Research

Julian Samora’s research strategies have been thoroughly documented by authors Anthony Blasi and Bernard Donahoe in their book A History of Sociological Research and Teaching at Catholic Notre Dame University, Indiana, published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2002. By permission of the authors, Chapter Nine, The Origins of Mexican American Studies is excerpted here. Their book can be purchased by contacting www.mellenpress.com

9. The Origin of Mexican American Studies

A general consciousness of the status of minorities in the United States emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. Signs of progress in the attainment of the civil rights of African Americans included President Truman’s racial integration of units in the military services, the 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring segregated education to be inherently unequal (Brown v. Board of Education), the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These initiatives and decisions did not by themselves create a national consensus. Rather, the desperate resistance by segregationist politicians in the South, associated in the resultant news photographs and television images with mob threats and police violence, discredited institutionalized racism in the minds of most Americans.
While before the 1960s participating in civil rights projects or associating with minorities involved one in a decline in respectability, after the 1960s it became “politically correct” to do these things. Universities began to create opportunities for African Americans both to promote the prospects of black people and to accustom university students in general to life in a diverse society. By the 1970s, a renewed feminist movement widened people’s perspective of rights in general. The University of Notre Dame began to plan for coeducation at that time, first by cooperating with St. Mary’s College nearby. It was in that setting that the Notre Dame and St. Mary’s sociology programs cooperated, operating for a year as a unit and hoping to form one department. University negotiations with St. Mary’s broke down, however, and Notre Dame then moved to become a coeducational institution. In such a context, it was only natural that creating opportunities for Mexican Americans and programs in Mexican American Studies would emerge. It was remarkable, however, that Notre Dame would take the lead. Perhaps it would be more remarkable that after being in the lead into the mid 1980s, Notre Dame would walk away from such an accomplishment at the end of the decade.

Julian Samora’s Initiatives
As we have seen, Julian Samora was the first Mexican American to earn a Ph.D. in sociology. He had a successful career in medical sociology, conducting field work in rural Mexican American settings in the American Southwest. In 1959 he came to Notre Dame to meet a need for research-oriented Catholic sociologists, and he served a term as department head in the early 1960s, declining a second term in order to conduct research under a Ford Foundation grant on population problems in Mexico and Central America. He was fully aware, however, of the flow of undocumented immigrant workers from Mexico to the United States, having engaged in research with William Form and William D’Antonio at the Mexico/United States border. From his own experience he was fully aware of discrimination against and hostility toward Mexican Americans.
Julian Samora would be the person to initiate a response in higher education in America to the needs of Mexican Americans and undocumented immigrant workers. That response could not be a continuation of community studies in the rural Southwest; Mexican Americans had migrated to urban America–as had Americans in general and immigrants from nations around the world–and had taken up residence not only in the Southwest but elsewhere as well. The questions became ones of how to dispel misinformation and stereotypes in the educational and professional cultures of the urban settings, and how to open up opportunities in American universities. Samora would answer these questions at Notre Dame, creating a model that would be emulated elsewhere.
After serving as department head in the early 1960s, Samora had obtained high profile grants and had emerged as a national expert on Mexican American issues. Nevertheless even educated people were “forgetful” about the presence of a Mexican American minority in the United States. “Forgetful” is an apt term for the situation. People knew intellectually that Mexican Americans live in America and had been a constituent element of the national population since the admission of the Republic of Texas to the Union. They knew that the subsequent war with Mexico, that derived from the boundary dispute between Texas and Mexico, led up to the purchase by the United States of a large territory that had belonged to Mexico. Yet what most Americans knew from their childhood history books ended with that territorial acquisition. There was little consciousness that there might be behavioral consequences in northern Indiana in the 1970s, for example, deriving from these historical facts. In one instance, Julian Samora, of all people, had been invited to a dinner at a country club that did not serve African Americans and other non-whites, even while Samora served on the Indiana State Civil Rights Commission. He not only declined the invitation but found it necessary to explain the reason.
As a high a profile Mexican American scholar, Julian Samora received many requests from officials at various colleges and universities to recommend Mexican American graduate students and academics for a variety of positions. Because there were so few such people, he often had to respond to the requests in the negative, saying he knew of no appropriate person. In some cases he was able to make recommendations. That he would be asked was an indication of an improving consciousness in the national academic community, but sometimes the requests demonstrated that the emergent consciousness was quite flawed. Here is a reply he felt compelled to send to a director of a medical school office of minority student affairs, after hesitating for almost two months:
I hesitated to respond to your letter of August 29, for a number of reasons. The primary reason is that the letter as addressed (Mr. La Raza Unida, Dear Mr. Unida) does not make a lot of sense because I suppose it is impossible for anyone to be named that! The bottomless depth of your ignorance is both very evident and quite appalling. If your letter is any indication, I would judge that it also reveals your insensitivity to minority people.
To answer your letter–no. I would not identify any minority student for you. As a matter of fact, I would not recommend “Gringo” students to you.

Because there was such a shortage of Mexican American scholars to meet the sudden and politically correct demand for them, Samora himself received a number of job offers. The Ford Foundation wanted him for its New York office in 1967, an offer that left him undecided for quite some time. In the end he did not want to leave Notre Dame or to live in New York. The University of California, Berkeley, wanted him three years later:
Please tell me what you know about the Berkeley campus. As you may know they are actively seeking me out for one of three positions related to the Chicano Studies program. I get the impression that they are fairly confused out there, but they keep calling me about every other night.

