Self-determination and Student Power: Interview with LALS Dr. Miguel Ángel Castañeda

Interview Conducted by Yamitza Yuivar Villarreal

This past summer, Dr. Miguel Ángel Castañeda joined DePaul as the STRC Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies. His research has focused on how Chicana/o student movements have transformed universities. We talked about how his personal experiences have shaped this work, his aspirations at DePaul, and the students' power to reveal contradictions in universities and reimagine higher education.

I was born in San Diego, California. My parents are Mexican and grew up on the Mexican side of the San Diego-Tijuana borderland, in Ensenada. My mom immigrated to San Diego in the mid-90s, she was part of this wave of migrants who left Mexico after the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]. I was born in San Diego, moved to Ensenada, and then moved back to San Diego after NAFTA had essentially made life much more difficult for people in Mexico. Like so many other migrants, my mom crossed the border without any documentation, so I grew up in a mixed-status household with a single mom San Diego’s proximity to the border makes it hyper-policed in terms of migration and Border Patrol, so much of my life was shaped by that constant threat of deportation and family separation. My mom was the first one in my family to migrate to the United States, so we didn't really have anyone else. I say all that not to be like ay, pobrecito yo, but because I saw my mom really hustle, work, and make it happen for herself and for me, and go through really hard things. That shapes how I look at the world and think about my work.

I grew up in Southeast San Diego, in Paradise Hills, which is a multiracial neighborhood. San Diego is pretty segregated, but this place was a mix of a lot of people of color. Going to school in that context also shaped how I write When I was a teenager, we moved to a different city called Chula Vista, very segregated in a very different way. My high school was 90% Latino, most of them Mexican, some of them living in Tijuana who were crossing the border every day to come to school. It was a different experience with Latinidad, much more heavily shaped by nation. All of these were highly underfunded public schools, so when I graduated high school, I wasn't prepared by counselors or my teachers to pursue higher education. I had to sort of figure that part out on my own. At first, I went to San Diego City College to pursue Chemistry. In the process of filling out my general education requirements, I took a Chicana/Chicano studies course that gave me a lot of tools to understand my experience, my family's immigration status, and how I was going to pay for my education. I was paying out of pocket because, even though I had US citizenship, I thought that because my mom was undocumented, I was categorically excluded from financial aid The Chicana/Chicano Studies faculty really helped me navigate those things.

You participated in a union of student employees. How did that experience influence your vision of higher education?

I was part of UAW 2865 when I was in graduate school at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in the history department. UAW 2865 is the Academic Workers Union for all of the UC system. It allowed students to have the power to move the university to help them with certain things. The union gave us a vehicle to make education more accessible I was at UCSD for nine years, and within that period we went on three strikes, which got us gender-neutral bathrooms, better pay, and more childcare for those who are student parents. All of those things are really important to making the university much more accessible to all. One of the inherent difficulties with student organizing is that there is little institutional memory, a lot of organizations pop up and then students graduate and leave. The union gives us a place to be, it holds the history of the students who have struggled. That's why I talk about it as part of my history, although it happened much before I was there, because we continued, we built on the things that we had won before.

Independent of what the issue is, student protests expose contradictions, even when the university maintains different discourses of neutrality or even social justice.

You're starting your path as the STRC Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department. What do you expect to achieve in this new position?

I'm really excited to be at DePaul doing this and to connect with the student body in Chicago. I love California, but I'm also really liking Chicago so far. Professionally, I want to continue turning my dissertation into a book manuscript that I can work on and publish in a few years, hopefully.

A lot of my research is focused on MEChA [Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan] and the student movement Chicana at San Diego State University, but I want to bring my research here. The Young Lords have come up in some of the interviews that I've done. When I was applying to this postdoc, I saw that DePaul has a Young Lords archive at the Special Collections Library. That's another area that I want to explore, specifically, the Young Lords’ work at the 1969 Denver Youth Chicano Liberation Conference, which is a major conference in the Chicano movement, especially for a lot of the youth and students I’m interested because the Young Lords had more influence on the Chicano student movement at a moment in time when it was thought to be very Mexican-centric. So the presence of Puerto Ricans, especially the Young Lords who were also a sort of third-world revolutionary organization, really throws a wrench in that narrative.

