Larry Trujillo Oral History Interview

Amanda Belantara: Today I'm speaking with scholar activist Larry Trujillo. The interview was conducted for Bibliopolitica, a digital history of the Chicano Studies Library. The interview took place in Cathedral City on December 18th, 2023. Recorded by Emilce Quiroz, the interviewer is Amanda Belantara.

Amanda Belantara: So Larry, can you start off by introducing yourself, giving us a little background about your work?

Larry Trujillo: Yes, my name is Larry Trujillo. I taught Chicano Studies at Berkeley from 1975 until 1995. And then I moved over to UC Santa Cruz, where I taught community studies and ran the Chicano Latino Student Life Resource Center, El Centro. I was an undergraduate student at Berkeley. I was able to get to Berkeley: It's a good story, because of the Third World Strike that happened in 1969. One of the demands in that strike, the strike was calling for a Third World College, an autonomous Third World College. But one of the demands was for 25 special admit students. And I was going to community college at the time, and I was actually recruited as one of those 25 students. When I first got to Berkeley, I believe Richard and I got there about the same time, and there was, I think, less than 1% of the campus at that time were Chicanos. I was the first in my entire family to go to college. I didn't really know where UC Berkeley was, or that it was the flagship campus of the UC system, the most prestigious public research institution in the world. That's how I started.

Amanda Belantara: And so when you were on campus at Berkeley, how did you first come upon the Chicano Studies Library?

Larry Trujillo: Well, when I first got to Berkeley, I stayed in the basement of Casa Joaquin Murrieta, which was a student co-op. And there I met a lot of Chicano students that were involved in activities both on campus and in the community. And I started taking Chicano Studies classes. I took my first Chicano Studies class, actually, in 1970 at LA Valley College with Dr. Jose D'Anda. That's when I learned about history that I had never learned before. I learned about the Chicano movement that was emerging. That year I met Cesar Chavez, and I marched in the Chicano Moratorium. And that was kind of the beginning of my pathway of the next 50 years as a Chicano scholar activist. So I met students that were taking Chicano Studies classes. There was not a Chicano Studies Library at the time. It didn't come till later. But in, I think, my second year, 1971, that probably was, I knew a group of students got together and wrote a proposal. I believe it was to the Community Service Projects office for a small grant to start a Chicano Studies library. I believe my friend Tomás Almaguer told me that Clementina Durón had actually written a bibliography of Chicano Studies. I think it was for Juan Martinez. And that was kind of the first seeds of starting to collect materials in Juan's office. I don't remember all the students that were involved. It was a small group. I do remember it was a community projects grant because I was very active in a program called the Vacaville Prison Project, which was a program out of Chicano Studies that went up to the prison and worked with Chicano inmates in a self-help group called Empleo por Unidad. And we had written a grant to that office to get funding for our bands to go. So I knew about the office. I don't remember if I told some students they could get money there. I don't remember actually writing the grant myself, but I do know that was a seed. And we got a space in room 88 Dwinelle, a small little office, probably the size of a faculty office. As you walk in, it had a file cabinet where we collected student papers. And in the bottom drawer, we had some Chicano community newspapers. I think El Tocolote from the Mission was starting at that time. El Macriado, the farmworkers newspaper, a number of newspapers that were kind of emerging, Basta Ya. So we had a drawer full of Chicano newspapers. And then Professor Octavio Romano from Public Health, who was an anthropologist, also the founder of Quinto Sol Press, which was one of the first Chicano presses, donated copies of El Grito, a Journal of Chicano thought, which was along with, I believe, Aztlan, the first two Chicano journals, Aztlan out of UCLA, El Grito out of Berkeley. It was publishing actually materials on Chicano studies by Chicano scholars. It was an important journal because it was starting to critique traditional social sciences. Nick Vaca, sociologist, wrote a really pivotal piece on racial stereotypes in social science. And Octavio himself wrote a piece on the same on anthropology. And that's where I think you read my piece on criminology. That was a particular criminology literature on Chicanos. So we had that set of El Grito and also Espejo, which was a literary collection that he published and an anthology called Voices. So that was the beginning of the library. We had a desk in there with chairs around it, and we had a study hall. My memory is that I volunteered and would go in there and sit and allow the place to be open. I think a number of students did that so we could have it open. And that's my memory of the beginning of a space for Chicano studies, very small one. I think if I remember, we moved to a slightly bigger room into Dwinelle and then ultimately we've got a much bigger space over in Wheeler.

Amanda Belantara: Can you share your perspective on why the library was needed?

Larry Trujillo: It was critical to our mission of creating knowledge on Chicanos as part of Chicano studies. So it was a very critical piece of the whole development of Chicano studies. We needed a place to house materials on Chicanos.

