COMPTON IN MY SOUL

A reflective memoir by a Mexican American ethnic studies pioneer whose achievements contrast with his hometown’s decline.

Camarillo, a professor at Stanford since 1975, contemplates his academic career and the social backdrop that fueled the excitement of teaching in a new discipline, one aiming to redress social inequities that marked his upbringing in the semirural, working-class suburb of Compton, where Mexican immigrants lived in a segregated neighborhood. “We had not only been largely excluded from attending college,” he writes, “but our history had been excluded.” In the first section of the book, the author looks back poignantly at growing up amid the unspoken restrictions of “Jaime Crow,” as the first generation of culturally aware Chicano youth still dependent on their close-knit community. Yet as Compton transformed, Camarillo pursued his academic ambitions, which took him first to UCLA, where he found a connection to “the dawning field of ethnic studies and a growing appreciation for all that my hometown had gone through in recent decades.” He aspired to uncover the hidden past of Mexican-origin people in the U.S., struggling to have Chicano history accepted as an academic discipline, even as his hometown “became an example of the American Dream denied.” Camarillo describes his long-term efforts to enhance diversity at Stanford and legitimize ethnic studies, as well as his return to Compton, where he discovered that “impoverishment had a stranglehold on the city in the post civil rights years.” Despite the surge in violence, “for every tale of sadness and loss, I would eventually return and discover stories of perseverance and hope”—as would his son, who became a teacher there. Camarillo’s detailed recollections are evocative, and he offers a positive message about diversity and social change, only somewhat hampered by rambling storytelling or the minutiae of academic politics.

An original account of a historian’s social upbringing.