KPBS Midday Edition

SDSU Celebrates 50 Years Of Chicana-Chicano Studies

By Marissa Cabrera / News Producer, KPBS Midday Edition, Mark Sauer / Host, The Roundtable

Published October 9, 2019 at 11:15 AM PDT

This story was published more than 4 years ago.

San Diego State University's Chicana and Chicano Studies Department was one of the first of its kind in the nation when it was established in 1969 as Mexican American studies.

San Diego State University's Chicana and Chicano Studies department is marking a major milestone this year: its 50th anniversary.

The program, which was born out of the Chicano and Civil Rights movements, was one of the first of its kind in the nation when it was established as Mexican American Studies in 1969. The idea was to offer students a different approach to teaching American history, by focusing on the history, culture and contributions of Latinos in the United States. A similar program was also developed focused on Africana Studies.

Student activists played a pivotal role in the creation of Chicano Studies. Arturo Casares was a student in the department's early years and eventually became a part-time lecturer. Casares went on to form Barrio Station, a non-profit that serves Latino youth in Barrio Logan.

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The department is holding a series of events to commemorate the founding of Chicano Studies at San Diego State.

Casares and Roberto Hernández, associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies joined Midday Edition on Wednesday to discuss the history behind the program and its impact.

Corrected: April 26, 2024 at 3:45 PM PDT

KPBS is a service of San Diego State University.

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Marissa Cabrera

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Marissa Cabrera worked as a producer for KPBS Midday Edition and had previously served as a Newscast Producer for KPBS' Morning Edition. Before joining KPBS she reported on Vatican affairs, social, and cultural issues in Rome, Italy. She also contributed to a documentary on sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Marissa has worked as a multimedia journalist at various news stations in San Diego and Monterey as well as Columbia, Missouri. Marissa graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a bachelor's degree in broadcast journalism.

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Mark Sauer

A newspaperman for more than 30 years, Mark Sauer joined KPBS in October 2010 and previously served as the host of the KPBS Roundtable. He spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune after stints at The Houston Post and at two papers in his native Michigan. A features/human-interest writer in the UT's Currents section for many years, Mark also spent about a third of his UT career as an editor and reporter on the Metro Desk. He has covered a wide range of events: Wild fires in Southern California and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; Super Bowls and the World Series; foster care and child-abuse issues; the Roman Catholic Diocese's sexual-abuse scandal and bankruptcy; royal visits of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Princess Diana; Republican and Democratic national conventions; high-profile criminal trials; and many other stories, from the silly to the sublime. Along the way, he interviewed everyone from presidents to pan-handlers. His work exposing the false accusations and prosecutions of several San Diegans for murder, rape and child abuse garnered Pulitzer Prize nominations and many regional and local journalism awards, including Best in the West, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism and several San Diego and California bar-association awards. Mark has a degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

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