHNICITY A N N UA L R EPO RT 2 018 - 2 019 STA N FO R D U N I V ER SI T Y

CENTER FOR C O M PA R AT I V E STUDIES IN R AC E & E T H N I C I T Y A N N UA L R E P O R T 2 0 1 9 - 2 0 2 0 STA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y

ANNUAL REPORT 2017-2018 STANFORD UNIVERSITY

TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE

TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE SECTION ONE: THE FACULTY In interview after interview, alumni of CCSRE recalled the impact that faculty made on their lives. David Palumbo-Liu’s courses on literature and culture helped shape how Hai Binh Nguyen understood issues of race, identity, and justice, and her path towards a career dedicated to social justice.

Matthew Snipp served as an advisor for Wendy Greyeyes even after she graduated from Stanford and worked on Native American community issues.

Tomás Jiménez and Gary Segura sparked Perla Campos’ drive to learn more about her identity and community.

As these and other CCSRE-affiliated faculty established themselves at Stanford, they moved CCSRE in new directions. By constructing a vibrant intellectual community around the interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity, by pushing conversations about race and ethnicity into the study of technology and other new scholarly arenas, and by building bridges to community practitioners, CCSRE-affiliated faculty succeeded in transforming Stanford.

CCSRE’s impact on Stanford depended in large part upon the presence of dedicated ethnic studies scholars. Growing that presence has required constant effort. At Stanford, just as in the U.S. academy generally, struggles over faculty hiring and retention are interwoven with the history of ethnic studies. In a recent interview, Al Camarillo described the effort to hire faculty of color and ethnic studies faculty as “the most difficult, exasperating, frustrating” aspect of his work in the academy. Tenure battles have also been flashpoints on occasion, in part because they often come to represent the perceived legitimacy of fields of scholarship. In some cases, the connection between tenure and legitimacy is direct, as when one Stanford

Usha Iyer

Jonathan Rosa

administrator informed historian Estelle Freedman that her candidacy for tenure was denied in 1982 because feminist studies might turn out to be a temporary fad. In other cases, it is less direct. UCLA denied Don Nakanishi tenure in 1987 ostensibly because his scholarship did not meet the university’s standards, but many Asian American Studies scholars understood the implications: if Nakanishi, who had done as much as anyone else to build the field of Asian American Studies, was untenurable at an elite university, then perhaps no Asian American Studies scholar was.1 Faculty hiring and retention also shaped the character of university departments and whether faculty and students of color felt a sense of belonging. Sandra Drake, a specialist in Caribbean literature, was appointed Assistant Professor of English professor at Stanford in the mid-1970s.

She recalled, “I was one of two African Americans

1. Estelle Freedman, Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), ch. 3; Don Nakanishi, “Why I Fought,” Amerasia Journal 35, No. 3 (2009): 191-207.

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Gordon H. Chang

“Minority students in different departments want advisors and professors whom they can look up to and relate to.” in the English Department, but there were no Asian-Americans, no people from the Third World and only three women in a department of 40. My area was Caribbean literature. One male colleague, who was supposed to vote on my entry into the department, walked up to me and said: ‘Do they read in the Caribbean?’ I just didn’t know what to say.” Even after the establishment of CCSRE, historian Gordon Chang remembered that work in ethnic studies was typically viewed as political instead of serious scholarship within the Stanford community. One undergraduate at Stanford, who was also head of the university’s NAACP chapter, explained why he took an interest in tenure cases: “Minority students in different departments want advisors and professors whom they can look up to and relate to.”2 At Stanford, key hires during the 1990s had produced a faculty core sizable enough to anchor CCSRE’s programs. But those gains were fragile, and sometimes reversible. At the end of the decade, Stanford had only three Native American professors, and two who taught the core Native American Studies curriculum. One of those – English professor

Robert Warrior (Osage) – was up for tenure review in 1999. On February 5, 1999, the leadership team of CCSRE signed a letter to Dean of Humanities and Sciences Malcolm Beasley advocating for his receiving tenure on the basis of his contributions to the field of Native American Studies and his service to the university. Ten days later, Warrior was notified that he would not receive tenure.3 Warrior’s tenure denial came amidst a much broader controversy on campus regarding the university’s tenure process. Two years earlier, in 1997, the denial of tenure to labor historian Karen Sawislak precipitated a very public legal battle over Stanford’s tenure process and whether it was biased against women faculty. “In my cohort, people hired from 1986 through 1991,” Sawislak would later write in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “8 women were denied tenure in the humanities and 6 were granted it; 6 men were denied tenure, and 12 granted it.” In 1998, a group of women faculty called “The Women’s Coalition for Gender Equity at Stanford,” released a 16-page report detailing serious concerns about hiring and retention of women faculty; the report provoked sharp disagreement

2. Roy Johnson, “What It Was Like to Be an African American Freshman in 1962,” Stanford Magazine, September 2017, at: https://stanfordmag.org/ contents/what-it-was-like-to-be-an-african-american-freshman-in-1962; Gordon Chang, interview with author; Jennifer Stewart, “Meeting Reveals Student Interest in Tenure Cases,” Stanford Daily, February 18, 1999.

3. Letter from Faculty Steering Committee of CCSRE to Dean Mac Beasley, February 5, 1999, in Box 12 folder Meeting with Dean of H+S 12/6/99, Al Camarillo Papers ARCH 2019 135, Special Collections, Stanford University

CCSRE 25TH ANNIVERSARY

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from Provost Condoleezza Rice regarding the nature of Stanford’s commitment to increasing the number of tenured women faculty.4 For junior faculty, women faculty, and faculty of color, the tenure battles of the late 1990s had a significant impact on morale, with some coming to feel alienated from their departments as they saw friends and colleagues depart following unfavorable tenure decisions. The climate made CCSRE seem even more important to scholars working on race and ethnicity, with sentiment growing for CCSRE to take a leadership role in addressing the issue of faculty hiring and retention.5 Among the core faculty of CCSRE, the Warrior case sparked a discussion about how to respond. As with the controversy over Dean Shoven’s allocation of an Asian American Studies billet towards the hiring of a sociologist over the objections of the Asian American Studies faculty, the denial of tenure to Robert Warrior raised questions about the authority of traditional departments and deans to evaluate scholarship in emerging and hitherto marginalized fields of study. CCSRE also confronted how one tenure decision could jeopardize one of its main academic programs, since Warrior had taught half of the Native American Studies core curriculum.