While he would prove to have ambitions for programs of research and academic development, he was not disposed to go to the Ford Foundation or to the University of California, Berkeley, out of personal ambition. He seemed to believe Notre Dame was a good place for what he had in mind since there was a sympathetic and influential department head in the person of William D’Antonio, support and flexibility for obtaining grant money, and a growing program in sociology and anthropology whose future Samora himself could help shape. That conditions might change for the worse could have been suspected when D’Antonio announced his decision to leave Notre Dame. Samora’s name had been placed in nomination for department head again, but he withdrew it in October, 1970.
In the late summer of 1970 Samora could point to the record of the faculty and history of Mexican American research that had been established under him and D’Antonio; members of the department had published more books and articles in Mexican American Studies than any other department in the United States. Not only was he personally associated with Mexican American public affairs by virtue of his membership on the Southwest Council of La Raza, but the headquarters of the Mid-West council was located at Notre Dame itself. Samora and his graduate student Jorge Bustamante were consulting with educational publishers about teaching materials for elementary and secondary instruction concerning Mexico and Mexican Americans. It seemed to be time to begin to institutionalize a line of research and graduate-level study of Mexican Americans. Samora began by informally proposing to the John Hay Whitney Foundation a study of the Texas Rangers designed to counter the romantic portrayal of the Rangers common up to 1970 and to reveal the oppression historically associated with them. He was already engaged in research on the United States/Mexico border situation under a 1968 Ford Foundation grant. The next step was to propose a grant to set something up at Notre Dame. He began with a small program based on University resources.
The University of Notre Dame established a modest program in the field of Mexican American studies in 1968 under the Center for the Study of Man in Contemporary Society. The primary thrust of the program was to produce scholars and scholarly materials in the field of Mexican-American Studies. The reason for the establishment of the program was the paucity of materials in this field and the extremely small number of Mexican-Americans who hold the doctorate degree. It was felt at the time that the students would earn their degrees in the established disciplines rather than attempt to offer a degree in Mexican-American Studies. Students were encouraged, however, to do their dissertation research on Mexican-American topics.

The idea was obviously to have something in place in order to demonstrate serious intent, so that a funding entity could be approached for support for an expansion of the program. The best-known sociologist to participate as a student in this initial program was Jorge Bustamante.
Julian Samora was informally proposing Ford Foundation support for a Mexican American studies program at Notre Dame as early as March, 1970. He pointed out to foundation staff that there were only three Mexican Americans with doctorates in sociology, including himself, in the country and only a fourth nearing degree completion. He suggested that given its faculty resources Notre Dame could, with foundation support, train two or three a year. Meanwhile, he had begun writing to the seventy colleges and universities in the United States that had some kind of Mexican American Studies Program in order to survey curricula.
Samora was already administering a 1968-70 Ford Foundation grant that supported publications in Mexican American Studies and a number of students at Notre Dame and at San Diego State University. The new five-year grant would support students in the field of Mexican American Studies who were pursuing degrees at Notre Dame in the departments of economics, history, and sociology and anthropology. It would also fund publications in the field at the University of Notre Dame Press, a seminar with Samora for the students, and practical research experience in summers. The plan was to develop Mexican American scholars by recruiting them with the prospect of conducting research on their own cultural group, provide extra discussion and critique of their course projects in various classes, as well as create a support network through the seminars with Samora, engage them during summers in the conduct of research, and get their careers started with publications.
In a memorandum arranging the funding of a trip for five graduate students and himself in the first summer of practical research experience, Samora provided a fairly detailed account of what he had in mind.
In Colorado they will visit in Denver with members of the Crusade for Justice, a Mexican American organization that is actively involved in social change in Colorado. They will also visit a number of villages and towns in southern Colorado. In New Mexico they will visit a number of villages in the northern part and also a developing school in Dixon, New Mexico, whose specialty is the recording and analysis of oral history. They will also go to Albuquerque to visit with the Alianza Organization. The purpose of this trip is to acquaint the students with the rural village culture as well as the work with two urban organizations. We estimate that the trip will take two weeks….

