THE DAWNING OF DIVERSITY

Award-winning journalist Sotomayor surveys the history of Chicano students at Stanford University in this nonfiction book.

Founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885, Stanford University remained a nearly all-White institution for its first half-century. Moreover, not only did Leland, a businessman and California politician who espoused White supremacist beliefs, once declare on the campaign trail, “I prefer free white citizens to any other class or race,” but, as the author highlights in this book, many of the university’s first administrators “embraced” the eugenics movement. Thus, the admittance of 71 Chicano students (the “vast majority” of whom were the children of cooks, janitors, farmworkers, and factory laborers) into the university in 1969 marked a revolutionary turn into “unchartered waters with a potent fusion of unease, excitement and exhilaration.” Focusing on 1969 and the early 1970s, Sotomayor effectively captures Stanford’s transition and “growing pains” during its transition into becoming a more diverse institution. Presented chronologically, the book’s 19 chapters tell the “untold story” of Stanford’s Chicano students, who became central figures in not only the university’s Chicano Power and farmworker movements, but actively participated in the school’s anti-Vietnam, women’s liberation, and Native American, Black, and Asian power movements. A journalist drawn to “good stories,” the author prioritizes the personal stories and “human emotions and actions” of Stanford’s Chicano community in the turbulent late-1960s and 1970s. While backed by solid research (reflected by nearly 900 footnotes), the book’s strength lies in its emphasis on the writings and recollections of students. Sotomayor interviewed more than 40 students who attended Stanford between 1969 and 1974. Many of the conversations point to Stanford’s aim to integrate Chicano students into a White cultural milieu without realizing, in the words of Félix and María Gutiérrez, who were hired in the 1969-70 school year as the assistant dean of students and a financial aid counselor, respectively, “We knew more about Whites than most Whites knew about us.” The work concludes with brief biographies of dozens of the interviewees detailing their family histories and post-Stanford careers.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and former co-editor of the Los Angeles Times’ Latino Series, Sotomayor is himself an inductee in Stanford’s Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame. The engaging text is accompanied by photographs in nearly every chapter, including a photo gallery of full-color images in which the rich history of Stanford’s Chicano students comes to life. While Chicano was the “term of choice” for Mexican students of the 1960s and ’70s, the perspectives of non-Mexican Latine people and Latine people of African descent are largely absent, mostly due to their arrival at the university after the 1970s. Nevertheless, their stories would have made for a worthwhile inclusion in the book’s final chapters, which focus on the 1980s through the present. The book does, however, successfully describe the intertwined histories of Black and Chicano students and the development of a more diverse curriculum in the school’s course offerings, brought on in large part due to student demand.

A well-researched and absorbing history of Stanford’s revolutionary class of Chicano students.