“I think that we owe it to a disillusioned and cynical junior faculty and prospective generation of scholars following us, as well as to Robert Warrior, as well as to our own programs, to take some kind of position forthwith,” Sandra Drake wrote the CCSRE leadership. The group decided not to press the administration on individual cases; rather, they sent a letter to the new Dean of Humanities and Sciences Malcolm Beasley about their concern that “recent cases involving faculty diversity” would have “a negative impact [...] on our ability to sustain

Jennifer DeVere Brody

Photography: Lava Thomas

TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE

comparative ethnic studies.” The letter yielded at least two meetings with the Dean’s office, but little in the way of concrete policy changes.6 By the mid 2000s, senior faculty in CCSRE had succeeded in giving their programs a secure institutional footing. But, Al Camarillo later recalled, their pride was tempered by the recognition that very few new faculty of color and ethnic studies faculty were being hired and tenured.

Other universities were attempting to recruit Stanford’s senior faculty, and with each passing year those offers looked more attractive. In meetings with President John Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy in June of 2007, Camarillo and thendirector of CCSRE Larry Bobo proposed that a reinvigorated commitment to faculty diversity would make it easier to retain Stanford’s senior ethnic studies faculty, and asked for an allocation of ten billets to bolster searches for ethnic studies scholars. Furthermore, they proposed that the search committees include a member with relevant background in ethnic studies. Hennessy and Etchmendy greeted the proposal enthusiastically, and the Faculty Development Initiative (FDI) was

4. Karen Sawislak, “Denying Tenure: Who Said Anything About Fairness?” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 17, 1999; Diane Manuel, “Report Questions Hiring, Retention of Women Faculty,” Stanford Report, February 25, 1998.

5. See, for instance, Sharon Holland to Ian Morris, November 15, 1999, in Box 12 Folder Meeting with Hennessy and Etchemendy, as well as correspondence in Box 12 Folder Meeting with Dean Beasley, both in Al Camarillo Papers ARCH 2019 135.

6. See correspondence in Box 12 Folder Meeting with Dean Beasley, Al Camarillo Papers ARCH 2019 135.

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born. The Provost’s office would provide the faculty salary funding for the first five years of the appointment, and a member of the FDI Advisory Group would be involved in the faculty searches. A Special Assistant to the Provost for Faculty Development administered the FDI, with Al Camarillo serving in the role from 2007 to 2016, and Matthew Snipp serving since 2016.7 The FDI brought a new cohort of scholars to Stanford that have gone on to remake ethnic studies at the university. The first cohort of faculty hired under the FDI included sociologist Tomás Jiménez, political scientist Gary Segura, education scholar Samy Alim, cultural studies scholar José David Saldívar and literary critic Vaughn Rasberry. In the program’s first five years, it recruited eleven faculty to Stanford, exceeding its goal of ten. One of the faculty recruited was Jennifer DeVere Brody, who was the first woman hired through FDI. Of the 6 junior faculty recruited during that period, 5 remain at Stanford as tenured faculty (Angela Garcia, Tomás Jiménez, Kathryn Gin Lum, Ana Minian, Vaughn Rasberry).

In recognition of the program’s success, the university administration renewed it after its initial five-year period, and the FDI continues to provide support for the hiring of ethnic studies faculty. To date, 22 faculty have been hired through the FDI.

Lauren Davenport

Vaughn Raspberry

Alfredo J. Artiles

Duana Fullwiley

Tomás Jiménez

Kathryn Gin Lum

Hakeem Jefferson

7. See materials in Box 12 Folder FDI 2007, Al Camarillo Papers ARCH 2019 135.

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TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE SECTION TWO: CULTIVATING INTERDISCIPLINARITY In an interview about his experiences with CCSRE, sociologist Matt Snipp reflected upon the Center as an important complement to the intellectual community he found within his sociology department. He described CCSRE as “a second intellectual home.”

The vitality of the CCSRE community, Snipp believed, arose from its interdisciplinary nature, which gave him “a window into the way other people, other disciplines, thought about, theorized, and did research about race and ethnicity. [...] it just opened up a new set of intellectual horizons.” Snipp was a trained demographer who had worked with and analyzed surveys for much of his professional career. In discussions with scholars from English and Comparative Literature, Snipp noticed that the idea of narrative structure kept coming up. “And I got thinking, well, a survey. [...] is basically a device for eliciting a narrative structure. That’s a really powerful way of thinking about how to design surveys.”8

Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

Matthew Snipp

8. Mathew Snipp, interview with author, December 8, 2020.

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Claude Steele and Hazel Markus Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

The CCSRE community, Snipp believed, arose from its interdisciplinary nature, which gave him “a window into the way other people, other disciplines, thought about, theorized, and did research about race and ethnicity.

“How are we going to actually build a somewhat harmonious society once you realize that there’s more than one answer to what’s good, right, true, and beautiful in the world?”

