After 40 years, give or take a few, SJSU Chicano Commencement endures

By Joe Rodriguez, San José Mercury News
jrodriguez@mercurynews.com

Tony Quintero remembered the wailing cry of a friend's mother as a dozen or so defiant Chicano graduates walked out of San Jose State's main graduation ceremony a generation ago.

"No!" the woman cried, begging her son to stay seated. "Don't give up your degree!"

The degrees were safe, but much more was at stake. Upset about the low number of Mexican-American students and professors at the school, the graduates intended to shake the administration into action. Half-expecting a riot, 200 campus and city police officers lined Spartan Stadium.

Instead of violence, what broke out that June evening in 1968 was a separate graduation ceremony — Chicano Commencement — which lives to this day and holds its 40th official celebration Sunday. Some 2,000 people are expected at San Jose State's Event Center to honor 56 Chicano students and their families. The event has become a festive affair, a far cry from its controversial beginning.

To everyone's relief at Spartan Stadium, only a few boos broke the silence of the peaceful walkout. The students gathered in a field across the stadium with 200 to 300 sympathizers and relatives. The crowd listened to playwright Luis Valdez and other fiery speakers and watched a theater group perform a new satirical play called "Chicano Commencement." Each graduate got a chance to speak. Most, if not all, thanked their parents. Then everyone partied into the night.

Juan Garcia, now a professor at Fresno State, was a freshman who attended. "I remember thinking to myself, 'Hey! We should have a separate commencement every year.' I was that inspired."

It didn't happen the same way again, but it did happen. Today, such commencements — sometimes called Chicano/Latino Commencement — are held at private and state universities in California, including Stanford and UC Berkeley, and throughout the Southwest. San Jose State's was among the first.

Three short years later, in 1971, a different brand of Chicano activism took hold on campus. Student leaders Mauro Chavez and Chris Jimenez liked the idea of a separate commencement, but they didn't want to disturb the main graduation ceremony by walking out or demonstrating outside.

"Mauro said, 'You shouldn't spoil someone else's party for your own,' " Jimenez remembered. —‰'Let's have our own.' "

Instead of attending the main ceremony, the graduates organized and raised $3,000 for a separate ceremony for Mexican-American and other Latino college graduates from throughout the Bay Area. About 30 showed up at Guadalupe Church in East San Jose and brought their families. Jimenez's wife cooked a big pot of chicken. Others brought tortillas, beans, salads and soft drinks. Chavez's idea was to recognize the academic accomplishments of individual graduates, honor the sacrifices of their parents and inspire their little brothers and sisters to aim for college.

In addition, the graduates could select their own theme and keynote speaker. His broader goal was to change the university and other public institutions from the inside. Chavez died in 1992 after a long and distinguished career in academia.
"The highlight for me," Jimenez said, "was the families jumping up and down and shouting when the graduates went up for their diplomas. It became a shouting match between families, they were so proud and happy."

Standing on the sidelines, however, were some of the student protesters from 1968, and they weren't pleased with how Chicano Commencement was turning out.

"It became a celebration and not a political occasion," said Armando Valdez, now a behavioral scientist in Mountain View. "I would rather have seen continued protest. The reality is, little has changed for Chicanos in this society."

Jimenez still bristles at the criticism.

"They called us all sorts of names, 'vendidos,' sellouts," he said. "What did they do other than protest? Our philosophy was education. If you want social change, you need educated people."

Gabe Reyes, who helped organize the 1971 event as a student and later became an administrator at San Jose State, said the battle over Chicano Commencement underscored a wider question every civil rights activist faced at the time: By joining the institutions they wanted to change, did they risk becoming "co-opted" and changing little or nothing at the end?

"It was a question we all wrestled with," Reyes said.

A few years later, the organizers of Chicano Commencement abandoned separatism and encouraged graduates to also attend the school's main graduation ceremony. The university gradually embraced the ceremony as a way to promote campus diversity and boost recruitment of Latino students.

Linda Ortega, a staff member at San Jose State's engineering department, once invited former San Jose State President Robert Caret to a Chicano Commencement at the Santa Clara Convention Center attended by 2,000 people.

She asked him, "This is pretty awesome, don't you think?" Ortega recalled him responding, "I'm blown away." Before too long, black, Asian and gay graduates throughout California were staging their own parallel or ethnic commencements.

Christina Ramos, a student organizer with a new master's degree in public administration, agreed that the ceremony had lost its political edge for a while. But she said Arizona's new law for questioning undocumented immigrants has lit a fire under this Sunday's Chicano Commencement.

"It's still a political statement," Ramos said about the event. "We as Latinos are still not viewed as positive contributors to society. But we are still here. We are making a difference. We are graduating from college."

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