Amanda Belantara: Do you remember any actions that you personally may have taken in support of the library?

Larry Trujillo: I'm going to fast forward a little bit. I went on to graduate school. All that time I was taking Chicano studies classes and when I was a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant in Chicano studies. And in 1975, I actually joined the ladder rank, one of the first ladder rank faculty members in Chicano studies. I see the Chicano studies library as part of a larger project of building Chicano studies as a discipline, as a transdisciplinary study. And so it was an important piece of a larger struggle that we were involved in along with ethnic studies and women's studies and a number of other sort of alternatives to traditional white, male canon of knowledge in the university. So we were engaged in not only creating a discipline, but also challenging the university to be inclusive to the history, culture and contemporary issues of Chicanos.

Amanda Belantara: Can you speak about that a little bit more? What role did the library play in supporting the growth of the field? Was it part of building the infrastructure of Chicano studies?

Larry Trujillo: Yes, it was a critical part. So we were engaged going back to the infrastructure. We were engaged in a multi-prong infrastructure building and the library was a very crucial part. We were also working on developing better recruitment strategies to get more Chicanos to the university, retention programs to maintain students. In 1976, I became the coordinator of Chicano studies and I was working on all those fronts. And one of the really critical pieces was building the Chicano studies library. Jose Arce had been a really key person in developing the beginnings of that, of building the library and then Richard Chabran came in and, I believe Richard was an acting academic librarian. He went back to get his master's in librarian information science. And in 1976 or early 77, I wrote a proposal as coordinator of the program to fund a full-time academic librarian, one FTE full-time academic librarian. That was a pivotal watershed moment in I think the library because Richard had finished his degree. We were able to get him an appointment as an academic librarian. So he was part of the infrastructure of the library system. So it was really a point where we were starting to be very cutting edge and pioneering in developing of Chicano studies libraries. One of the most critical things that Richard did is he wrote a think piece that he shared with me on conceptualizing a database, actually more a praxis, a theory and practice of retrieving material, assessing material, housing material, and making it accessible to the public and to scholars and researchers on materials on Chicanos. So that was really a critical moment. And he went on from there to develop the Chicano Periodical Index and the Chicano Thesaurus, two cutting edge tools in the collection of materials on Chicanos. The index was able to start to house all this material. And the thesaurus to me was one of the most important pieces. Richard went to get backing from the Dean of Libraries and he said we had to go through the traditional way and we go, no, we want to have the worldview be the worldview of a Chicano perspective from a Chicano world of knowledge. So the thesaurus was allowing to have a terminology that researchers could use that wasn't accessible in other databases. So terms like La Migra, which is the border patrol, you wouldn't be able to find that on a traditional database. Huelga, which is the word for strike that the farm workers use. Those kind of terms now were used as well as terms like Chicano and barrio. So it was a creation of a system of retrieving knowledge based on a Chicano perspective, a Chicano worldview. And that was very, very critical to not only the advancement of Chicano studies as a discipline, but also putting the Chicano Studies Library at UC Berkeley on the map as one of the really crucial and most important Chicano Studies libraries in the nation.

Amanda Belantara: You mentioned that the thesaurus was really remarkable to you. Could it have led to a change in the way that you did research or the way that students could do research?

Larry Trujillo: Yeah, I think it was. It was really critical because now we had the ability to have a language that spoke to the community, that spoke to the struggles that were going on and just really gave us a view that wasn't in traditional ways of finding knowledge. That was the most critical thing is that we now had a language that was from a Chicano perspective, not only the thesaurus, but the whole sort of index and becoming a depository for written and unpublished materials on Chicanos was really the feat that we were trying to achieve. So one of the things we did is we got all our faculty to do an assessment of their field. So Tomás Almaguer did sociology, Guillermo Hernandez did literature. My own personal field was criminology. So I did a look at the Chicano Studies Library to see what they had on Chicanos and criminology. I started to look at my own literature I was reading. I went to those bibliographies and collected all the materials from those bibliographies and then went and saw do we have it at the Chicano Studies Library. And we asked everybody to do that. And I know I remember sort of coming up with over a hundred citations that were not in the library at the time. And one of the things we did is I actually took and made copies of the articles, got them over to the wonderful work study students that we had in the library to put in the vertical files. And so we built a real base of materials that could improve the quantity of the index as well as the quality.

Amanda Belantara: Could you talk a little bit more about how the Chicano Studies faculty would collaborate with library workers?