Claude Steele also became committed to CCSRE’s cultivation of interdisciplinary perspectives. Being part of the CCSRE community and having served as Faculty Director, Steele recalled, “I could hear what the lawyers thought. I could hear what people in the med school thought. I could hear what business people thought. I could hear what the historians thought. And all of a sudden, you develop an acumen that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to develop.”9 Many of these interdisciplinary conversations occurred in the Center’s Faculty Research Network program. Organized within RICSRE, CCSRE’s research center, the faculty research networks convened humanities and social science scholars to mutually explore specific topics over a multi-year period. Hazel Markus joined Fredrickson as codirector in 1998, replacing Claude Steele, and she co-convened a research network on “The Meanings and Practices of Diversity.” In an interview, Markus recalled the gatherings as a way for faculty across

a range of disciplines to build a shared set of intellectual reference points by discussing readings and presenting research. Markus described her research network as animated by an enduring problem: “How are we going to actually build a somewhat harmonious society once you realize that there’s more than one answer to what’s good, right, true, and beautiful in the world?”10 For Markus, the research network was a way of thinking through issues that came up in her work as an educator and graduate student mentor. One Korean graduate student in her seminar was upset that other students kept pressing her to speak more during class. Markus could see from the student’s papers that she was full of ideas, and this led the two of them to explore the range of culturally-specific understandings of the association between thinking and talking. The Faculty Research Network was one forum for Markus to present the results of this exploration.

9. Claude Steele, interview with author, April 14, 2021.

10. Hazel Markus, interview with author, December 16, 2020.

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TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE

REALISM in the

Wo r l d

A conference sponsored by the RICSRE/SHC How Do Identities Matter? Network and the Junior Scholars Caucus of The Future of Minority Studies National Research Project

Ramón Saldívar and Paula Moya

English Professor Paula Moya coordinated a CCSRE faculty research network titled “How do Identities Matter?” from 2003 to 2007, in collaboration with the Stanford Humanities Center. At the time, Moya was part of an initiative called the Future of Minority Studies (FMS), which sought to bring ethnic studies, gender, queer, and disability scholars into dialogue about “the epistemic significance of identity claims.” In other words, the scholars were attempting to acknowledge the importance of how identity shaped understandings of the world while also maintaining a commitment to truth claims. FMS provided a larger, national community of scholars that Moya could draw on to develop “How do Identities Matter?”, a conference in 2005 that involved 16 panelists from across the country discussingsubjects such as the legitimacy of African American political identity, representations of the Dalit community, and the experiences of working-class and immigrant students in the college classroom.11

S CH ED UL E

Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

Thursday, May 19, 2005

|

8:00am-6:30pm

| Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall

Breakfast

8:00am

Introductory Remarks

8:15am

Paula Moya, Stanford University, English Ulka Anjaria, Stanford University, Modern Thought and Literature

Panel 1 Presenters:

8:30am-10:30am Danielle Heard, Cornell University, English Amanda Nolacea Harris, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,

US Latina/o and Hispanic Literatures Carmen Sanjuán-Pastor, Stanford University, Spanish & Portuguese Respondent: Michael Hames-García, Binghamton University, English Chair: Jennifer Harford Vargas, Stanford University, English

Tea and Samosas

10:30am-11:00am

Panel 2 Presenters:

11:00am-1:00pm Ulka Anjaria, Stanford University, Modern Thought and Literature Esha Niyogi De, University of California, Los Angeles, Women's Studies, Asian American Studies

Ernesto J. Martínez, Binghamton University, English Respondent: Alex Woloch, Stanford University, English Chair: Sarah Allison, Stanford University, English

Lunch and Informal Discussion

1:00pm-2:45pm

Panel 3

2:45pm-4:45pm

Presenters:

Annmaria Shimabuku, Cornell University, East Asian Literature Karin Spirn, Diablo Valley College, Las Positas College, English Gerald Campano, Indiana University, Bloomington, Education Respondent: Michele Elam, Stanford University, English Chair: Sarah Lagrotteria, Stanford University, English

Concluding Discussion Moderator:

4:45pm-5:30pm

Paula Moya, Stanford University, English

Poetry Reading by Ogagaoghene Ifowodo

5:30pm-6:00pm

Wine and Snacks

6:00pm-6:30pm

Dinner at Paula Moya’s House for all Conference Participants and Attendees

7:00pm

Other faculty research networks have included: “The Social and Cultural Construction of Race and Ethnicity,” “Aftermaths of Slavery”; “Reading Race”; “Ethnic Violence and Genocide”; “Academic Success in Diverse Classrooms”; “Racial Bias in Health Care”; and “Emancipatory Performance and Racial Formation.”

Prudence Carter, who was director of RICSRE from 2012 to 2014, described the intellectual community she found in RICSRE and CCSRE: “Our mosaic community encompassed both rigorous scholarship and deep fellowship among thinkers committed to knowledge production, humanistic and artistic endeavors, and solutions to the problems of racism and white supremacy.

CCSRE and RICSRE were my intellectual home

11. Paula Moya, interview with author, December 14, 2020; “How Do Identities Matter” at: http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/identities/cgi-bin/index.php

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and community.” During Carter’s tenure as RICSRE director, the center “established a fellows program for Stanford faculty and deepened our AL has sought to work The symposium demonstrated Stanford’s ongoing role as commitment to training graduate students a leader in producing scholars who think across about language international community intertwined with race and ethnicity. CREAL Director, the campus onas the comparative studies raceby and Associate Professor of Education of and, courtesy, re of race and ethnicity ethnicity.”12 Anthropology and Linguistics H. Samy Alim, is himself a legacy of this history. CREAL Co-Director John R. Rickford CCSRE hashashosted a bringing number examine the linguistic pioneered raceof andconferences ethnicity to the forefront of linguistics, while Co-Director Arnetha Ball has emphasized that demonstrated the power of interdisciplinary entities, the role of the role of language in education. Rickford has been at since 1980 and isand a chaired Professor of Linguistics approaches to Stanford the study of race ethnicity. tions, and the linguistic and, by courtesy, Education. Ball is a Professor of Education One such conference was organized in inMay and the Director of the Program African and African ulations.”

