Albert Camarillo is the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He’s one of a small number of people who founded the academic field of Chicano/Latino history. He has also mentored so many of the historians who’ve written books that teach us much of what we know about the history of Latinos in the United States. Not least, he is the author of a new book himself, titled Compton In My Soul: A Life In Pursuit of Racial Equality, published by Stanford University Press, in which he recalls growing up in the Black and Brown suburb of Los Angeles, his experience as one of a very small number of Chicano students at UCLA, and his almost fifty years of teaching Chicano history at Stanford. In this episode of Writing Latinos—the season three finale!—we talk with him about the Trump administration’s attack on higher education, the recent trend in Latino history to focus on Black-Brown tension and the anti-blackness of Latinos, the writing of family history, and how our understanding of Latinos has changed since the beginning of his career.