No doubt, simply hearing Samora’s observations and questions in the various settings informally communicated a great deal about qualitative research methods. A number of sociologists participated in the Ford Foundation funded phase of the program–notably Gilberto Cardenas, Miguel Carranza, and Alberto Mata. Together with Jorge Bustamante, who is a Mexican rather than a Mexican American but who devoted considerable energies to the study of the undocumented immigrant worker phenomenon, they comprise the small first scholarly cohort in the sociological study of Mexican American life, the previous isolated efforts of Samora, D’Antonio, Dasilva, and Rubel not having been integrated into an identifiable area study. Indeed, it would be Cardenas who would endeavor to form a theoretical framework that would make the area study cohere rather than simply collect findings on Mexican Americans.
As the five years of the grant approached a terminus, there was some fear that the program would have to all but end. The University’s Vice President for Advanced Studies, Robert Gordon, had the understanding that there was an implicit obligation to hire a second Mexican American sociologist so that studies of Mexican American life and academic role models for Mexican American graduate students would continue once the grant ended. Meanwhile the Ford Foundation wanted Samora and Jorge Bustamante to travel in the southwest United States and in Mexico to outline issues for study, and there seemed to be nobody else to stay behind to administer a Mexican American Studies Program at Notre Dame. Indeed there were informal inquiries from Ford Foundation officials whether Notre Dame had hired any other Mexican American professors. Notre Dame did in fact proceed to hire two Mexican American professors, one in sociology (Jaime Sena-Rivera), but by the fall of 1975 Samora was suggesting that the Ford Foundation was not interested in renewing the grant.
Throughout the period of the initial Mexican American Studies Program and the phase that was funded by the Ford Foundation, Samora met with a number of frustrations arising in the University setting. He had thought that Catholic Notre Dame would present his students with fewer cultural problems than would other settings, but in part under the influence of Fabio Dasilva they began to do brilliant things with neo-Marxian theory (as were many Catholics working with Marxian thought, for that matter–e.g., liberation theology), sparking adamant opposition from conservative Catholics such as Robert Vasoli and adamantly non-Marxian moderates such as David Dodge and Frank Fahey. Samora’s brand of research–largely consisting of savvy qualitative field work–was not in step with the increasingly quantitative orientation of the department’s methodologists, so that the more the Mexican American Studies Program’s students learned from him the more suspect they became in the eyes of several members of the department. The very strength of the network that developed among the program participants tended to isolate them from others.
Then there was the University administration itself. The president, Father Hesburgh, asked Samora for some proposals to bring Mexican American students to Notre Dame. Samora replied with three ideas: the American bishops could initiate a fund-raising drive to support the students with designated scholarships, the University could set aside a percentage of its financial aid budget for Mexican Americans, or earnings from $5 million in the University’s endowment could be designated for financial aid for Mexican American students. Samora himself preferred the third idea, but he had his hopes raised for the second, since it would cost the University no moneys beyond its current expenditures. Nothing came of the ideas. Meanwhile, he had given up encouraging Mexican American high school students to apply to Notre Dame because he perceived them to be met by indifference on the part of the admissions staff. At the time, Father Hesburgh, quitting the United States Commission on Civil Rights, was criticizing the Nixon administration in Washington; Samora believed the criticisms were applicable to the Hesburgh administration at Notre Dame. In 1980 he would finally resign from the Notre Dame affirmative action committee “in disgust” after failing to persuade other faculty members to admit “more than an acceptable token number” of minorities.
Meanwhile, the Ford Foundation wanted some responses from the University about the program so that the latter could be evaluated. One of their questions asked for an account of any problems that had been encountered. Samora suggested to the University Office of Advanced Studies that, in response to the Foundation, mention be made of departments resisting recruiting Mexican Americans, an over-reliance in graduate admissions on Graduate Record Examination scores, and a lack of Mexican American faculty in the economics and history departments, such faculty having an interest in topics on which Mexican American students would want to write theses and dissertations.
Remarkably, Samora proceeded to pursue and obtained federal money to continue the program, despite the various problems with the University. The program had already a track record of supporting thirty-eight graduate students between 1971 and 1979, twelve of them in the sociology program. The new funding began in the academic year 1978-79 under the Graduate and Professional Opportunity Program (GPOP), involving only slight changes from the Ford Foundation funded program–principally the addition of the Law School to the three departments in which students enrolled. The Mexican American Studies Program, with the involvement of the sociology department, would continue until Samora’s retirement in 1985. The GPOP funded phase of the program immediately saw the addition of two more Mexican American faculty at Notre Dame, in the law school and the English department.
In annual reports to the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Samora described the progress of each of the twelve graduate students supported by the fellowships and described his own activities in the “Chicano Movement Seminar” that he conducted for them and in his role as an academic adviser. He wrote of counseling the students about their course work, about their adjustment to graduate studies, and their adjustment to the University, as well as “any other problems that may come up.” In the weekly colloquium the students made book reports, presented research papers, and had some lectures. Perhaps most important for the success of the students, they presented their papers written for other courses in the colloquium first, in order to benefit from other students’ and Samora’s criticisms. Naturally, Samora would have had more interests in common with the fellowship recipients from the sociology department than with the others. Indicative of this was the practice of sociology students borrowing books from his personal library and photocopying materials from his extensive files of information on Mexican American affairs. What did not go into Samora’s official reports was the extended familia of students with Julian and Betty Samora at numerous fiestas at casa Samora. The bonding of the students together as a group and with the Samora’s helps explain the high retention rate of the program, a major achievement in itself.
Julian Samora was the only Mexican American to work in Notre Dame’s sociology program for any length of time. He played a considerable role in launching Mexican American studies in general and the sociological study of Mexican American life in particular. The further impact of a Notre Dame tradition of Mexican American sociological studies beyond the time of Julian Samora and his non-Mexican American colleagues D’Antonio, Rubel, Dasilva, and Barrett is evident in the graduate students who went through the department, especially those who went through the Mexican American Studies Program that Samora had established. Ascertaining who should be associated with the “tradition” is not simple, since there were Mexican Americans who studied sociology at Notre Dame but did not tie into the network of people studying Mexican American life, Mexican nationals who were decidedly part of that network, Latinos from other nations, and even Spaniards who had participated in the Mexican American Studies Program. A listing of sociology graduate degree recipients who have Spanish and Portuguese names (Table 9.1) runs from a pre-Mexican American Studies Program M.A. recipient, through the program participants, to post-program recipients, many of whom may have been attracted by Latin American Studies at the Kellogg Institute.
Once the Graduate and Professional Opportunity Program funding ended and Julian Samora retired, a controversy arose in the department whether to let the Mexican American Studies Program die or to do something to continue it. While the program faced resistance on account of some participating students’ Marxian “radicalism” early on, it was the opposition of advocates of a purely quantitative sociology who killed it in the end. They did not consider the Samora tradition of work to be really sociology. So the program died. When Julian Samora retired, the student body and the Arts and Letters College Council voted in favor of giving him an honorary degree, but the recommendation was ignored. The only remnant of the heritage of Mexican American Studies that remained was the presence of Jorge Bustamante during part of the academic year. When the University president, Father Hesburgh, serving on a United States commission concerning immigration legislation, found out that Jorge Bustamante (Ph.D. ’75) was regarded as the world authority on the border situation, he had a chair established at Notre Dame for Bustamante. By then Bustamante was serving as a college president in Mexico and could only spend part of a term each year at Notre Dame. In later years when Father Patrick Sullivan, C.S.C., Richard Lamanna, Kevin Christiano, and Andrew Weigert, among others, argued for establishing some kind of new program in Mexican American Studies, the quantitative sociologists remained opposed. The next Notre Dame president, Father Edward Malloy, C.S.C., wanted to increase diversity at the University at a time when the Latino undergraduates were agitating for a Latino studies program. It was from President Malloy’s initiative, and over opposition from some in the sociology department, that Gilberto Cardenas (Ph.D. ’77) and his staff were lured up to Notre Dame from the University of Texas to re-establish Mexican American Studies at Notre Dame in the summer of 1999.