American Studies, having been at Stanford for over a decade.

2012 by the CCSRE-affiliated fornow Race, Many of the symposium’sCenter participants, established in and leading the next The generation of scholarship, Ethnicity, and academia Language (CREAL). conference, r H. Samy Alim, Director of Stanford’s were mentored in undergraduate or graduate education at We now have a critical mass of young StanfordLanguaging

by Professors Rickford and Ball.

“Racing Language, Race,” featured thnicity and theorizing the complex new scholarship in sociolinguistics.

The ter for Race, Ethnicity and Language Stanford’s legacy as a long-term leader directors in scholarship about y hosting their inaugural conference race and ethnicity, and theRickford, strength of and John Rickford’s of CREAL, H. Samy Alim, John er, who co-sponsored the event. At and Arnetha Ball’s career mentorship was evident in the e: New Approaches to the StudyAretha of University’s strong representation at the conference.

Ball, used the conference to solidify and Django the United States, Europe, and the Paris, Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy in international, the interdisciplinary network of scholars ons of language in constructing and Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, of graduated from language.

Stanford with a PhD in studying the intersection race and Education and a minor in Applied Linguistics in 2008. At engaged with each other and the the symposium, Paris presented his cutting-edge research Building off Stanford’s history of innovative wealth of innovative research. The in language and pedagogy in the changing urban school scholarship in this area, the conference m’s intention to “start thinking across environment. Afterward, he reflected“was on the symposium’s y,” inside the United States as well success at bringing together “traditions in sociolinguistics, designed to use this powerful legacy to shape future ding the gendered meanings of the linguistic anthropology, and education” at the same time that 13 new connections, moving beyond the boundaries South Africa to South Korea, how it forged research agendas.” ulti-layered identities, how the Bay of each discipline. The participants embraced the “tension The intellectual of RICSRE early, of the panethnic Asian American identity betweenlife pushing and revising received dominant versions w Mexican and Puerto Rican youth connections between race and language while recognizing and crucial, support from a number of important to reshape Latina/o identities and the ways race and language remain tied to social inequality.” ning” of America.

Paris added, a real gift to beprovided back at Stanford grants. The Russell Sage“It was Foundation a joining the crucial and necessary work of CREAL.” $416,000 grant to support research into models of s commonly pronounced both “seeouraged the symposium’s audience, symposium was designed to use this powerful inclusion that CREAL’s acknowledged diversity. In 1998, the on. The distinction is revealing. The legacy to shape future research agendas. “Now that we have f language use that hold important criticalprovided mass,” Alim urged, do we take this?

How do Ford Foundation a $2 “where million dollar seed udies of race and ethnicity. Since its we move the field forward in such a way that we contribute grant for a project on “Comparative Perspectives on an interdisciplinary and international both theoretical and practical knowledge that is meaningful e and ethnicity within sociolinguistics, to Communities of Color? That’s been a guiding focus of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender,” co-cooordinated by racial identities, the role of language Professor Rickford’s and Professor Ball’s research and it is our inalization of racialized populations.” collective goal for the CCSRE with the Institute forfuture.”

Research on Women CREAL strives to share academic and Gender, and the Program in Feminist Studies. mmunities, “to help resolve the often –Annelise Heinz he intersection of race, ethnicity and The project began with a faculty and graduate Annelise Heinz is on a Ph.D.poverty, Candidate in the Department of History. She is student workshop series inequalities, researching the surprising American history of the Chinese game mahjong osium began with a well-attended and identities.and Emerging from workshop series the politics of culture fromthe the 1920s through the 1960s.

Annelise's ents from across the United States work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in American e presenters took advantage of the themes, the project then hosted a roundtable and transpacific history. Before beginning graduate work, Annelise lived ether in conversation. From training in Southwest China 2007-2008, teaching English to graduate students at in Hawaii to graduate student antidiscussion about the local impact of welfare reform, Yunnan University. Previously, she worked in education and social work posters focused on a wide range of featuring localincommunity leaders, and an interview Washington State. A native of Southern California, Annelise earned her B.A. in History at Whitman with author Luis Rodriguz.14College in 2003.

Racing Language, Languaging Race inaugural conference

Professor John Rickford (Co-director of CREAl) and conference presenter, Professor Django Paris.

Thursday & Friday May 3 & 4, 2012 Levinthal Hall.

Stanford Humanities Center Hosted by Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL)

Professor H. Samy Alim, (Director of CREAl), welcomes scholars & introduces the main conferences theme

Linguistics Professor Penny Eckert and graduate students engage in dialogue.

photos left & right: Graduate students present research at the Poster Session. photo bottom right: Professors John Baugh, Django Paris, and Arnetha Ball (Co-director of CREAL).

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12. Prudence Carter, correspondence with author, April 2, 2021.

13. Annelise Heinz, “Language Matters,” CCSRE, Newsletter, Fall 2012, 21-22, quote on 22.

14. CCSRE, Newsletter, Summer 1999; CCSRE, Newsletter, Spring 2001.

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TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE The Irvine Foundation provided a $3.2 million grant to fund initiatives over three years beginning in 1999. The funding allowed CCSRE to develop the Public Policy / Leadership Institute (PPLI), the Public Service Summer Institute (PSSI), to create dissertation fellowships for graduate students, to subsidize teaching load releases for junior faculty, and to coordinate the Community-University roundtable bringing scholars into discussion with local community activists. The PPLI and PSSI proved hugely popular among undergraduates and endured for several years, and CCSRE maintained a program for graduate dissertation fellowships through the present.

