Dr. Emmet Campos arrived at UW-Madison as part of a cohort of Chicane students recruited from Texas. While on campus, he was very involved with Mecha and creating community with fellow Chicane students. While he has since left Wisconsin for University of Texas-Austin, he remains connected to Wisconsin and those he met while attending UW-Madison, visiting every summer. CLS PA Carmen Ibarra sat down with Emmet Campos to talk about his time at UW-Madison. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
[Carmen Ibarra] First, I wanted to ask about how you came to attend UW-Madison?
[Emmet Campos] I was raised in San Antonio, Texas, but I was born in Fort Worth. Most of my family comes from Texas, originally from Mexico- that’s the origin story of a lot of us, right? My dad was in the Air Force, and that was his lifeline. He was a migrant farm worker, my grandparents were migrant farm workers, my mom was as well, so the military service was an opportunity for my dad to get out of that stream and to get an education. At the time, UW was recruiting students from San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley. They also recruited from Milwaukee, Racine, Chicago, and Minneapolis. I was planning to apply to UT, which was my first choice. When I told the counselor where I was planning on applying, she asked if I had ever thought about UW, which I had never even heard of at the time. She told me that UW, along with other Big Ten Universities, had a new program, the five-year program, which they created as an effort to diversify the Big Ten.
[Carmen Ibarra] Can you tell me a little bit more about the five-year program?
[Emmet Campos] My tuition, living expenses, food, and housing would be paid for, and they had a counselor, supportive services, and an office for the program. She had to do some convincing, because I had my mind set on UT, but I ended up applying to UW- I think the clincher was the full ride. I was accepted to UW, and I wasn’t accepted to UT. I didn’t even get a rejection letter, and I was really upset that UT had ignored me- though ironically, I ended up getting my graduate degrees at UT.
[Carmen Ibarra] How did they go about building community within the five-year program?
[Emmet Campos] UW was building community the right way with the five-year program. They offered a full ride, Latine counselors, support services, and a cohort model, all of which made the space more welcoming. This was very important because UW was a predominantly white institution, and it probably still is, but in the mid-70s, it was really white. And so, how do you create that welcoming space? They got people who looked like us, counselors that looked like us, and they made a space for us. There was also a student organization, La Raza Unida, made up of graduate and undergraduate students. In the Midwest, there wasn’t a huge Mexican community, but there was a small community in South Madison, and we began to work with them, which was very important for the political and cultural work we did. Those spaces they created for us made it important for us to stick around, and even then, a lot of students ended up leaving after the first winter. When they recruited us, they never told us about the brutal winters!
[Carmen Ibarra] What was your experience like at UW?
[Emmet Campos] My cohort came together in the mid-70s, and it was a really powerful space, a critical mass of students coming together. There was one Latino professor, Dr. Prospero Saíz, who was instrumental in the work that we did and in the education we received. He taught the very first Chicane literature class at UW. He’s a brilliant guy, and also an activist. That was the identity that I aspired to later in my work as an academic. I wanted to be someone who bridged academic research with community engagement and empowerment. Dr. Saíz was a model for that kind of work. He showed up, taught classes that had never been taught before, and introduced us to literature and authors that we had never even heard of, things that we didn’t even realize our people could write. We read work by people like Gloria Anzaldúa, Carlos Fuentes, Tomás Rivera, and Raúl Salinas, who later became my mentor when I arrived at UT Austin for my graduate studies.
[Carmen Ibarra] What was your experience with community building while in Madison, and how did it influence your career trajectory?
[Emmet Campos] UW fostered community to a degree. They created the five-year program, which was critical to getting us there in the first place, but after that, the University was not very supportive, and they pushed back on a lot of things that we demanded. There was a thriving Latino community that we reached out to and who supported us. Faculty also formed some of that community. I mentioned Dr. Saíz, and there was a graduate student, Jesús Salas, who was a very important figure, and these critical mentors helped create community. Through Mecha, we fostered community through student initiative, involvement, and engagement with the support of these mentors. I am still in touch with many of my Mecha folks, and we still get together, and that’s community, right? It’s community, but it’s familia as well. We not only went to school together, we organized together. These experiences were foundational for my career, because I wanted to be an activist scholar like Dr. Saíz and Jesús Salas. They put me on the path to academics, and I ended up back here at UT Austin, where I got my graduate degree in the English department, and then my PhD in cultural studies and education. At UT Austin, where I have been teaching for the last 15-20 years, I continue to take the lessons that I learned from my work with Mecha and apply them here, and take the lessons I learned from those professors and apply them in my teaching, in my pedagogy, in my curriculum. After graduating from UW, I worked for ten years with nonprofits and federally funded programs, doing community work. This was a result of the foundational experiences I had with La Raza Unida, the five-year program, and the classes I took at UW-Madison. La Raza Unida transformed into Mecha in the late 70s, and it became a space for students to organize. I think one of our most important accomplishments was the creation of the Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies Program.
[Carmen Ibarra] What is Project MALES, and what is the value of the work that organization does to you?
[Emmet Campos] MALES is an acronym, standing for Mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational Successes. I’ve been the director of that program for the last 10-11 years. There are four components to the project. There’s a research component and institute, and a statewide consortia of K-12 and post-secondary institutions focused on the issues that we address. The project principally serves Black and Brown men, talking about their experiences and the challenges they face in k-12 and higher education, and how to increase their graduation rates. We also have a mentoring program. We serve about 150 young men in East Austin, and we match them up with undergraduate students that we train and meet with them weekly. We also have a Maymester program where we go to Mexico, and more recently Spain, between the spring and summer session. I’ve been teaching that class with Dr. Sáenz and Dr. Aguayo for about five years now.
[Carmen Ibarra] You’ve spoken fondly of your time at UW-Madison, could you tell me your favorite memory from your time here?
[Emmet Campos] Well, that’s the problem, Carmen, I can think of too many. There’s a thrill to building community and making family beyond blood. To me, these memories are continuous because I was able to create family when I was there, I’m still in touch with my Mecha familia. UW is where it really all started for me. That’s where I cut my political teeth. That’s where I learned about my history and my culture and the great literatures that we produce. That’s where I met my lifelong friends. I built community here.
[Carmen Ibarra] What advice would you give to students?
[Emmet Campos] When you come to college, the classroom experience is an important component of that experience in higher education. But just as critical, is the work you do outside of the classroom, the kind of engagement you do, with student and community organizations. That work is just as critical, or more critical, I think, for the developing yourself. You, as a person, your career, whatever you aspire to be, your vocation, and it’s important to be grounded in both academics, but also in your community, and to not forget where you came from.