The Central American Studies Program
at California State University, Northridge
By Beatriz Cortez
The Central American Studies Program at California State University in Northridge is the only program of its kind in the United States. During the last seven years, as the program has grown and its faculty has expanded, it has played a central role in the development of the discipline of Central American Studies and it has gained recognition at national and international levels.
Currently, the Central American Studies Program at California State University has an approximate enrollment of 550 students in its classes. It includes 3 full-time professors, and 6 part-time faculty instructors. After offering a Minor, or sub-specialization, in Central American Studies for seven years, the program has expanded its curricula and its course offerings to accommodate student demand and to generate the appropriate conditions to grow into a Bachelors Degree granting program. The inauguration of this program will represent an important historical moment, since it will be the first time that a Bachelors in Central American Studies is offered, both in the United States and in Central America. There are historic, social, political, economic, and cultural contexts that have made this possible.
It is not by mere chance that the Central American Studies Program emerged at California State University in Northridge. After all, this is a campus community with a long history of activism. It is a campus with a strong Chicano presence, particularly represented by one of the first and the largest Chicano Studies departments in the nation. The Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University in Northridge was established more that 35 years ago at what was then called the San Fernando Valley State College through the activism of many students and faculty of color. It was a process that began in the Fall of 1968, when the number of African American students on campus was less than 200 and the number of Chicano students was less than 100 (The Storm). Eventually, in the Spring 1969, an advisory committee was formed by “representatives of the Black Students Union, the United Mexican-American Students, the administration, the staff, faculty, the general college student body, the Students for a Democratic Society and the local community” (Greenwood, “Valley State Asked,” 1969: B). Their negotiations concluded with the establishment of the Afro-American Department, now Pan African Studies, and the Mexican-American Studies Department, now Chicana/o Studies Department (Kumbula, A1). The agreements reached included the following six clauses:
- The establishment of full departments of Afro-American studies and Mexican-American studies.
- The appointment of a faculty-administration-student committee to develop procedures under which students may bring complaints against faculty members.
- Valley State will “actively” recruit Mexican-American and [B]lack counselors for the college counsel[ing] center.
- The college, together with two newly appointed directors of the Educational Opportunities Program will set up centers in [B]lack and Mexican-American communities where information about the college will be available.
- The college president will reconstitute the College Advisory Board to include representatives of the [B]lack and [C]hicano sections of the San Fernando Valley community.
- The college will “vigorously pursue” the recruitment of [C]hicano and [B]lack students for the fall 1969. (Greenwood, “Minorities Peace Accord Reached,” A1)
Nowadays, the Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University in Northridge is characterized by its diversity, interdisciplinarity, activism, and by the large number of students actively involved in its work, particularly through the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlán (MECHA). California State University in Northridge was transformed by the activism on campus, eventually becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution, or HSI, which the U.S. Department of Education defines as “a non-profit institution that has at least 25% Hispanic full-time equivalent (FTE) enrollment, and of the Hispanic student enrollment at least 50% are low income” (n.p.). In addition to expanding its enrollment of Latino students, the university has expanded its ethnic studies programs. In Fall 1990, twenty years after the establishment of the first two ethnic studies programs at California State University, Northridge, “the Asian American Studies Department was established with the objective to serve an estimated 3,700 Asian students on campus at the time” (Pyle, 3). Today, it is estimated that the so-called Minority populations at California State University, Northridge constitute more than half of the university’s student population. This history of activism and the cultural spaces established by other ethnic studies programs in a sense paved the way for Central American students, faculty, and the community at large to lobby within the California State University system and within the California legislature for a Central American Studies Program. The Central American Studies Program at California State University in Northridge was inaugurated in August, 2000.
In spite of the solidarity between the Chicano community and the Central Americans on campus, and in spite of the fact that the Central American Studies Program was inscribed within the realm of the Chicana/o Studies Department and with the support of its faculty and community, it is important to recognize a fundamental fact: the Central American Studies Program was created as a representation of an identity that exists in contention to and in difference of the Chicano identity. This difference makes it necessary to establish a cultural space that allows for the construction, study, and visibility of the Central American identity. This is also the case beyond the university context, particularly since the celebration of difference has not been a characteristic of Central American national cultures. On the contrary, in Central America, both from a perspective of nationalist state discourse or revolutionary culture, unity has been at the heart of the formation of national culture and, as a result, of the erasure of difference. Nevertheless, difference is necessary, as it has been stated from quite diverse spaces of discussion.
