How do we grapple with uncertainty and a new wave of hostility towards Latinx and Chicanx populations in our current times? While dreaming radically of and for the future is essential work for communities and individuals, analyzing our history can aid and guide us in that dreaming. In the spring of 1974, Chicanx/e students from Milwaukee, Waukesha, Racine, and Texas founded La Raza Unida (LRU) at UW–Madison to address the needs of Chicanx/e students. Those students, with the support of faculty, then led the fight to create Chicano Studies at UW-Madison. In 1976, our program was established.
What knowledge, wisdom, and action can we take from our predecessors in the 1970s and all who stood with them, into this moment? What should we carry forward from all those who have carefully and lovingly built the program into what it is today? Students approach CLS with an interest in building strong and lasting communities inside and out of the academy. CLS faculty advance research on Latinx peoples through research on mixed-status families, immigration, labor conditions, oral history, literature, and the arts. Our curriculum includes courses where students volunteer at the Madison Community Immigration Law Center or Tenant Resource Center. For students and faculty alike, community care and professional growth have always been inseparable, and this has shaped generations. Forty-seven years after the founding of CLS, in 2023, the Board of Regents approved a CLS major. By 2026, we graduated 58 students in the major. Althought the program still isn’t a department, it has never stopped growing.
The 50th Anniversary Symposium will be held in the new Levy Hall on UW’s campus on October 16th and 17th. In community, we will break bread and be in conversation. Friday evening opens with a reception and the unveiling of the exhibition tracing fifty years of CLS history. Saturday brings a keynote address on Latinx poetry and three panels examining the program’s impact on students, its contributions to interdisciplinary research, and its commitment to community-engaged scholarship. In these challenging times for Latinx and Chicanx communities, ethnic studies, and higher education itself, join us in practicing community, celebrating our anniversary, and dreaming for the future this fall. All are welcome.