CCSRE has continued the tradition of supporting new, innovative, and impactful programs. The Race and Justice Research Labs were launched in 2021. Currently, there are nine labs that seek to link ethnic studies scholarship with community-based practices of racial justice. Each lab is led by a Stanford faculty and relies upon collaborative work with a community partner, and focuses on developing approaches to racial justice rooted in cutting-edge research. One such lab is led by sociologist Jackelyn Hwang and works with the City of Oakland’s Department of Housing and Community Development. By looking at the full range of forms of displacement and housing instability, including but going beyond eviction, the lab examines the roots of racial and ethnic disparities in residential displacement in order to develop policies to eliminate those disparities.

CCSRE has achieved national recognition for its work as a center for ethnic studies scholarship.

On June 19, 2018, Prof. Jennifer DeVere Brody and CCSRE convened a National Leadership Summit that brought together leaders of ethnic studies centers from eight other universities across the United States. The participants discussed the

National Leadership Summit

significance of their work during a political moment in which issues of race were front and center, and how best to reach and engage the public. The summit led to the development of the Mellon Foundation-funded Centering Race Consortium (see Part Four).15 As part of a national community of ethnic studies research centers, RICSRE has often sponsored fellowships for visiting faculty and postdoctoral scholars. During their year as part of the CCSRE community, these faculty and scholars are able to pursue their research while also being part of the intellectual life of the center. Prudence Carter recalled how visiting scholars generated new kinds of dialogues about race and ethnicity within CCSRE: “We continued to attract some of the most illustrious and notable people to join our community as guests.

I remember our community’s engagements with the incomparable Lani Guinier, Melissa Harris-Perry,

15. “CCSRE Hosts National Leadership Summit,” July 9, 2018, at: https://ccsre.stanford.edu/news/ccsre-hosts-national-leadership-summit

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Melanie Lamotte

Maxine Hong Kingston, Junot Diaz, Gerald Torres, in addition to Stanford’s own constellation of highly visible race scholars.” 16 One recent postdoctoral fellow, Prof. Melanie Lamotte, described her time at CCSRE as “a lifechanging experience.” Lamotte added, “It gave me the time I needed to focus on my research and to complete my first book. Thanks to the support I got from the faculty at CCSRE, I was able to land several tenure-track job offers. Being surrounded by such a diverse and inspiring collection of scholars helped me gain the confidence I needed to succeed in the academic world. Most importantly, hearing about everybody’s research at CCSRE was a truly

“Being surrounded by such a diverse and inspiring collection of scholars helped me gain the confidence I needed to succeed in the academic world.” transformative and eye-opening experience. I learned a lot about the question of racial justice in different places across the world, and how to solve it.”

16. Prudence Carter, correspondence with author, April 2, 2021. A partial list of past visiting scholars include: Gabriela Arredondo, Eric Avila, Rick Baldoz; Stephanie Batiste, Ned Blackhawk, Elizabeth Bergman; Thomas Biolsi; Anthony Bogues, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, James Campbell, Glenda Carpio; Dolores Inés Casillas, Miroslava Chávez-García, Cherrie Lalnunzri Chhangte, Carolyn Chen, Sin Yi Cheung, Sergio De La Mora, Michele Elam, Ramzi Fawaz; Tyrone Forman; Michael Hames-Garcia, Jewelle Taylor Gibbs; Petronhila Beatriz Goncalves e Silva; Thomas Guglielmo; Ange-Marie Hancock; Luke Charles Harris; Libra Hilde; Yuki Imoto; Alison Isenberg; Stacey Jessiman de Nanteuil Gaye Theresa Johnson; Mark Dean Johnson; Moon-Kie Jung; Barbara Krauthammer; Denise Khor; Melanie Lamotte; Long Le-Khac; Soo Im Lee; Amanda Lewis; George Lipsitz; Rosina Lozano; Jean J. Kim; Melissa Michelson; Jerry Reid Miller; Nancy Marie Mithlo; Alaina Morgan; Marcia Ochoa; Michael Omi; Thomas Pettigrew; Howard Winant; Ana Elena Puga; Jennifer Richeson; Dorothy Roberts; Mark Q. Sawyer; J. Nicole Shelton, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson; Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu; Celine Parreñas Shimizu; Richard Schweder; Dara Strolovich; Garcia Tendayi Viki; Johannes Voelz; Ulrich Wagner; Jamele Watkins; Jenny Heijun Wills; Mina Yoo; Harvey Young; Nicholas Maurice Young; Sabrina Zirkel.

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MAKING AN IMPACT

SECTION ONE: COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT A core value of CCSRE is linking research to practical, community-centered engagement.

CCSRE’s history includes a long tradition of forging those links, not only through the development of critical service learning, but also the establishment of the Public Policy / Leadership Institute and Public Service Summer Institute. In addition, CCSRE has launched initiatives that seek to bring university researchers into conversation with community practitioners in order to both transform academic knowledge and impact public policy. One of the earliest such initiatives was the CommunityUniversity Roundtables Project, which was led

by Dr. April Young and funded by the James Irvine Foundation. By convening roundtables with CCSRE faculty, community leaders from low-income communities, and policy-makers, the project sought to foster collaboration between scholars and community organizations. As part of the Roundtables Project, Prof. Jennifer Eberhardt worked with community residents and local law enforcement, utilizing her research on implicit bias

Jennifer Eberhardt

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to shift discussions around law enforcement training.

