The Association of Asian American Studies celebrated a major diversity milestone over the Easter weekend at its national conference in San Francisco, 50 years after a student strike at San Francisco State University birthed ethnic studies as a model for the nation.
March 20, 1969 marked the end of the longest student strike in U.S. history, a five-month-long outcry for campus equity and social justice that started on Nov.6, 1968.
Leading the way was a coalition of Black students and other students of color dubbed the Third World Liberation Front.
After all these years, the biggest prize won in that fight remains the establishment of what is believed to be a first: a full college of ethnic studies. Not just a department, but a complete school within the university that encompassed the full panoply of diverse students, including Black, Latino and Asian.
Theo Gonsalves, installed this weekend as president of AAAS, benefitted from the program as a grad student before moving on to professorships at the University of Hawaii and University of Maryland Baltimore County.
But it is his mentor, Daniel P. Gonzales, associate professor of Asian American Studies of the College of Ethnic Studies at SFSU, who knows the history of ethnic studies even better.
Gonzales wasn’t just one of the handful of students to strike and to demand and create the school’s curriculum from scratch. He went on to be one of the department’s pillars.