The Study of Undocumented Labor Migration
The sociology department at Notre Dame was a place where humanistically oriented scholars–often involved with an intellectually sophisticated religiosity–engaged Marxian thought and where Marxian leftists seriously engaged culture and meaning. The humanistically inclined gravitated toward the phenomenology and symbolic interactionism of Andrew Weigert in the 1970s, as well as to Fabio Dasilva, who was open to phenomenology, existentialism, and Georg Simmel’s “form sociology,” as well as to Marxian thought. The Marxian leftists gravitated toward Dasilva, as he moved increasingly into the critical theory approach of Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas, though such students could see the force of Weigert’s kind of theory. The result was that the Notre Dame graduates who specialized in theory were involved with a Marxian style big picture tempered by an appreciation of real humans generating meaning systems and personal identities in the course of their dealings with one another. It did not make scientific sense to these students, thanks to Weigert and Dasilva, to proceed as dogmatic Marxists, but it also did not make sense to trivialize the research ethic by resorting to a micro-level descriptivism that did little more than depict what people did and said. Consequently, these students had to develop personal theoretical syntheses rather than adopt already existent social “theories.”
A parallel development occurred among Julian Samora’s students. Some arrived at Notre Dame already radicalized by the developments of the 1960s and gravitated around Fabio Dasilva, who would not be satisfied to leave them dogmatists. Their mentor, Julian Samora, was a qualitative researcher who tended to study small communities and to formulate savvy analyses on the basis of observations of everyday life. Their faculty allies, who had done research in Latin American settings, knew some Spanish, and savored Latin culture, were Andrew Weigert and Arthur Rubel, the former a symbolic interactionist and the latter an ethnographer. Such an environment led the Mexican American Studies Program participants into the creative intellectual work of synthesizing the critical and the appreciative, the big picture and the micro worlds that real people experience.
The trajectory of the study of undocumented Mexican labor migrants in the United States reflects this synthetic process. The background to the study of the undocumented migrants is to be found in mid-century development theory. “Underdeveloped” or “developing” societies were thought to be undergoing a “modernization” process in which the social scientist would observe the diffusion of innovations into rural areas and the adaptation of rural migrants to urban environments. Samora’s early studies of the reception of medicine by rural Mexican Americans and his follow-up study of families who moved out of a small village to Pueblo, Colorado, should be thought of in this context. In time, however, development theory evolved into the world system paradigm, in which social scientists thought in terms of surplus value (profit driving from the exploitation of labor) being drawn out of the periphery of the world system to the center, leaving the periphery poor despite its productivity. The world system approach was undoubtedly suggestive, but in the case of Mexico much of the productive labor force was migrating to the United States and not being exploited in the periphery. It seemed necessary to look at that migration as a phenomenon in its own right as well as place it in a global context.
Students of migration tended to see migration itself as an intrusion of people from one economy into another. In an “equilibrium approach,” social scientists thought in terms of labor moving from places where capital is scarce and labor plentiful, to places where capital is abundant and labor scarce. A problem with this approach is that capital can move more freely than labor and achieve greater margins of profit where there is an over-supply of labor than where there is a relative scarcity. Moreover, during the 1970s intense capitalization reduced the need for labor. It was also questionable whether people really left one discretely defined economy and entered another when they migrated. When a “historical-structural” approach to the problem replaced the equilibrium model, the account lost sight of real individual people. There would be an international capitalist system and reserve labor pools, but what form these took in people’s experiences was unclear.
The study of undocumented labor migration by the Notre Dame scholars begins with Los Mojados by Julian Samora, with Jorge Bustamante and Gilbert Cardenas. In the introduction, Samora begins with an observation phrased as if from the perspective of the migrant.
The individual alien himself has the strange experience of leaving his family, friends, community, and country for an undetermined period of time. He lives outside the law, on the fringes of society, in constant fear of being apprehended. Invariably he leads a life of hardship, and he is at the mercy of those who would exploit him.

The question that lies behind the various chapters of the volume is, Cui bono? In order to answer that question, it was necessary to identify the categories of people. Among the migrants, for example, there were wetbacks (illegals who cross the Rio Grande), alambristas (illegals who cut through fences), braceros (guest workers), commuters with “green cards,” and legal crossers who worked illegally. In the border region the commuters’ interests conflicted with those of the resident Mexican Americans, whose wages they “depress.” The chapter that was originally drafted by Cardenas focuses on the tightening and loosening of immigration barriers in order to highlight the interests of industrialists and other elites and the interests of the United States Border Patrol as an institution. The chapter originally drafted by Jorge Bustamante reports his own experience of posing in Mexico as an intended wetback, gaining the confidence of others intending to cross the Rio Grande illegally, and going through the experience of crossing, being hunted, hiding, being arrested, and gaining information in a detention center through unstructured conversations. Samora, Cardenas, and Bustamante were revealing the articulation of typical significant experiences of real people with the larger structures of an international border and the world of employment, but they had not yet synthesized all that they knew into a paradigm.
Bustamante began to apply labeling theory to the “wetback” phenomenon, so that the construction of a deviant identity for a category of persons could be seen as a facet of a larger social process. In his dissertation he engaged in the intellectual labor of outlining an opening up to experience and to meaning-construction on the part of neo-Marxian (as opposed to politically Marxist) thought. Then he analyzes labor migration as an integral part of the social relations of production along the United States-Mexico border, and ties his own experience as an experimental wetback to the structural context in which migrants become commodities, as it were. This was a synthetic comprehension of a particular social situation. Gilberto Cardenas, in his dissertation two years later, generalizes the synthetic endeavor, creating a theory of undocumented labor migration. He refined this theoretical approach in a collaboration with Estevan Flores; the capitalist production process was the operative system, and immigrant workers were the actors contending with that system. The theory had to begin with the operative system without ignoring the social actor. Flores wanted to take that line of analysis one step further and spoke of the movement of workers and families as a working class demand for access to social wealth.
Other scholars of undocumented labor migration began to follow a similar trajectory of theory development, most notably Alejandro Portes within a center/periphery framework in 1977, linking that in turn to the international capitalist system in 1978. Wayne Cornelius would use a global economy perspective in 1987, after using a push/pull factor model before then. However, “Julian Samora’s students began their paradigmatic shift in the early 1970s and can certainly be a described as forerunners in the transition to a broader, more encompassing perspective for the study of immigration.”

