Mexican Americans Speak Up in Pollak Library’s Special Collection April 29, 2021 Share This:
This illustration from the California Librarian, the January 1973 special issue on Chicano Library Service, is by Jorge Enciso s Design Motifs of Ancient Mexico, Dover Publications, 1953.
Daisy Gomez-Fuentes listened in awe to an audio-visual recording of Chicano activist Rudy Acuña speaking to a group of Cal State Fullerton students in May 1974. The lecture gave her insights into the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and ’70s.
“He spoke about the cultural conflicts that Chicanx students faced in academia,” said Gomez-Fuentes, a Chicana and Chicano studies major and daughter of Mexican immigrants.
Colleges, for generations, have encouraged new students to find their place in student organizations on campus. That s bad advice, writes Lisa M. Nunn in
College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life (Rutgers University Press). Nunn, a professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Educational Excellence at the University of San Diego, writes that the traditional approach puts too much of the onus for belonging on the new student. And this approach, she writes, is particularly bad for first-generation college students.
Nunn answered questions about her book via email.
Q: What s wrong with the find your place message colleges typically give students?