Another early CCSRE initiative was the Stanford Integrated Schools Project. Directed by RICSRE Associate Director Dr. Dorothy Steele, the project looked at the experiences of over 1750 students in 84 classrooms to identify best practices for education within diverse classroom settings. The project fit into a larger transition in education research that argued against viewing students of color in terms of ‘deficits’ rather than ‘assets’, and also pushed back against dominant notions that the best way to deal with diversity was through ignoring racial and ethnic identity. From their analysis of the data, Steele along with project participants Hazel Markus, Frances Green, and Amanda Lewis concluded that “focusing on building positive relationships among students and teachers, providing high expectations and challenging curriculum for all students, and using diversity as a resource for teaching and

Praxis Fellowship

Photo: Lipo Ching

MAKING AN IMPACT

Above: Institute for DIversity in the Arts From left: Harry Elam, Gina Hernandez-Clarke

learning (instead of being color-blind), is linked to higher student achievement and to students’ sense of personal safety.”1 CCSRE has also developed a long-standing partnership with the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA). The founding of IDA in 2000 was inspired by Stanford’s Committee on Black Performing Arts (CBPA), which dates back to 1969; the two institutes merged in 2005. Since its inception under the leadership of Director Harry Elam and Associate Director Gina Hernandez-Clarke, IDA has linked arts practice to the practice of social justice. Through CCSRE’s partnership with IDA, CSRE majors are able to incorporate a theoretically rigorous arts practice into their course of study. For undergraduates, this culminates in a senior project or honors thesis with both a creative and an analytical component. CCSRE’s partnership with IDA fulfills, in many ways, the vision first articulated in the Chicano Studies Committee’s initial report to Dean

Shoven, which recommended the establishment of a Committee on Chicano Performing Arts (CCPA) that would collaborate with the CBPA. “The CCPA would be uniquely dedicated to theater and performance, making it possible, for example, for students to major in Performance and Culture within the Chicano Studies program. [...] The CCPA would work in tandem with the already existing Committee on Black Performing Arts, and would be modeled on its existing structure.”2 IDA also serves AAAS students and the annual showcase of IDA concentrators from both programs is a highlight of the academic year.

Key figures who have worked with and/or overseen the program include: Harry Elam, Cherrie Moraga, Jeff Chang, Ellen Oh, A-Lan Holt, and Adam Banks.

Stanford has long been identified with Silicon Valley and all the technological innovation that name connotes. Until recently, however, the discussion about race and the tech sector has mainly focused on employment statistics. CCSRE’s

1. CCSRE, newsletter, Winter 2006.

2. “Final Report of the Chicano Studies Committee”; Gina Hernandez-Clarke, interview with author, December 10, 2020; Ramón Saldívar, interview with author, December 29, 2020.

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MAKING AN IMPACT Technology + Racial Equity Initiative, led by CCSRE’s Executive Director Daniel Murray, Ph.D., aims to broaden and deepen the conversation. The initiative developed from a cross-sector meeting hosted by Faculty Director Brody that grew into a panel featuring Gordon Chang, Jackelyn Hwang, Antero Garcia, and Bridget Algee-Hewitt at CCSRE’s annual faculty retreat. It was then publicly launched with a panel on “Race, Rights, and Facial Recognition” at a 2019 conference sponsored by the Institute on Human Centered AI. The panel featured Algee-Hewitt alongside Matt Cagle of the ACLU and Wendy Chun of Simon Fraser University. The discussion ranged from the use of facial recognition technology to track communities of color, the ways algorithms encoded, in Chun’s words, “legacies of eugenics,” to the ethics of tech-driven anthropological research. Since then, the Tech + Race Initiative has

Technology and Racial Equity Practitioner Fellows, 2020

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continued to highlight the manifold imbrications of technology and racialization through roundtables, seminars, and other forums.

The Technology + Racial Equity has received two $180,000 “Network Challenge” grants from the Public Interest Technology University Network, to

fund CCSRE’s Race and Technology Practitioner Fellows program in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab and the Institute for Human-Centered AI. The program, which supports practitioners seeking to bridge the struggle for racial justice with technology studies. In 2020, the practitioners gathered for a week in January for workshops and discussions around their projects. The fellows’ projects have included addressing racial bias in government automated decision-making systems globally, curbing the harmful impacts of Agricultural Technology on Latinx farming communities, and shaping city-wide technology policy in Minneapolis.

In Fall of 2021, the Center will launch a Technology and Racial Equity Graduate Fellowship program with leadership from faculty in the School of Engineering and the School of Humanities & Sciences.

In 2020, CCSRE and similar centers at three other universities – Brown, Yale, and the University of Chicago – received a $4 million dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to advance the study of race within the humanities and the arts. The four centers comprise the Centering Race Consortium, and the grant supports a range of projects and initiatives, from an arts practitioner fellowship to research projects with direct public impacts. One example of such a research project is an arts-based diversion program with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, which encourages non-carceral approaches to criminal justice. Another project looked at monuments, murals and movements.Ultimately, the Consortium incubates new scholarly and practitioner networks that will lead to revitalize studies of race and ethnicity within the humanities and arts, and promote new approaches to racial justice.

CSRE has grown exponentially over the last few years, hosting an FDI Postdoctoral Fellowship, several Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships, a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Abassi Center, numerous Visiting Scholars, guest lectures, new universitywide partnerships and achieving greater national recognition for its research work.

Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, Advisory Board Chair

SECTION TWO: THE ADVISORY BOARD CCSRE’s reach extends beyond faculty, students, and staff to leaders outside academia. The center’s advisory board embodies this spirit of campuscommunity collaboration. The advisory board undertakes a number of projects each year to advance the strategic mission of CCSRE, and it also plays an important role in linking CCSRE to the broader society. The national advisory board historically included ethnic studies scholars, business and education leaders, attorneys, artists, and others; all board members have been changed by their experience with CCSRE or ethnic studies more generally. The CCSRE advisory board has been composed of a majority of people of color for decades.

Current board chair Valerie Red-Horse Mohl is an award-winning documentary film-maker who is also owner/founder of Red-Horse Financial Group and the Chief Financial Officer of East Bay Community Foundation. Her work in social entrepreneurship began in 1996, when she founded an investment bank whose purpose was to provide Native American communities with access to financial resources for economic development.

