Ethnic Studies

UCLA's four ethnic studies centers made an unusual public plea Tuesday to boost faculty diversity and expand courses and research. At a news conference and town hall meeting at UCLA, the directors of the research centers said their hiring proposal and related campus diversity initiatives are crucial because of California's changing demographics.

Henry Silva is one of those character actors who are the glory of American motion pictures--we may not know his name, but we instantly recognize him in the dozens of vivid roles he has played over the years: A Korean manservant in "The Manchurian Candidate," an Indian brave in "The Plainsman," a Sicilian mobster in "Johnny Cool." His all-purpose ethnicity says something profound about how Hollywood has denied and reinvented the racial and cultural identities of some of its finest actors.

There were times when Siris Barrios, now a 20-year-old urban planning major at Cal State Northridge, wouldn't even admit she was born in El Salvador. Her parents rarely discussed the civil war there or their trek to the United States. At the public schools near her Watts home, her Mexican American peers looked down on her, she said, recalling a Spanish-language vulgarity she would hear directed toward Salvadorans.

There were times when Siris Barrios, now a 20-year-old urban planning major at Cal State Northridge, wouldn't even admit she was born in El Salvador. Her parents rarely discussed the civil war or their trek to the United States. At the public schools near her Watts home, her Mexican American peers looked down on her, she said, recalling a Spanish-language vulgarity she would hear directed toward Salvadorans.

A daylong seminar on the Armenian genocide drew a capacity crowd Saturday to a 300-seat UCLA lecture hall, as academics from across the nation and Europe discussed the World War I-era slaughter. The seminar was held on the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Armenian studies program at UCLA and was attended by the consul general of Armenia and his staff, said seminar organizer and UCLA history professor Richard G. Hovannisian.

It was 1969. The revolution was coming and for this crowd the enemy was "Tio Taco," wannabe gringos who forgot where they came from. More than 100 men and women, militant Chicanos, met in Santa Barbara with a vague notion that the tranquil beachside city would be ground-zero for their movement. They could smell it in the air. Before they left, they had put together El Plan.

Wearing dark glasses and rumpled jeans, professor Rudy Acuna strolls down the rows of his classroom at Cal State Northridge like a Mexican American Socrates, teasing his students, provoking them. He knows how to rile them up and calm them down, how to pepper his lectures with colloquial Spanish to get chummy with them, then how to back off and force them to rethink everything they thought they knew. The course is titled "History of the Chicano" but it has the feel of a United Farm Workers rally.

Wearing dark glasses and rumpled jeans, professor Rudy Acuna strolls down the rows of his class at Cal State Northridge like a Mexican American Socrates, teasing his students, provoking them. He knows how to rile them up and calm them down, how to pepper his lectures with colloquial Spanish to get chummy with them, then how to back off and force them to rethink everything they thought they knew. All 26 students in his class are Latino, with maybe a few students of mixed race.

Police moved in before dawn Tuesday and arrested at least 80 people on the sixth day of a University of California protest called to push for more money for ethnic studies programs. The protesters had set up a tent city in front of California Hall, which houses the offices of Chancellor Robert Berdahl. Some students refused to leave and had to be dragged away. About 100 activists, including six on a hunger strike, took part in the protest that started Thursday.

As John H. Bunzel stated in "Are Ethnic Studies Separate or Equal?" (Opinion, Nov. 8), I agree that ethnic studies, if presented in a highly intellectual and apolitical arena, have a legitimate academic and societal role. However, as a UCLA graduate who has completed a handful of such courses, I am tempted to ask whether "ethnic studies" is merely a euphemism for state-sponsored indoctrination. From my experiences, there existed a clear political agenda--one that presented biased commentary in the midst of factual information.