Rodolfo Acuña dies; author, activist, historian and godfather of Chicano studies in the US

Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña lived his life following a simple belief: “If you know something is wrong, you have a duty (not an obligation) to do something about it.”

From street protests to campus debates, writings and speeches, the son of Mexican immigrants is doing the work of fighting: for his students, against racism in higher education and in society and especially to promote and maintain Chicano studies, a discipline that helped create and advance him to be more than just an academic officer.

“My strategy,” he once told an interviewer, “has always been to take my short story to the edge of the cliff and be ready to jump over the cliff if necessary.”

Acuña died on Monday of undisclosed causes. His death was announced on the Facebook page of the Cal State Northridge Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies, which Acuña helped establish and where he taught for more than four decades.

“We owe his many contributions and he will always be with us and the many lessons we have learned,” wrote current chairman Gabriel Gutierrez. “¡Dr. Rodolfo Acuña, Presente!”

Laura Casas, a trustee of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in Northern California, said taking Acuña’s classes at CSUN awakened her to politics. The professor, he said, “spoke with confidence and knowledge and inspired my generation in publishing and political awareness. … He told us that we matter and that we count. That we make a difference and that we belong.”

Acuña was 93 years old.

As he often wears sunglasses even at home, Acuña has cut a lot of crowds during his classes and at lectures and gatherings across the country. The crowds remained in awe the professor he cited centuries of Mexican American history to denounce the forces that persecuted Latinos in a compassionate, raspy voice that never lost its power no matter how long he spoke.

Cal State Fullerton Chicano studies professor Alexandro José Gradilla recalled inviting Acuña to speak on his campus in 2011.

“As a freshman in Orange County, I thought Rudy was going to be huge” in the area, Gradilla said. “Rudy knew better. He had the power to go from holding a colleague and junior scholar to account for institutional racism at the highest level created by academic leadership. And the student body, faculty and staff were ready for him.”

Acuña has contributed chapters to numerous anthologies and scholarly writings and has written numerous book reviews, several children’s books, academic articles and opinion pieces in academic journals, magazines, listserves and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. His subjects ranged from LA politics to higher education issues, the wars being fought in the US to Donald Trump’s long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Although he was fluent in academic language, his verse was approachable, written with students and the public in mind and shows someone who is always sure he is not stuck in an ivory tower.

“I’m like Doubting Thomas: I want to touch the wounds,” he told an oral historian in 2022. “I want to see what it is.”

Among the more than 22 books that Acuña wrote on Chicano and Mexican history, his 1972 title, “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” which chronicled the history of Mexican Americans from the Native kingdoms conquered by the Spanish to the present day, can be a basic text for Chicano studies in high schools across the country.

“This book builds a knowledge base that we didn’t have,” said Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez, a professor at Arizona State University. Never before published, “Occupied America” ​​is now in its ninth edition.

Chicano studies was more than just a collection of classes at Acuña — it was a philosophy that emphasized ethnic pride and cultural awareness inspired by the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and ’70s. He wrote, its purpose, “was to free students from reading and writing.”

Acuña wrote in his 1996 book, “Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles,” Acuña said. “History is more than an esoteric search for truth; it involves a living society and its common memory.”

His work was often targeted by conservatives. In 2011, Acuña was one of the many writers who saw their careers scuttled by then-Arizona Atty. Gen. Tom Horne and others as they campaign to block ethnic and Mexican American studies programs in Tucson. At the time, Horne accused the professor of promoting “nationalism.”

Years later, Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign rallies often featured undocumented immigrants accused of crimes under the banner of “Occupied America.” But no matter what controversies angered him, Acuña never backed down from what he wrote and spoke about, whether in the classroom or in protests.

“I’m proud to be a hero,” he told the Times in 1993. “I’m proud to be a fanatic. I’m proud of my age. … I’m very proud to be Mexican!”

Acuña was born in Boyle Heights in 1932, and his upbringing in South LA and East Hollywood helped establish his strong racial identity as a teenager. In the first grade, he was placed in the slow-moving group at school because he did not know English. Once, the principal of a public school asked if she and her sister, who is dark-skinned, had the same father.

“Even though I was first generation and born in the US, we always had that sense of being Mexican,” he told The Times in 2016.

The future academic served in the Army during the Korean War and was stationed in Germany, which he described in his 2022 oral history as “the worst race riots.” He later enrolled at what is now Cal State LA under the GI Bill and earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology before pursuing a master’s degree in history at the same school before eventually earning a doctorate at USC.

Acuña started teaching “because it was the fastest thing I could do.” He bounced around schools in the San Fernando Valley — including a yeshiva where he was required to wear a yarmulke during class — before working at what is now Pierce College and Mount Saint Mary’s University, where he taught his first course on Mexican American history around 1965.

It didn’t take long for Acuña to lead the educational revolution he knew was coming.

In 1969, he became the first professor in CSUN’s department of Mexican American studies, now called the Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies, which became an incubator for Latino activism in LA and beyond. He has taught thousands of students and faculty members for decades, and often confronts administrators for what he believes is their lack of concern for the needs of minority students and staff.

Harry Gamboa Jr., a Chicano artist, writer and teacher, recalled seeing Acuña advocate for equal education and protest limits in the Chicana and Chicano studies department during a mid-1990s meeting on the lawn of CSUN’s Oviatt Library.

“Here you have a professor of Chicano studies talking to possibly 10,000 people of every race and every language represented in Southern California who are right in front of him and are moved by his words,” said Gamboa, who photographed Acuña in his later years. He never stopped talking, and when he spoke, people listened.

At the time, Acuña made national news by suing UC Santa Barbara, where he had applied for a teaching position. In this case, Acuña accused the institution of discriminating against him because of his age and race. When the professor’s job offer was rejected, more than 500 students, many from the Mexican American student group MEChA, gathered on campus to protest the university’s decision.

A judge found that Acuña had been discriminated against because of his age and awarded him $326,000 in 1996. Denying Acuña’s request to take over, the judge argued that the animosity between Acuña and his potential colleagues would make his appointment “bad and inappropriate.”

That fight inspired him to make the film “Barbara & We” about his thoughts on the university and its chancellor, Barbara S. Uehling, who believed he could not help Latinos. Uehling died in 2020.

Acuña used the judgment from his case to fund a foundation to help people who have experienced job discrimination in higher education. He chose to stay at Cal State Northridge for the rest of his career.

On social media, dozens of people posted memories of their encounters with Acuña, a relationship he was proud to maintain over the decades.

“He becomes like a grandfather and looks after the kids, and he’s proud of them,” Acuña told the Cal State Northridge publication in 2016. “Life has been good to me, and I have to give back. That’s what it’s about.”

He is survived by his wife, Guadalupe Compean, and daughter Angela.

Pineda is a former Times reporter.