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MAKING AN IMPACT “CCSRE reflects the global society. Many business schools and companies simply do not,” Red-Horse Mohl said after joining the board. “How do we work for a more balanced, representative society? Given the global crisis we face, CCSRE is simply the most important place at Stanford!” She teaches a popular course for CSRE on social entrepreneurship and racial equity.3 Previous board chair Emory Lee (AB ‘59, AM ‘64) had a Stanford undergraduate experience in the 1950s not too different from those of CCSRE majors today who seek to apply their knowledge in the community: a Stanford course on contemporary China led him to volunteer in San Francisco Chinatown, where he later worked in a youth program. Lee joined the advisory board in 2009 at the tail-end of nearly four decades of public service with the Department of Health and Human Services. Lee noted that “CCSRE serves as a new paradigm for other colleges and universities experiencing diminishing commitments to ethnic studies established in the late ‘60s and ‘70s.”4 Past board chairs include sociologist Margaret Andersen, Dr. Augustus White, the first black graduate of Stanford School of Medicine and Richard Lyman. “CCSRE provides a model for other universities,” Andersen told an interviewer, “by linking the different interdisciplinary programs that foster research and teaching on race and ethnicity.

The unique part of CCSRE is that each program is able to maintain its leadership while also engaging students and faculty in collaborative work.”5 CCSRE has benefitted from the financial and intellectual support that so many board members have made over the years. Ina Coleman, who is based in L.A. joined the board in the 2011-2012 academic year. At the time, Coleman was managing director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and responsible

for both global and U.S.-based programs promoting women’s rights and leadership development. With a background in marketing and communications, Coleman brought to the board a passion for connecting impactful scholarship with a public eager for new perspectives on issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In 2013, Coleman endowed funds to sustain CCSRE’s communications work and fellowship programs. As she said when she joined the board, “the award-winning and outstanding research and work that’s at the center can impact and promote a much-needed national conversation about race and ethnicity in this country.”6 Board members have also supported CCSRE’s programs that engage the public. Loren Kieve (Cherokee) has served on the board for nearly two decades. Kieve had attended Stanford as an English major and did graduate work at Oxford, where he switched to legal studies. Upon returning to the U.S., Kieve worked as a trial lawyer, cutting his teeth on smaller cases and eventually moving onto major cases including the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kieve had long-standing interests in both education and civil rights: he served on the board of the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and also worked in the office of Rep. Allard Loewenstein, a prominent civilrights supporter. When Claude Steele invited him to join the CCSRE board, Kieve recalled, it seemed like a perfect fit. “I think that racial understanding and advancing racial justice are perhaps the most important things that we can be doing within the United States today. And I think that CCSRE is at the heart of that.”7 After joining the board, the Kieve family established the Anne and Loren Kieve Distinguished Speaker Fund, which sustains CCSRE’s annual Kieve Lecture. The Kieve Lecture brings to campus some of the most exciting individuals working in

3. CCSRE, Annual Report 2018-2019.

4. CCSRE, Newsletter, Fall 2014.

5. Victor Thompson, “A Conversation with Margaret Andersen,” CCSRE Newsletter, Spring 2009: 26-7, quote on 26.

6. CCSRE, Newsletter, Fall 2012.

7. Loren Kieve, interview with author, January 27, 2021.

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Kieve lectures.

From top: Anne and Loren Kieve with Dolores Huerta; Ai-Jen Poo; Bryan Stevenson

“I think that racial understanding and advancing racial justice are perhaps the most important things that we can be doing within the United States today. And I think that CCSRE is at the heart of that.”

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MAKING AN IMPACT the field of racial justice and is a highlight for the entire CCSRE community. In addition, it brings the CCSRE intellectual community into engagement with a broader public. The inaugural lecture was delivered in Fall 2005 by Glenda Carpio of Harvard. Looking back on a decade and a half of Kieve lectures, Loren Kieve, who also chaired the board, reflected, “We’re very proud of what the Kieve distinguished lectureship series has done. We’ve had everything from N. Scott Momaday, the first Native American to receive a Pulitzer Prize [...]. We’ve had Dolores Huerta, an icon.

We had Bryan Stevenson, who was one of my heroes on civil liberties, fighting against the death penalty. So I think it’s given CCSRE a footprint, a platform, and public visibility that we’re very proud of.”8 Another annual lecture predates CCSRE’s founding. The annual Galarza Lecture, named after eminent Chicano Stanford alumnus Ernesto Galarza (MA ‘29), was launched in 1986. A scholaractivist, Galarza was also a prolific author who advocated for civil rights and the rights of workers.

The Stanford Center for Chicano Research hosted the Galarza Lecture and awarded the Galarza Prizes to exceptional undergraduate students. When the SCCR fully merged with RICSRE in 2005, RICSRE took over responsibility for both the lecture series and the prizes. The speakers for the Galarza Lecture are among the most distinguished figures in the Chicanx/Latinx community in the U.S.; one CCSRE newsletter described the Galarza Lecture as the Chi/ Las program’s “crowning event” (2005) Since 1996, notable Galarza Lecture speakers have included Dr. Arturo Madrid, Luis Valdez (Teatro Campesino), Juliet Garcia (President UT Brownsville / Texas Southmost College), Michael Olivas (Prof. Law, University of Houston), Arturo Vargas (NALEO), Ricardo Ramirez (University of Notre Dame) and Dr. Alicia Schmidt-Camacho (Yale). The Galarza Lectures will be renamed the Camarillo-Galarza Lectures in recognition of Prof. Al Camarillo’s contributions to the Chicanx and Latinx community at Stanford.

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8. Loren Kieve, interview with author.