In Central America, as the modern nations were emerging influenced by European liberalism, the concepts of unity and equality were applied to the region through a practice that maintained difference by making it invisible and natural while it promoted a discourse of equality and inclusiveness. As a result, the discursive need to transform the national multitude into a people of uniform qualities under the identitarian affiliation of the Ladino, that is, non-Indigenous, or the Mestizo, that is, mixed European and Indigenous, as the modern national subject was established. This Ladino/Mestizo consciousness is expressed through the writings of Central American intellectuals during different historical moments of the modern nation. As an example we might look at Miguel Angel Asturias in Guatemala, who in 1923 argued in his Masters thesis for the eradication of Indigenous people from the national landscape, since he considered them “degenerate” (89-90). He argued for a process of mestizaje that would allow for a uniform national subject to take the place that was being occupied by Indigenous people (101-06). Asturias does celebrate the ancient Indigenous component of national culture and national identity, in part because it provides specificity to it, and in part because he is convinced that the ancient Indigenous cultures were eradicated through the process of the Spanish conquest. Nevertheless, he goes to great lengths to express his dissatisfaction with the contemporary Indigenous cultures and peoples that are part of the modern nation’s landscape:
It is easy to observe the psychic degeneration that has overcome the Indian, from the time when he was the indomitable race that died or fled to the mountains in its majority rather than surrender, or bravely fought unequaled heroic battles for his independence, to the condition he is found in today: yesterday courageous, today cowardly. Between these two parameters an entire lifespan is made painful and sorrowful by the Castilian spur that drew blood on his flanks, by the bellicose bits the conquerors ground into his mouth and by the cacaxtes, the packmule harnesses worn by men. (Asturias, 420)
As a result, the articulation of difference as a central dimension of the identitarian space that the Central American Studies Program at California State University in Northridge seeks to establish is fundamental. It is not only the case that, as Homi Bhabha states, “[t]he social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation” (2), but also, that difference functions as the basic right on which our claim for this academic and cultural space is made.
Walter D. Mignolo, when discussing the role of the Humanities in the 21st century, argues that global citizenship requires the dismantling of global racism, and that the decolonial shift in the humanities brings with it a body of knowledge of experiences and memories that were previously disqualified (314). Also, rather than encouraging the liberal ideal of unity and commonality, which for Mignolo is based on the white European heterosexual male paradigm, he argues for the exploration of difference. As he considers the claim that “because we all are equal, we have a right to be different” (quoted by Mignolo, 314), he invites those of us who work in the humanities to help “acknowledge that global citizenship is a myth while global racism is not overcome and to work toward the decolonization of imperial knowledge that engendered the coloniality of being” (Mignolo, 329).
The solidarity that the Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University has towards Central American Studies in a relationship that recognizes and even celebrates difference, is significant. The situation would be much more complex, had the Program been created under the umbrella of a Latino Studies program, that is, a program which would not perceive Central American Studies in light of difference, but, rather, would define Central Americans as Latinos, and would seek to define the Central American Studies Program in the same terms that it defined its own discipline. In other words, it would represent a force of erasure of the Central American identity within the context of Latino identities in the U.S., and would particularly represent a force of erasure of the myriad of Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean experiences that are part of the Central American identity as a whole.
Furthermore, it is also fundamental to note that the focus of the Central American Studies Program, that is, its vision of Central America as a transnational region that encompasses a myriad of ethnic and cultural identities, the majority of which are non-Hispanic, has been facilitated by the fact that the Central American Studies Program was not created within the space of Latino Studies but linked to the space of Chicano Studies. There are, of course, fundamental differences between these two identities, but for the purposes of the creation of the Central American Studies Program, the most important difference is the lack of investment that the Chicano identity places on its Latino background, and rather, its emphasis on its Indigenous heritage. This is an important distinction for our vision of Central American Studies as a space that deconstructs the Ladino identity, that rejects the vision of the Central American identity as Hispanic, and that seeks to open spaces for the knowledge and understanding of Central America’s diverse cultural and ethnic identities. Of course, one must also make a distinction between the Chicano construction of identity with a foundation of an Indigenous distant past, and the Central American identity that our program postulates: one that is constructed by diverse cultural and ethnic Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean identities coexisting with the Ladino and European consciousness not only in our distant past but also in our present. Our program, therefore, could only be inscribed within the realm of Latino Studies at the expense of the erasure of our ethnic and cultural diversity. Furthermore, this inscription of Central American Studies within the realm of Latino Studies, because of its emphasis on only one cultural dimension and one cultural perspective of the Central American experience, would be as justifiable as its inscription within other disciplines that would also emphasize only one particular Central American cultural experience and/or identity, such as an African Diasporic Studies or an Indigenous Studies Program.