Jorge A. Bustamante
Jorge Agustin Bustamante (1938- ) was originally from Chihuahua, Chihuahua State, Mexico. He attended elementary schools in Michoacan and a secondary school in the Federal District (Mexico City). His colegio major was law, also pursued in the Federal District. From 1955 to 1959 he earned a law degree in the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, writing a thesis on constitutional law. From 1958 to 1966 he worked as a corporate attorney and in private practice. Resuming his studies with the assistance of scholarships in 1967 in the faculty of political and social science of the National University of Mexico, he also completed two semesters of graduate coursework in sociology at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. At the same time, he taught as an assistant professor at the National University of Mexico in the department of international relations of the political and social science faculty. Thus it was as a broadly educated scholar and experienced educator that he went to Notre Dame in 1968 to pursue a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology, while on leave from the National University of Mexico.
Bustamante had conducted comparative legal research on higher education law (1966-67) and had been involved in field work research on rural faith healers in Mexico under the supervision of Arthur Rubel, as well as field work investigating corruption in the Mexico City judicial system (1968). Once coming to Notre Dame, again in research supervised by Rubel, he conducted in-depth interviews with elder Mexican immigrants in South Bend, Indiana. He became involved in field work on illegal Mexican immigrants in Illinois and along the United States-Mexico border, in research supervised by Julian Samora. He was also involved in Samora and Richard Lamanna’s East Chicago research project. For three years (1968-71) he served as Samora’s research assistant in the inquiries into illegal border crossings, designing interview schedules, conducting close to five hundred interviews in Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facilities, and ultimately participating himself as an ostensibly illegal alien. His studies at Notre Dame were supported in part by scholarships for study abroad from the National University of Mexico, Ford Foundation fellowships, and University of Notre Dame tuition waivers. He already had a few publications before the numerous articles he wrote in connection with the illegal immigration research. He received the M.A. from Notre Dame in 1970.
Given this background, it is astonishing that a deviance comprehensive examination committee rejected several versions of Bustamante’s examination paper. Bustamante used the rejected paper as the basis for a presentation at the 1970 American Sociological Association meeting and for another presentation in a plenary session of the meeting of the International Sociological Association that same year in Varna, Bulgaria. He even submitted it to the American Journal of Sociology, where it appeared in 1972 with acknowledgment for helpful comments on the earlier versions to Fabio Dasilva, the A.S.A. session chair Richard Schwartz, and three fellow students (Hernan Vera, Robert Antonio, Dennis Terzola). The examination committee continued to reject Bustamante’s approach to deviance, albeit by a split vote. The difference of opinion among the committee members, judging from one source, arose from Bustamante’s use of Marxian categories. The matter was quickly becoming an affair. Latino graduate students were threatening to leave, and at least one did. The majority of the examination committee called a department faculty meeting on the matter. “It was the first time we had a full department meeting to impeach a student, …and these people were trying to crucify him.” The considerable disagreement among the examination committee members became evident at the meeting, and the department voted to waive the examination requirement in deviance. As one of his last official acts at Notre Dame, William D’Antonio ruled that Bustamante could proceed in the program and write his dissertation without passing the deviance examination–in effect over-ruling the committee majority. As the new department head, William Liu tried to smooth over the situation with a conciliatory letter to the graduate students (with whom he was soon to do battle himself). The whole affair became a legend in the department and soured matters for many for years to come.
Bustamante returned to teaching in Mexico City and to write his dissertation. There was a real danger that his university would attempt to “satisfy” the terms of his contract by treating him as an adjunct; so Julian Samora asked Ford Foundation officials in Mexico City to open doors for him. He was later hired by a research institute early in 1972 and by June of the same year held simultaneous affiliations with the University of Texas, Austin, and El Colegio de Mexico. Bustamante’s dissertation committee members were all able to read Spanish–Samora, Dasilva, Rubel, Weigert–so Samora encouraged Bustamante to draft the dissertation in that language and translate it once it was approved. He was rapidly becoming recognized as an authority on border affairs and had occasion to persuade the president of Mexico to end the “Bracero Program,” as it was called, a guest worker arrangement for farm laborers in the United States.
The dissertation itself sets out on a painstaking theoretical endeavor. It conceptualizes immigration not as a demographic phenomenon but as a variety of labor. For a profit-driven economic system to expand, there needs be labor from which productivity can be derived that exceeds the total cost of that labor. Labor is not a simple market commodity but rather is arranged in asymmetrical social relationships. For the relationships among entrepreneur, worker, and consumer to be the asymmetrical, to benefit one or two of these categories to the disadvantage of a third category, there needs to be an underlying conflict of interest. That conflict of interest takes the form of property, which is not so much an assemblage of goods as a social relationship. Property is social in the sense of denying to one set of people what is accorded to another person or persons. Or, to use Bustamante’s more Marxian phraseology:
The structural dimension of labor as a social relation becomes specified in terms of a structure consisting of social classes in contradiction of interest, derived from the organization of production based on private property of the means of production.

In early capitalism, class prejudice enabled the entrepreneurs to immiserate the working classes. However the same profit motive that led to long working hours, low pay, and child labor also led to technological advances in the industrial process that required a skilled, and later an educated work force. A combination of education and democratic politics, as well as enlightened elites, who saw the need for a large consumer class, reversed the immiseration of the working class and created a modicum of prosperity. This happened, for example, in the United States. Political support for education and labor rights, however, depended on the ability of the elites and the electorate to see across class lines and ethnic lines respectively. Racial and ethnic prejudice prevented an appreciation of the immigrant as educable, worthy of having rights, and as a possible consumer. Prejudice came to be reinforced by criminalization when the Border Patrol was created in 1924.
The calling of the social scientist is to dispel social superstition. In the case of the undocumented Mexican labor immigrant phenomenon, this meant humanizing the “wetback,” depicting him not as a “back” in a particular geographical setting but as a person with a face, imagination, and hopes. Such a depiction was something the science of North American as well as Mexican elites needed in the 1970s. Bustamante saw his task in the dissertation research “to captured analytically the human experience of those involved in the relations of production of the micro social dimension of the area of our research.” Bustamante was more perspicacious about the role of a scholar such as himself in the bigger picture than were most “student radicals” who wrote dissertations in the 1970s (or other times, for that matter). So he was willing to risk what was regarded as heresy by leftist sociologists and take up the symbolic interactionist problematic of witnessing the creation of social meanings in the natural setting. That is why he returned to Mexico, posed as a worker (explaining his good Spanish grammar with a story about being the son of house servants), networking with men who were planning to cross the Rio Grande illegally, crossing it with them, experiencing being hunted, being arrested, and being put into a detention facility. All the while, he utilized his impressive powers of empathy to capture the experiences of others in order to provide a context for his own.
After the dissertation, Bustamante continued to investigate border issues with Julian Samora, including the development of the maquiladoras (plants of multnational corporations located near the U.S. border inside Mexico). He wrote numerous articles for the Mexico City newspaper Uno Mas Uno, as well as academic articles on the expulsion of illegals by the United States and the different perceptions of the issue by the two nations. Meanwhile he had assumed the presidency of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a research institute in Tijuana. He accepted an affiliation with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame, but it was not until 1999, upon completing his term as president in Tijuana, that he could spend a full term each year at his alma mater.