Larry Trujillo: A lot of the library workers I think were Chicano Studies majors, a good number of them. And I think most of them were Chicano students that took Chicano Studies classes. So there was sort of a synergy there vis-a-vis the faculty. Students were working in the library. And then Richard and Jose and others, Oscar Trevino and others that were critical in the building of the library, were really considered part of our colleagues. I know Richard and I worked on a number of projects together. I know he wanted to get funding for the Chicano Periodical Index. He did all the work for this, but I was a faculty member so he asked me to be the principal investigator for a grant. We didn't get the grant, but the work that went into creating that became a basis for getting the whole index and thesaurus off the ground. And Richard was very creative in the sense that one of the big collections that we had at the Chicano Studies library that we were most noted for was our Chicano newspaper collection. We had really an extensive, probably the foremost in the country, collection of Chicano newspapers. And Richard had the insight of putting it on microfiche because newspapers are bulky and take a lot of space, so getting them on microfiche was a space issue as well. And then was able to sell those to other libraries to generate funds to make the index. But back to the question, so the faculty played a real critical part in helping to build the library. And not just Chicano faculty in Chicano Studies, but Chicano faculty in other departments as well. Yeah, I think from 1976 to 1981, I was the chair of the Chicano Studies Library Committee. That was one of my commitments, was to the building of the Chicano Studies Library. And we built it in a lot of different ways. It wasn't just the index and the thesaurus, but we had some really good collections. One of the things that I felt was really important is back in those days, we didn't have as many books on Chicano Studies. So most of the faculty put together readers. And we put a lot of thought into our readers. One of the things that, this is a sidetrack, but I think it's an important one, is we were trying to gain legitimacy as scholars in the university. We were kind of looked at as kind of the bastard child. We weren't real scholars. We were just kind of allowing students to run loose in the community and get credit. Now, we did build real strong relationships with the community. And part of what I did in every one of my classes, I required community work. It was called community service learning then, but that was actually frowned upon. But we were pioneers in that. That was real crucial to us to have also accessibility of the library to the community. What we would do is we would get the best articles from a variety of different sources. Because they were community pamphlets that had a wonderful kind of analysis of community struggles or a community project or a movement. Another really rich collection was our poster collection. Malaquías Montoya was one of the foremost poster artists in the Chicano movement. And Chicano movement poster art was kind of in the forefront of poster art during that period. And so we had Chicano artists that were famous for poster work right there in our backyard in the Bay Area and several taught in Chicano studies. Rupert Garcia, Malaquías Montoya, Patricia Rodriguez, Yolanda Lopez. Ester Hernandez didn't teach, but she was a very famous poster artist. We collected all that material. A lot of us as students learned how to make posters. And every time we had a rally or a protest on campus or something in the community, we made a poster. And I was really diligent in collecting that poster art and helping Richard and then Lily preserve that in the libraries. We had a really rich poster collection. There's a slide collection kind of chronicling the history from the time that I started in '75 til I left in '95 of events and activities. So there was a lot of those kinds of rich collections that weren't traditional mainstream.

Amanda Belantara: You mentioned that there were events and things going on at campus. Do you remember any events going on in the library or any community collaborations or any happenings at the time?

Larry Trujillo: Well, the library was kind of a centerpiece for a lot of things. When we were in Wheeler, we had a little bit more space and we oftentimes we'd have a poetry reading. Another piece that also was a part of that building the infrastructure was a Chicano cultural center. And we actually had a space over in Channing where we could have poetry readings and things. But we also had some of those kinds of things, talks by faculty, in the library. It was a place where, of course, students organized informally. A lot of the workers at the Chicano Studies Library were also activists in defending Chicano Studies and helping to... They played a crucial role in us getting things like space. I remember I was able to situate myself on the space committee and I know the student's voice was very critical in saying that we need a bigger space for Chicano Studies and that's how we got Wheeler. That was a good piece of that. So yeah, the library kind of was a place where you studied, but you also pass the word about what's going on and the need to go to defend Chicano Studies at a rally or to support the farm workers or whatever.

Amanda Belantara: What impact would you say that the library had on you as a person and as a community member?

Larry Trujillo: I think the library kind of was the place where I would go to develop my starting point of my research. It just was so critical to my work, to my research, to my praxis. It was kind of a two-way street that I think I played a critical role in helping develop the library, but on the other hand, the library played a critical role in helping develop me as a scholar activist. I have really fond memories of how important Richard and Lillian were to helping me to get materials that I needed when I sometimes would hit a wall of not knowing exactly how to define that material and also to have their support in doing my work.

Amanda Belantara: It sounds like you actually did a lot of collaborations with the library in order to help make it happen, from putting your name on applications to get the periodical index potentially funded to recommending titles. How did you feel doing that work in support of the library? How did it make you feel to help grow those collections?

Larry Trujillo: Yeah, it's a wonderful feeling to have been a part of building at that library. I went back recently. We had a gathering of all the alumni and saw how much the library has grown and how now it's an ethnic studies library and it's just continued to blossom. That made me very proud to see that.