Because most Central American people in the United States and in Southern California are recent immigrants who arrived in large numbers starting in the 1980s, this is a newly established population with the need to generate visibility for its insertion in the cultural debate for identity and self definition. As a result, the Central American experience in the U.S. requires some sort of strategic essentialism, that is, the visible definition of its identity and of its spaces, not because its identity cannot be flexible and malleable, able to transform itself throughout the years; and not because for strategic political reasons it can also be affiliated and part of the Latino community in the U.S.; but, rather, because it is an emerging identity which requires its own space for its inscription and definition, its own space for the celebration and knowledge of its culture, as well as its definition in its own terms, be it from a cultural, popular, or academic perspective. Of course, Latino Studies as a general umbrella term will always be a place where the Central American identity locates part of its affiliations, as long as it is able to do it in difference, in solidarity, and without the erasure of its Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous components. In other words, as long as it allows the strategic visibility that Central American Studies requires at this crucial moment when it emerges and is institutionalized as a discipline.
To further add to the problematic erasure of the ethnic and cultural diversity in Central America at the formation of our Program we had also to address the question of the national vs. the regional. Central America is not a cultural region united by any type of regional cultural defined identity. Rather, within the Isthmus, the marked presence of nationalistic cultures maintains identities separated, often, in opposition to one another. These national identities follow the traditional modern construction of national identity based on territoriality, on the eradication of difference, on the formulation of a uniform national subject, in the case of the state apparatuses, and on the construction of the idea of national unity, in the case of revolutionary cultures. Outside the Central American territory, from the cultural and identitarian spaces of immigration represented by the diasporic communities that, in this case, have settled in the United States, the Central American identity functions only outside of the Central American territory, and it exists as an umbrella term that defines a region and that is composed by difference. In other words, in spite of the fact that the experience of immigration and the nostalgia that it produces, presents the nation and nationalism as the foundations of identity, for our program, it is fundamental to deconstruct nationalism. As Hardt and Negri state:
In cases of diasporic populations, ... the nation seems at times to be the only concept available under which to imagine the community of the subaltern group. ... It may be true, as Benedict Anderson says, that a nation should be understood as an imagined community—but here we should recognize that the claim is inverted so that the nation becomes the only way to imagine community! Every imagination of a community becomes overcoded as a nation and hence our conception of community is severely impoverished. (107)
Therefore, the Central American Program strives for the visibility of the Central American cultural and ethnic diversity, and its experiences of transnationalism, post-nationalism, and immigration. It is a postcolonial positioning that is no longer affiliated to the colonial dimensions of a nation or a region, but to a more permeable and malleable understanding of this region and of the movements of its displaced peoples. As Hardt and Negri state, the colonial civilizing project that defined the nation in clear terms and that viewed disease as “a sign of a lack of civilization” (135) can no longer stand at this age of globalization when “[t]he boundaries of nation-states ... are increasingly permeable by all kinds of flows. Nothing can bring back the hygienic shields of colonial boundaries. The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion” (136).
As traumatic and significant as the experience of immigration has been for each of over two million Central American immigrants that compose our community in Southern California, it is evident that each of our identities is defined by the issues that each of our communities consider fundamental struggles: the revolutionary experience of the 1980s and 1990s, the history of economic oppression during most of Modern history of the Central American region, our contention with an imperialistic US foreign policy, particularly marked by episodes such as the William Walker invasion of Nicaragua in the 1850s, the arbitrary formation and occupation of Panama during most of the 20th century, the US support of the Contras during most of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and its support and counter-insurgency training of the Guatemalan and Salvadoran militaristic governments during the recent civil wars. Nevertheless, one must also acknowledge that these are struggles linked to the experience of the modern nation, that relate to the construction of the idea of a cohesive national identity, to the economy that sustained national and international political relations.