Gilberto Cardenas (1947- )
While Julian Samora was a product of a traditional and rural Mexican American society who came to point out that the new Mexican American reality was undergoing change in an urban setting, Gilberto Cardenas was a product of the new urban reality. Born in Los Angeles in the post World War II context, he availed himself of the most accessible educational opportunity near home–East Los Angeles College, where he earned an associate’s degree in 1967, and California State College Los Angeles, where he earned the B.A. in 1969. He became aware of Julian Samora’s work and went to Notre Dame because Samora was there. As a student in the California of the 1960s he was an activist, and Notre Dame seemed to him very much the ivory tower at the time. “In a sense, I was a problem.” One among the first cohort (1971) in the Ford Foundation phase of the Mexican American Studies Program, he had drafted a study that outlined the tightening and loosening of immigration restrictions on Mexicans in a synchrony with the needs of industry for cheap labor. Samora included that study in Los Mojados (published 1971).
Fabio Dasilva was beginning to emphasize the sociology of knowledge at Notre Dame in the early 1970s, with social thought understood as a facet of social reality rather than as an independent exercise about but not a part of society. He used the writings of Georg Lukacs and often referred to those of Georges Gurvitch. This aspect of the sociological enterprise seemed to be of interest to Cardenas in his graduate student years; he requested complimentary copies from publishers, of History and Class Consciousness by Lukacs and The Social Frameworks of Knowledge by Gurvitch in the summer of 1972. At the same time he had drafted an advocacy pamphlet in support of a boycott of non-union lettuce, a movement many across the nation joined at the time in support of the effort to unionize largely Mexican American farm workers in the southwest. From 1972 to 1974 he was involved both in activism and research, often in association with the Mid-West Council of La Raza. He coordinated a census survey of the Spanish surnamed population in South Bend, Indiana, testified on the status of farm workers before the Indiana State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, directed the development of a research project on the Spanish-speaking population of two communities in Chicago, and conducted a study, “Manpower Impact and Problems of Mexican Illegal Aliens in an Urban Labor Market” listed as a 269-page thesis at the University of Illinois library. There was no doubt that he was an industrious researcher who was becoming a research entrepreneur.
Cardenas’ first academic appointment, which would continue for almost a quarter of a century, was at the University of Texas, Austin. He would continue with his interest in social theory, considering a volume on Chicano social thought and ideology that would have been edited with Julian Samora, as well as continue his interest in Mexican immigration, on which he was writing his dissertation. He also began to publish articles based on his research in the north central states. His major labor, however, would be the dissertation, into which he would incorporate some of his published essays.
Gilbert Cardenas’ dissertation should be associated in a reader’s mind with Jorge Bustamante’s. Not only did the two scholars share the same mentors at Notre Dame and for a time work in the same environment at the University of Texas and on the same general topic of Mexican labor migration to the United States, but they shared a common theoretical framework. Both concerned themselves with knowledge about the border migration phenomenon as a central facet of the phenomenon itself. Bustamante, after an extensive clarification using neo-Marxian categories, saw the need to humanize the “wetback” and expose the process by which the migrating persons came to be labeled as deviant. Implicitly his audience had to be larger than a circle of scholars who read dissertations and academic articles; so he proceeded to make his case directly to policy makers in Mexico and through his series of newspaper articles to the Mexican public. In this endeavor he helped bring northern Mexico into the national consciousness of his country. Cardenas would also set out on a clarification of basics by using neo-Marxian categories, but the need he perceived was to expose the ways in which the American bureaucratic and research establishments deceived themselves and therefore failed to comprehend the labor migration phenomenon. The dissertation would be the place where his ideas would be worked out, and scholarly articles and research reports aimed at scientists and administration would present his case to the individuals who had been unknowingly perpetuating the bureaucratic self-deception. Cardenas’ first name tended to alternate between Gilberto and Gilbert in his writings; it was Gilbert who was writing the dissertation addressed to the establishment, as it were. Ironically, then, the attorney and scholar Jorge Bustamante who spoke identifiably upper-class Spanish ended up infiltrating the ranks of casual laborers and advocating their cause in the public forum, and the minority agitator from the lower tier-campuses of the southern California public university system who spoke faintly accented English ended up infiltrating the ranks of the research establishment and attacking the flaws of its scientific perspective.
The title of Cardenas’ dissertation, A Theoretical Approach to the Sociology of Mexican Labor Migration, is misleading. More than an “approach,” it is an expose of the cognitively distorted quality of most previous studies of the undocumented immigrants (“illegal aliens”), the studies on which American public policy relied.
The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate the ideological character of the dominant political paradigm produced by conventional sociology and used in the study of Mexican labor migration.

Thus the dissertation embodies an attack on “conventional sociology” as much as a research problem. Sociology at the time witnessed an attack on the part of leftists and symbolic interactionists on functionalists’ conservatism and on a scientistic quantomania that had lost its “mind.” The fact that the conflict within the discipline had broken out in a fairly dramatic manner at Notre Dame may well have sensitized Cardenas to the theme in a particularly acute way.
The cognitive distortion in the perception of the border migration phenomenon came by way of presupposition and conceptualization. The scholars and government officials were looking for, seeing, and reading inappropriate imagery into a social Rorschach. Cardenas was convinced that additional empirical research could serve no useful purpose until an effective criticism of received “knowledge” developed. It would be necessary to go back to the public policies of the United States that determined and defined the demographic and social status of Mexican immigrants. An understanding of those policies would yield information about the migration process because the policies and the migration were part of the same ensemble.
Cardenas went on to demonstrate that economic and political interests had a great bearing on immigration policy. Absent a cognizance of these interests, researchers had failed to see that the migration principally concerned proletarian labor. Rather the temptation was to see it as a matter of ecology, national boundaries, citizenship, and ultimately law enforcement. It was seen as a “problem.” Remedial proposals focused on individuals, who could be naturalized, granted temporary status, arrested, etc. Alternatively, the matter was approached in terms of ethnic relations. All such conceptualizations ignored that at base the Mexican immigration was a proletarian labor migration. Issues that were relevant but which had been ignored were the heritage of imperialism, the generation of racist attitudes, administered migration, the formation of schemes of legality and illegality, and structured social relationships within a system of capitalist political economy.
Cardenas proposed interpreting the immigration data that bureaucracies generate as political, as an aspect of social control. Concepts such as national origin, legal status, detainment, visas, and naturalization were contrivances of the political economic framework, not scientifically useful observables that could account for the emergence and maintenance of that framework. If accepted at face value, such bureaucratic contrivances would become “reifications” of mere constructs. They should be properly seen as creations of the administrative apparatus intended to justify congressional appropriations. The point he was trying to make is not easily communicated to a reader who it is not already sensitized to the sociology of knowledge and who can therefore bracket and set aside a faith in “science.” Cardenas did nevertheless attempt to take the matter beyond his dissertation, especially in professionally socializing the next generation of scholars at the University of Texas, Austin.
Cardenas’ career in Austin was that of a research entrepreneur. He attracted funds, brought people and resources together, edited collections of studies, and authored some. A particularly interesting study from this period focused on Mexican Americans on probation for marijuana dealing: Cardenas and Estevan Flores (Notre Dame M.A. ’75; University of Texas Ph.D. ‘ 82) found that the probationers came from low-income backgrounds, did not see themselves as criminals, and preferred stable work to marijuana dealing. The forces at work were economic; consequently a deterrence policy based on stigmatization would not be effective. Also of enduring significance was Cardenas’ involvement in a suit to force the educational system in Texas to admit the children of undocumented immigrants.
Through a process initiated (by) the University of Texas, I was consulted by a working class organization…to work on a major lawsuit in Texas to try to get children of non-documented parents back into the schools. The Supreme Court then (used) the research that I presented in my testimony to make the decision.

