I Told the Story of a Forgotten Chicano Revolutionary in a Podcast. Turns Out It Was My Story, Too

Valentino Gutierrez, now a high school teacher in Pico Rivera, told us of going on hunger strike to expand Chicano studies while he was an undergrad at UC Santa Barbara. Margarita Berta-Avila, a fellow student and friend of Oscar’s at UC Davis, told us how strongly she felt about the Chicano movement despite not being Mexican American (her parents are from El Salvador and Peru). Other friends of Oscar’s, like Sabrina Enrique, talked of the sexism of the 1990s movement that I believed then was a thing of the past.

The emotional toll of activism

I heard former activists, including Judith, talk about the emotional toll so much activism took on her and her fellow student activists. She said her grades and mental health suffered. Mining my own feelings and looking at my academic transcript, I remembered how mine did, too.

“I don’t think we’re at where we’re at today without these sacrifices and activism of the folks in the ’90s,” said Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UCSB.

“I don’t feel like they’ve always been properly recognized.”

The activism of 1990s college students survives in memories and on mostly analog platforms. These students’ newspapers, film print photographs and cassette audio recordings remain in dusty boxes in attics and garages, and in some university archives, if they’ve survived at all.

And that contributes, Ambruster-Sandoval said, to 1990s Chicano student activism being a “lost period.”

For about 25 years, that’s what the early 1990s college activist experience felt like to me. Every time I take out copies of the UC San Diego newspaper, Voz Fronteriza, that contain my writings, the pages seem to be more yellow and more brittle. I have cassette copies of my radio shows that need to be digitized before time erases their content.

As I began a mainstream journalism career in the late 1990s, I heard people in my first newsroom say journalism that came out of activism and even ethnic journalism fell into the category of “advocacy journalism.” There is some truth to that. But the comments left a chilling effect that led me to put away my college journalism experiences and lock them up in favor of a traditional “objective” approach. I was at the very beginning of a paid journalism career and I didn’t want another target on my back.

But to tell Oscar’s story for the podcast, I had to tell my own story as a 1990s activist because he and I moved in some of the same activist circles and attended some of the same marches, including the protest in downtown Santa Barbara to support Chicano Studies Professor Rudy Acuña on Feb. 1, 1992. Acuña had been turned down for a faculty position in Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara the year before and would sue the university, alleging bias against him for his activism, race and age. Acuña’s 1972 book, “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” and subsequent scholarship led many to consider him a founder of Chicano studies.

That’s where I met Oscar and talked to him briefly.

California’s red-hot politics brought Oscar, me and thousands of other students to those Santa Barbara streets.

The state’s institutions were being stretched to the limit after large numbers of people immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1980s to escape economic crisis in Mexico and violent civil wars in Central America, both situations stoked by U.S. policies. Anti-immigrant groups responded with nativist proposals to take away the civil rights of immigrants. They successfully proposed ballot measures like Proposition 187 that targeted undocumented immigrants and their kids. (A federal judge ruled in 1997 that Prop. 187 was unconstitutional.)

Those anti-immigrant sentiments led me, Oscar and many other Chicano students to feel like we each had a target on our backs. And that environment spilled onto campuses, too, as Agustín Orozco, my friend from UC San Diego, describes in this essay.

Our shared, yet different, backgrounds

Oscar and I were both Chicanos but different in many ways. He was a middle-class U.S. citizen raised in the suburbs of LA County. My mother cleaned houses for a living. She and I moved to San Diego when I was 7 years old. We overstayed our tourist visas and only received the authorization to stay permanently about a decade later, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, most often described as amnesty, became law in my senior year of high school.

Oscar responded to the xenophobia by joining the Chicano student organization on campus, then producing a weekly college radio show that mixed various types of music with in-studio interviews and field recordings from protests and marches he attended in different parts of the state.

Before this podcast, my identity as a Chicano felt stuck in the 1990s. But I’ve adopted a fuller understanding of what Chicano, Chicana, Chicanx, Latino and Latinx activism has led to. I now see how the student activism of the 1990s helped lead to the intersectional coalition building of current times, and the exploration of Indigenous philosophy.

“The more that we could find out about these people and what they went through and, you know, even in this case, how they passed away or were killed, you know, the more we can share truth with people,” said Israel Calderon, a history teacher at Oscar’s alma mater, Baldwin Park High School, and a childhood friend of Oscar.

‘Liberate your mind’

That’s one of the reasons Calderon and some of Oscar’s friends and relatives created a foundation in Oscar’s name to raise money and hand out scholarships to Baldwin Park area high school students.

They’re more interested in promoting Oscar’s message to “liberate your mind” and help those who need help than they are to mythologize Oscar.

A story that aired last year on NPR reminded me to keep my reporting focused on the human experience. It was a story about then-NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro leaving the network. The reporter described how Garcia-Navarro had defended her deeply personal interviewing and reporting approaches.

“As journalists we do not check our humanity at the door. What we must do is try and give an accurate representation of what is happening before us to the best of our ability, leaving aside our prejudices,” she said.

How and whether I compartmentalize my humanity in the work I do is a question this podcast has raised for me and for others.

“Am I doing what we had set out to? Have I compromised?” said Margarita Berta-Avila, who’s now a leader with the California Faculty Association, the union for California State University professors.

She said thinking of Oscar, 28 years after his death, has been an opportunity to check her ideals from her college years and ask whether she’s become jaded.

I have spent 21 years telling people’s stories at Southern California Public Radio. I have, to the best of my ability, tried to tell stories about people living deep moments in their lives, and of policies that would affect people in one way or another.

I feel like I’ve kept a part of my humanity checked at the door at times, fearing that some kind of bias would creep in. There is no bias in connecting deeply with human experiences and letting my own humanity live in that moment, too.

For that insight, I have El Bandido de Aztlan, Oscar Gomez, to thank.