After more than 50 years serving in academia and the government, Dr. Arturo Madrid, recipient of Diverse’s Dr. John Hope Franklin Award in 2009, stepped down from his faculty position at Trinity University, San Antonio, in 2016. In his retirement he plans to remain in San Antonio and will continue to represent Trinity in various capacities.
Madrid’s career took him across the United States, serving at a dizzying array of institutions and organizations, including the Ford Foundation, the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), and the U.S. Department of Education.
Throughout his career, he kept his sights on two overarching goals, Madrid tells Diverse in a phone interview.
First, he sought to develop the intellectual resources of the Latino community. He helped develop organizations, research centers, fields of study such as Chicano studies, and worked to increase the number of Latinos in the academy.
Second, he worked to challenge and redirect the discourse about Latinos in American society. By doing so, he hopes “their issues are seen as American issues, and their concerns are American concerns, their institutions are American institutions and their cultural and literary expression and their historical experiences are seen as part of the American society and the United States.”
Having come up through the ranks of academe when affirmative action was just beginning to take hold, Madrid has been witness to the transformation of the academy and the growing strength of Latino intellectual power.
Yet the struggle is far from being over today, he says. While the number of Latino students enrolling in college is growing by leaps and bounds, the percentage of Latino faculty overall has barely budged.