By the late 1990s, Cardenas had served as the director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas (1991-96) and had become the executive director of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, a consortium of Latino research centers in the United States. In 1999 the University of Notre Dame lured him away from Texas; he became an assistant provost at Notre Dame and director of the new Institute for Latino Studies, occupying the new Julian Samora Chair of Latino Studies (funded by the Follett Corporation). The Inter-University Program for Latino Research also relocated to Notre Dame. Cardenas was also one of six people appointed to an advisory committee of the new Millennium Scholars Program of the one billion dollar Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Other Graduates of the Mexican American Studies Program
Michael (or Miguel) A. Carranza came as a student from Kearney State in Nebraska (B.A. ’71) to Notre Dame with an interest in sociolinguistics. He entered the Mexican American Studies Program under Ford funding in 1971, earning the M.A. in 1974. While still writing his Ph.D. dissertation, he accepted a position in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in 1975. He published a co-authored article on bilingual adolescents’ reactions toward speakers of English and Spanish while still at Notre Dame and completed his dissertation on the language attitudes and other cultural attitudes of Mexican American adults in 1977, supervised by Julian Samora. He later co-authored a research guide to ethnic studies in the United States, held office in the National Association for Ethnic Studies and the Midwest Consortium for Latino Research, and assumed the editorship of Ethnic Studies in Review.
Alberto G. Mata (1949- ) was born in El Paso, Texas, grew up in Munich, Germany, Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Lawton, Oklahoma. He attended Cameron Junior College (Oklahoma) and earned a B.A. in political science and an M.A. in human relations at the University of Oklahoma (1971). He came to Notre Dame that same year because of Julian Samora, under Ford Foundation funding in the Mexican American Studies Program. His dissertation research was supported by a National Institute of Mental Health grant obtained by Arthur Rubel and Clagett Smith under the project title “Chicano Drug Use Study,” but the dissertation itself was directed by Julian Samora. The research involved ethnographic observations among Mexican youth in South Chicago. Julian Samora considered him an excellent field worker and teacher. After Notre Dame he accepted a series of fellowships to conduct drug, gang, and health research in Houston, at U.C.L.A., and at the University of Michigan. Eventually he became a faculty member back in the Department of Human Relations at the University of Oklahoma and assumed the editorship of Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology. He has written a considerable series of articles on a variety of social problems.
Estevan T. Flores, a native of Colorado, earned the B.A. at St. Mary’s University and came to Notre Dame under Ford Foundation funding in the Mexican American Studies Program in 1972. He earned the M.A. in 1975 and transferred to the University of Texas, Austin, co-authoring papers with Gilberto Cardenas, under whom he wrote a dissertation. He has pursued both academic and public affairs publication, becoming the director of the Latino/a Research and Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he joined the sociology department.
Anthony J.P. Cortese (1954- ), was a native of Omaha, Nebraska, of partly Mexican American and partly Sicilian ancestry. He attended Catholic schools in Omaha, in which city his father was on the police force. A first generation college student, he attended Bellevue College in Illinois and became interested in sociology and philosophy there, graduating with a B.A. in 1975 at age twenty. At Notre Dame he came under the intellectual influence of Fabio Dasilva, Julian Samora, and Joseph Scott, earning the M.A. in 1977 and the Ph.D. in 1980. His dissertation, directed by Dasilva, applied moral development theories to Mexican American and African American children, finding the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg useful but culturally relative. While ten graduate students began sociology programs in 1975, only Cortese and Virginia Seubert (Ph.D. ’83) completed doctorates. Cortese accepted a position in Chicano Studies and sociology at Colorado State University in 1980, and later joined the faculty at Southern Methodist University. After some thirty scholarly articles in sociological theory and the social scientific inquiry into ethnicity and ethics, he published the book Ethnic Ethics.
Victor Rios is a native of South Texas; he had earned a B.A. at Texas A & I University (now Texas A. & M. at Kingsville), where he tried to study business and found it uninteresting, and switched to sociology. He received funding for graduate study at Notre Dame through the Mexican American Studies Program, largely on the basis of high Graduate Record Examination scores. He earned the M.A. in 1977, proved to be a sound enough student to win the John J. Kane Award for 1980, and received the Ph.D. in 1982 after writing a dissertation under Julian Samora that followed up the Bustamante and Cardenas dissertations. Rios has taught off and on, mostly as an adjunct professor, but rather than work in academia he operates a counseling practice in south central California.
Alberto Pulido Lopez (Ph.D. ’89) was born in East Los Angeles; his father was Mexican and his mother Mexican American; they moved to Oxnard, California, during his childhood and then to San Diego. His educacion included a sensitivity to honesty and social justice. Formally he spent two years at a community college and transferred to the University of California, San Diego, which he found to be an unsupportive environment, save for an Argentine Jewish sociologist, Carlos Waisman. At U.C.S.D. he learned a phenomenological and ethnomethodological kind of sociology at–good but apolitical .
…I was wanting to pursue the field of Chicano studies, and I could not find a place that offered any graduate support in this area. Nowhere in the United States! I was wanting to pursue interdisciplinary scholarship around the issues of ethnic identity, but could not find anyone or anything. A visiting professor told me about a professor at Notre Dame who was offering support in the Mexican American Studies Program. That is how I got to ND.

The ND experience was supportive because of Julian Samora, plain and simple.