In Central America, nevertheless, there are other identities that coexist with these, and do not necessarily relate to the modern economic and nationalistic dimensions of Central American experience. These are identities that exist outside of the space of the modern nation and that struggle against the efforts launched by the modern nation to erase them: the diverse ethnic and cultural identities that are also a fundamental part of the Central American experience. These are the populations that have been massacred and persecuted in the name of nationalism, and these are populations and identities that must have a place within the context of the Central American Studies Program at California State University in Northridge. Furthermore, it is important to realize that these are identities and communities that, in the diaspora, are no longer defined in absentia, as they are relegated to silence by the national dominant culture. This is particularly evident as we approach our classrooms and we realize that we will not be speaking and defining Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean peoples in their absence, but rather, we will be speaking of the Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean experiences and identities to a body of students that includes members of their communities. It is a dynamic that requires that our in-class discussions generate a space for the active participation of the students, that is, representatives of the diverse identities that constitute the Central American experience.
On a similar note, teaching Central American Studies outside of the Central American territory is an experience unlike any other at the university level within the Central American territory. Whereas, a university education is accessible to a limited percentage of the population and is marked by a middle class Ladino sensibility within the Central American territory, requiring the acculturation of members of other communities that seek access to higher education, in the diasporic communities the Central American population is markedly lower class and diverse. And while it might not have easy access to research universities such as the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), it is markedly present at California State University, Northridge among other campuses within the California State University system, such as Los Angeles, where this population is able to gain access to higher education in larger percentages.
At California State University, Northridge the official numbers do not include the student population of Afro-Caribbean heritage who are forced to choose in their application for admission to the University between a Central American and an Afro-Caribbean identitarian affiliation. As a result, the Central American student enrollment is officially listed by the Office of Institutional Research at 1,300. Nevertheless, it is estimated that the Central American population ranges from 2,500 to 3,000. In other words, the Central American community at California State University, Northridge constitutes, at least, an approximate 8% of the student population.
The Central American Studies Program at California State University, Northridge has a tri-fold mission: to empower the large and growing Central American community in the United States by promoting academic excellence, community involvement, and cultural diversity; to open spaces of global citizenship and dialogue between academia and society at large which contribute to the construction of a Central American transnational identity; and to promote an understanding and appreciation of the diverse Central American cultures, ethnicities, and worldviews from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Currently, the students enrolled in the Program come from diverse backgrounds, the majority come from Central American immigrant backgrounds that link them to the urban experience in Los Angeles and to the rural experience in Central America. Our students, as well as the Central American community at large, come from an experience marked by undocumented immigration and/or refugee status. A large percentage of the Central American students enrolled in the program have lived in the Pico/Union Westlake area of urban Los Angeles and have studied in over-populated high schools where they lacked the encouragement to move on to the university setting. As a result, our Program’s objectives include being advocates for our students and the Central American community, and making up for the work and opportunities that many of our students were not able to have access to, that is, to offer interdisciplinary courses that allow them to develop their critical thinking, writing, and reading skills and that motivate them to become independent, self driven lifelong learners. With regards to the Central American experience and identities, our courses seek to provide students with an awareness of the complexity of the historical, social, and cultural developments in Central America. Our program strives to help them develop a greater understanding and appreciation of the transnational Central American community’s experiences, cultures, and its contributions to the United States. We strive to develop the intellectual and social foundations, and the leadership skills, necessary for promoting social change in the United States and its society, especially in relation to the Central American community that has settled in this country. Furthermore, as global citizens, our Program seeks to prepare students to recognize, understand, evaluate and change the culture of exclusion that has been prevalent in both Central America and the United States, as well as to instill in students an understanding and appreciation of the diverse Central American cultures, ethnicities, experiences, and worldviews.