Dr. Miguel Ángel Castañeda

What classes will you be teaching during the fall and winter terms?

In the fall, I'll be teaching “Struggle and Resistance in Latin America” and in the winter “Media and Cultural Studies Across the Americas.” My PhD and a lot of my teaching are very much centered on U.S. history, I've taught classes on the US-Mexico border, for example. So, it will be a bit of a shift, but one that’s really exciting and will help me understand my work in a hemispheric context.

In your dissertation, you examined how Mexican-American activists have tried to convert San Diego University from a White institution to a multiracial space. I imagine you heard there have been recent student protests, like the encampment at DePaul and other universities. What are your thoughts about how students can transform higher education?

My dissertation, on a second sub-ladder, is about student power. I was still writing while the encampments were breaking out, so it gave it a different sense and importance if you will, but also a lot more pressure to think about this question. I think the encampments are already changing higher education because there is no way that, after what happened in the winter and the fall, institutions can go back to business as normal. I doubt that. Independent of what the issue is, student protests expose contradictions, even when the university maintains different discourses of neutrality or even social justice. Student protests force the university to act in its actual interest and one thing that's fascinating about the encampments is how swift and decisive almost all universities have been in the way that they have essentially acted and repressed a lot of the student encampments Independent where one stands on the issue, one has to comment that the pressure and the heavy-handed nature of the university is really a problem.

Columbia University is fascinating as an American historian. The same hall that was occupied and renamed during this most recent encampment as Hind’s Hall, in the protests against apartheid in South Africa, was taken over and renamed Mandela Hall. And also, during the 1960s protest against the war in Vietnam. Now, their first president of color has stepped down because of the contradictions that have been exposed and her inability to resolve both her identity as a woman of color and the demands of the student body. That's the student movement's power, to expose contradictions. Another thing happening at Columbia is a strike by all of the employees that make the university run. The student protests will merge with the worker strikes, and it's gonna produce a very volatile dynamic. The systems of higher education are just too wrapped up already in the process to really say that it's going to look the same. Now what that would look like in the end, that's a whole different question, but it'll be interesting to see how it plays out because we know what the response of the university is going to be.

You have talked about the concept of self-determination in connection with reimagining higher education. Can you tell us more about this term?

Self-determination is a term that is fought over and whose meaning depends on the context, who says it, time, and place In the 1960s, self-determination meant liberation, but there were many paths to that goal I try to say, “this is what self-determination is, its evolving nature, and what it means to different people.” What it meant to MEChA, to Chicanas, and its meaning in the relationship between university and community. From 1970 to about 1974 in the United States, it was the most intense in terms of the struggles for power by the Chicano students and Black Power movements. Self-determination for the Chicano student movement and MEChA, was student power to control what the university and departments did and what it looked like. It was really trying to flip power dynamics so that those most affected by the universities’ decisions, students, were in control, and that to me is at the crux of what student power is, the ability to actually make decisions in the institution. So for a sliver of time, that's what self-determination meant and its implications for higher education were really drastic. So part of my research is tracing the evolution of student movements.

Why is it important for Latinx students and other marginalized groups to exercise self-determination in universities? How can transforming this space also alter society?

The university plays a really important role in our society in a lot of different ways, from producing systems of thought and validating certain ideas over others. In our current day in life, we think of the university as a sort of marginal and somewhat isolated institution. But when you begin to understand that higher education is central to all things, from political discourses to the waging of war, you understand it in a very different light. Because of that, struggles over the university and its priorities really affect other layers of society as well.

To continue your welcome to DePaul, what do you think about Chicago so far?

I really like Chicago so far. We moved to Pilsen, and it felt the most like home, like Southern California. The murals have a lot to do with it. One of the big achievements of the Chicano movement in San Diego is the Chicano Park which is full of murals and that to me is really representative of the Chicano movement and experience, and of Mexican American barrios. It's really interesting to see in Pilsen how the murals are literally part of the community. You're just walking down a place and all of a sudden there's this giant immigrant rights mural. And that's been super cool. But I'm also really excited to explore a much more diverse Latinidad that I know is here, like the historic Puerto Rican community. My wife is Chilena and she's connected with a whole range of people already. So that is something that I'm really excited to experience, to learn about, to write about.