Brown Bag Seminar: From Compton to East Palo Alto: Reflections on Race, Ethnicity, and Public Education in California, Past and Present

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Albert Camarillo, Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor, Professor of American History, and Special Assistant to the Provost for Faculty Diversity.

In his Brown Bag lecture, Albert Camarillo will provide perspectives on the history of Mexican Americans and African Americans in California's public schools over the past half century. He will share personal reflections as a student who attended Compton public schools during the 1950s and 1960s and as a historian/citizen who has worked in education-related public service projects in Compton and East Palo Alto in recent years. His talk is based on an autobiographical book-in-progress titled Going Back to Compton: Reflections of a Native Son on Life in an Infamous American City.

A member of the Stanford University History Department since 1975, Camarillo is widely regarded as one of the founding scholars of the field of Mexican American history and Chicano Studies. As Special Assistant to the Provost, Camarillo is in charge of the Faculty Development Initiative of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He is the author of seven books and more than three dozen articles and essays on the experiences of Mexican Americans and other racial and immigrant groups in American cities. Camarillo’s newest book is Mexican Americans and Ethnic/Racial Borderhoods in American Cities, 1850-2000 (2013). He is also the author of Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios (1979, and 2005) and Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans (1984). Camarillo is the recipient of Stanford’s three highest awards for excellence in teaching and service to undergraduate education and was awarded the Miriam Roland Prize for Volunteer Service for 2005. Full bio.