Without a doubt, our Program plays an important role linking California State University, Northridge, as an institution, to the Central American community at large that surrounds it, in the general area, in numbers that are only estimated at over two million, lacking in exactitude and growing with immigration on a daily basis. For students who concentrate in Central American Studies and who participate in the Central American United Student Association, CAUSA, the Central American Studies Program represents a space that they may consider their own, and the Central American Studies Program office often serves as the heart of a student and faculty community that congregates there to produce their work, to organize their events, to share their experiences, and to further expand their bonds. Fortunately for the Program, the Central American student population at California State University, Northridge is diverse, and it includes not only immigrants originating from a number of Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean communities in Central America, but also from immigrant families that have formed across national identities: Nicaraguan-Salvadoran; Guatemalan-Panamanian; and so forth. In other words, our student population can be defined in the same terms as our vision of the program: transnational, diasporic, culturally and ethnically diverse, and from interdisciplinary academic backgrounds.
The courses in our program are interdisciplinary. There is a colonial legacy linked to the traditional disciplinary approaches to the Central American experience. As a result, even when some of our courses explore the realm of traditional disciplines such as literature, art, music, history and film, they do so from the interdisciplinary perspective of an ethnic studies program. Furthermore, most of our courses are fully interdisciplinary, such as the Central American Diaspora; Urbanization in Central America; Poverty, Development, and the Environment in Central America; Violence and Culture in Central America; Religious, Social, or Revolutionary Movements. There are also courses that specifically explore the cultural and identitarian perspectives of particular populations, such as Afro-Caribbean Cultures and Identities; Contemporary Indigenous Peoples in Central America, or the Changing Roles of Central American Women. Furthermore, our courses reflect the strong connection that our program has with the Central American community at large, particularly through the required Fieldwork in the Community course. This course is based on the premise that students have valuable knowledge to share with their community but, more importantly, that the community itself is an invaluable source of knowledge for the students, and that it is through service learning with the community that this knowledge can be acquired.
California State University, Northridge has been at the heart of the institutionalization of the discipline of Central American Studies. Of course, this process of institutionalization comes with certain political benefits as it provides visibility for Central Americans and it is part of a wider process of institutionalization of Central American immigrants in the United States. Nevertheless, that the institutionalization of the discipline of Central American Studies has begun in Northridge, a place where large numbers of Central American students have access to the program is significant. It has generated a space that could be defined, following Alberto Moreiras, as a space that allows us “to problematize the spatial relationships between center and periphery, between home and abroad, between the locality of knowledge production and its site of intervention” (28). In fact, “[t]he immigrant imaginary must necessarily affect an epistemic practice that used to be based on a national ... need to know the other, insofar as the other is now pretty much ourselves, or an important part of ourselves” (Moreiras, 28). In other words, the Central American Studies Program at California State University in Northridge has emerged within the contexts of an immigrant imaginary, of transnationalism, interdisciplinarity, diversity, and difference.
Works Cited
Asturias, Miguel Angel. Sociología Guatemalteca. Guatemalan Sociology. Trans. Maureen Ahern. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, Center for Latin American Studies, 1977.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Greenwood, Leonard. “Minorities Peace Accord Reached at Valley State.” Los Angeles Times 24 January 1969: A1.
Greenwood, Leonard. “Valley State Asked to Drop Charges Against Students.” Los Angeles Times 12 January 1969: B.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Kumbula, John. “Valley State Agrees to Establish 2 Ethnic Studies Departments.” Los Angeles Times 12 January 1969: A1.
Mignolo, Walter. “Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity.” American Literary History 18.2 (2006): 312-31.
Moreiras, Alberto. The Exhaustion of Difference. The Politics of latin American Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
Pyle, Amy. “Class Consciousness Education: The Founding of a CSUN Asian-American Studies Department Comes 21 Years after Chicano and Pan-African Studies.” Los Angeles Times 19 September 1990: 3.
Rafael, Vicente. “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States.” Social Text 41 (1994): 91-111.
The Storm at Valley State. Dir. Paul Kulak and Scot Kelly. CSUN: Paul Kulak Productions, 1985.
Unrest: Founding of the California State University, Northdige Chicana/Chicano Studies Department. Dir. Miguel Duran. CSUN Chicana/o Studies Department, 2006.
“Hispanic Serving Instituion.” U.S. Department of Education. 5 August 2006. <http://www.ed.gov/programs/idueshsi/definition.html>