Washington State University Chicano Studies Program Records, 1961-2025

The 1970s marked the birth of the Chicano Studies Program at WSU as faculty and students committed themselves to teaching, learning, and community-based projects. In the spring of 1970, the Chicano Studies Program officially became a WSU program. In an initial program proposal, three full-time professorships and five graduate student assistantships were created to operate the program. Six courses were developed to create the core of the Chicano Studies Program: “Arts of Mexico and Mexican Americans,” “Teaching the Bilingual Child,” “Introduction to Chicano Culture,” “History of Chicanos,” “Sociology of Chicanos,” and “Chicano Spanish.” A major in Chicano Studies was eventually offered to students who were enrolled at WSU.

In the 1970s, the Chicano Studies Program collaborated with community-based organizations and led a teacher training program. Based in the Yakima Valley and Columbia Basin, the multiservice non-profit, Northwest Rural Opportunities (the NRO), was a major organization of which the program worked closely. In the early 1970s, faculty member Reymundo Marín was part of the NRO’s Board of Trustees. Initially operated by the NRO, an early training certificate program for childcare providers evolved into the Bilingual Bicultural Training Institute—a teachers’ training institute led by faculty of the Chicano Studies Program. Between 1974 and 1978, the Institute partnered with local school districts in Eastern Washington to organize workshops on bilingual and multicultural education. It offered certificates to teachers and migrant teacher aides and enrolled grade school educators into WSU as students. As part of the broader emergence of Chicano/a Studies programs and departments nationally, the program at WSU followed familiar practices within Chicano Studies that bridged the university with outside communities.

By the 1980s, national and state funding cuts to education and social services ultimately led to the disintegration of the Chicano Studies Program. In May of 1982, the program consolidated with Asian American Studies and Black Studies to form WSU’s Comparative Ethnic Studies Program. Despite program consolidation, Chicano students and faculty remained committed throughout the following decades to advocate for minority student recruitment, enrollment, and retention as well as the hiring and promotion of Chicana/o/x faculty. Countless groups worked within the university to generate a university climate that is free of discrimination and racism. These student-led and faculty-led groups created spaces for students to understand themselves in relation to their environment and to those that are part of their communities.

Sources:

Chicana/o and Latina/o Faculty, Staff, and Student Organization at WSU and Washington State Commission on Hispanic Affairs. “The Past, Present, and Future of the Chicana/o and Latina/o Community at Washington State University.” October 8, 1997.

Heidenriech, L. “Teaching Liberatory Chicana/o Studies in the Corporate University.” in El Mundo Zurdo 5: Selected Works from the 2015 Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, edited by Domino Renee Perez, Larissa M. Mercado-López, and Sonia Saldívar-Hull, 49-63. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2016.