CCSRE FACULTY DIRECTORS INCLUDE:

SECTION THREE: REDEFINING LEADERSHIP The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity counts some of the most eminent scholars in ethnic studies among its roster of past and current faculty directors. CCSRE is notable for being led by a diverse leadership, with faculty of color at the helm. Current director Prof. Jennifer DeVere Brody is the first woman of color (she identifies as black and queer) to lead CCSRE and, apart from founding director Al Camarillo, has the longest tenure in the directorship.

“I am grateful, as an FDI Faculty hire,” Brody said, “to have the connection to the wonderful colleagues – students, staff. faculty and practitioner fellows – that comprise our CCSRE community. Our collective commitment to interdisciplinary race studies and racial justice impacts the entire University.”

Al Camarillo (1996 - 2002) Claude Steele (2002 - 2005) Larry Bobo (2005 - 2007) Hazel Markus (Acting Director 2007 - 2008) Matt Snipp (2008 - 2011, Interim Director 2015 - 2016) Ramón Saldívar (2011 - 2012) José Davíd Saldívar (2012 - 2015) Jennifer DeVere Brody (2016 - 2021) Paula Moya (2021 - ) RICSRE FACULTY DIRECTORS INCLUDE: Claude Steele George Fredrickson Hazel Markus Al Camarillo Jennifer Eberhardt James Campbell Prudence Carter Paula Moya Alfredo Artiles

Al Camarillo

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MAKING AN IMPACT Staff CCSRE’s staff have played an important role within the CCSRE community. Heidi Lopez, the center’s financial assistant and administrative associate, first started working at CCSRE during the summer of 2000 when she was still a college student in Ohio. She began working full-time at the center in 2008, though she remembers being extremely nervous about taking the job. “I had so many doubts about myself and I didn’t feel confident,” Lopez remembered. Fortunately, Lopez took the job, and found many supportive colleagues. “There have been so many people in CCSRE that have encouraged me and supported me along the way,” she recalled. The highlight of working at CCSRE has been interacting with students. “Getting to know our students and learning about them and their amazing work,” Lopez said, “is so inspiring and gives me hope for the future.” In 2019 Lopez won the university’s highest award for staff employees, the Amy J. Blue Award. Lopez is one member of an exceptional wider team of staff at CCSRE that manage the day-to-day operations of the center and contribute to every aspect of the vital work done under its aegis.

Current staff include: Daniel Murray, Executive Director Rigoberto Marquéz, Associate Director of Academic Programs and Community Engaged Learning Marsha Challoner, Center Manager Perlita Dicochea, Communications and Events Associate and Program Coordinator Byron Barahona, Student Services Specialist Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Senior Research Scientist Past Executive Directors and Associate Directors include Dorothy Steele, Elizabeth Wahl, and MarYam Hamedani.

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Daniel Murray and Heidi Lopéz Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford News Service

RaceWorks CCSRE was launched as an attempt to make Stanford a leading institution in ethnic studies. Over the course of CCSRE’s 25 year history, the core vision of CCSRE – which understood comparative and international approaches as central to the future of ethnic studies – has been vindicated. At the same time, the center has grown and transformed by incorporating new programs in community-engaged learning, bridging academic study and arts practice, advancing research initiatives that break new ground, fostering community collaborations, and sparking discussions in the wider public.

One project that combines many of these aspects of CCSRE’s work is RaceWorks, a multi-media resource for educators and facilitators that provides a primer on racial literacy. RaceWorks draws on the cutting edge scholarship that Stanford faculty affiliates of CCSRE are producing through its partner in this venture, Stanford SPARQ, run by Jennifer Eberhardt and Hazel Markus as well as Dr. MarYam Hamedani,

a former Associate Director of CCSRE. The RaceWorks platform was conceived by Hazel Markus and Paula Moya, and was launched in the Spring of 2020. It features digestible videos, a toolkit, and provides facilitators guides to generate collective discussion on race and racism. Envisioned as “an open access, modular, and supplemental resource,” RaceWorks is one way CCSRE is intervening into our current moment of widespread recognition about the nature of systemic racism in the United States. As ethnic studies continues to reinvent itself under new conditions, and amidst challenges to its mission, it will remain committed to fostering new insights about race and ethnicity. Indeed, CCSRE promises to be at the forefront of racial scholarship for racial equity for another 25 years.

MarYam Hamedani

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Photo: Nikk La

Stills from RaceWorks. Pratibha Parmar, Kali Films

CCSRE TIMELINE

1996

1969

African and Afro-American Studies Program and Committee on Black Performing Arts Founded

1986

Inaugural Ernesto Galarza Lecture

1980

Stanford Center for Chicano Research Founded

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CCSRE is established. Faculty Senate votes to approve CSRE, CS, AAS, NAS majors

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1994

Hunger Strike; Mellon Seminar on Comparative Perspectives on Race

1969-2001

2000

1998

Institute for Diversity in the Arts founded

First degrees in CSRE conferred

1997

CCSRE begins Graduate Student Teaching Fellows program

1999

RICSRE begins its Faculty Research Networks; Graduate Student Dissertation Fellowship program begins

2001

First Intro to CSRE course is taught

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CCSRE TIMELINE

2005

Inaugural Anne and Loren Kieve Distinguished Lecture

2016

2010

Praxis Fellowship launched

Doing Race published

2007

Faculty Development Initiative (FDI) launched; Raikes Foundation donation establishes community engaged learning program

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2012

Jewish Studies major established

2005-2021

2019

Technology and Racial Equity Initiative launched

2018

National Leadership Summit

2019

PhD Minor launched

2020

Centering Race in the Arts and Humanities and RaceWorks launched

2021

Race and Justice Research Labs

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CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE & ETHNICITY 25TH ANNIVERSARY STANFORD UNIVERSITY

25TH ANNIVERSARY 1996-2021

CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE AND ETHNICITY 450 JANE STANFORD WAY, BUILDING 360 STANFORD, CA 94305 CCSRE.STANFORD.EDU