Pulido names others in the program at the time and adds, “The creation of a community occurred with all of us because we were required to enroll in a graduate seminar with Samora.” He observes that his dissertation topic–race relations within American Catholicism–was suggested by Samora.
…Julian told me that no one was looking at religion in the Mexican American community and that it was going to become an important topic in the future. Hence, this is why I studied, first the “church” and now the sacred in the Latino experience.

Pulido’s dissertation, directed by Fabio Dasilva and completed in 1989, was based on archival research in the San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Bernardino Dioceses and the Los Angeles Archdiocese. It seeks to understand the Mexican American Catholics as a numerous but powerless group in the Catholic Church of southern California. He accepted a visiting position at the then-new Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University in 1989 and then taught a few years at the University of Utah before going to the American Studies Department at Arizona State University West in 1993. He remains one of the few scholars writing on religion and the Chicano movement and has published a book on the traditional penitentes of New Mexico.

Table 9.1: Spanish-Named and Brazilian M.A. and Ph.D. Recipients in Sociology

Name

Highest N.D. Degree

Mexican American Studies Program

Thesis/
Dissertation on Latino Topic

Notes
Jasso, G.

M.A. ’70

Ph.D. Johns Hopkins
Hernandez Cela, C

Ph.D. ’71

Native of Spain
Vera-Godoy, Hernan

M.A. ’73

Native of Chile, Ph.D. KSs
Santoya-Gamio, Raul

Ph.D. ’74

Native of Mexico
Bustamante, Jorge

Ph.D. ’75

Initial phase

x

Native of Mexico
Cardenas, Gilberto

Ph.D. ’77

Ford phase

x

Landeros, Delfina

M.A. ’74

Ford phase

Carranza, Miguel

Ph.D. ’77

Ford phase

x

Mata, Alberto

Ph.D. ’78

Ford phase

x

Flores, Estevan

M.A. ’75

Ford phase

Ph.D. Texas
Valdez, Daniel

Ph.D. ’82

GPOP

x

Table 9.1, cont.
Name

Highest N.D. Degree

Mexican American Studies Program

Thesis/
Dissertation on Latino Topic

Notes
Cortese, Anthony*

Ph.D. ’80

GPOP

x

Rios, Victor

Ph.D. ’82

x

Camara, Evandro

Ph.D. ’86

Native of Brazil
Lopez, Paul

Ph.D. ’74

M.A. ’84

Ph.D Northeastern
Casillo, Valerie

M.A. ’85

GPOP

Pulido Alberto

Ph.D. ’89

GPOP
x
Native of Brazil
Cesar, Jasiel

Ph.D. ’89

Hernandez, Edwin

Ph.D. ’89

Menendez-A., Antonio

Ph.D. ’91

GPOP

Native of Spain
Bastias Urra, Manuel

Ph.D. ’90

Native of Chile
Carmona, Francisco

Ph.D. ’93

GPOP

Native of Spain
Bonamusa-M Marg

M.A. ’90

Baranda,Maria
M.A. ’97

*Maternal side of family was Mexican American

Table 9.1, cont
Name

Highest N.D. Degree

Mexican American Studies Program

Thesis/
Dissertation on Latino Topic

Notes
Bompadre, Viviana

M.A. ’97

Perreira Sergio

Ph.D ’00

1Notre Dame had a Latino student organization in the 1930s, but its membership appears to have been international and its emphasis social; see Notre Dame Alumnus 15 (1936), pp. 37 and 152.

2Julian Samora to Emily Schossberger (University of Notre Dame Press), May 10, 1972, Julian Samora Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin, Box 16. At the time of our research, the enormous collection of Samora papers had undergone only a preliminary inventory, preventing our citing location information any more specific than box numbers.

3Julian Samora to the director, Office of Minority Student Affairs, Indiana University School of Medicine, October 26, 1972, Samora Papers, Box 16. We have chosen to omit the unfortunate official’s name.

4Julian Samora to William V. D’Antonio, April 19, 1967, Samora Papers, Box 43.

5Julian Samora to Ernesto Galarza (San Jose, California), April 7, 1970, Samora Papers, Box 16.

6Julian Samora to William V. D’Antonio, October 22, 1970, Samora Papers, Box 16.

7Julian Samora to Frederick J. Crossan (Dean of Arts & Letters, Notre Dame), August 20, 1970, Samora Papers, Box 16.

8Julian Samora to Archibald L. Gillies (John Hay Whitney Foundation), December 30, 1970, Samora Papers, Box 16. Samora received the grant in 1973, involving Notre Dame graduate Richard Kiekbush (Ph.D. 74) in the research. Texas state senator Joe Bernal co-operated in setting up the project. Julian Samora, with Joe Bernal and Albert Peña, Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).

9Julian Samora, Graduate and Professional Opportunities Program proposal (federal), 1978-79, p. 3, Samora Papers, Box 9.

10Julian Samora to Siobhan Oppenheimer (Ford Foundation), March 19, 1970, Samora Papers, Box 16. At the time the anthropologist Arthur Rubel, whose research had focused on Mexican Americans in Texas, was in the department, and Fabio Dasilva had conducted a survey focusing on the social participation of Mexican Americans in El Paso. Arthur J. Rubel, Across the Tracks. Mexican-Americans in a Texas City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966); Fabio B. Dasilva, “Orientação de referência em um grupo étnico de uma comunidade fronteiriça, Sociologia 27:3 (1965), pp. 193-208, and “Participation of Mexican-Americans in Voluntary Associations, Research Reports in the Social Sciences 2:1 (1968), pp. 33-43. Moreover, Richard Lamanna had conducted research on the Mexican Americans of East Chicago with Samora–Julian Samora and Richard A. Lamanna, Mexican Americans in a Midwest Metropolis (Los Angeles: Graduate School of Business Administration, University of California Los Angeles, 1967). Donald Barrett had made a demographic contribution on Mexican Americans–Donald N. Barrett, “Demographic Characteristics, in Julian Samora (ed.), La Raza: Forgotten Americans (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), pp. 159-99.

11Julian Samora to Siobhan Oppenheimer (Ford Foundation), Arpil 9, 1970, Samora Papers, Box 16.

12Julian Samora to Siobhan Oppenheimer (Ford Foundation), March 17, 1971, Samora Papers, Box 16.

13Julian Samora to Frederick Crossan (Dean of Arts & Letters, Notre Dame), July 9, 1971, Samora Papers, Box 16.

14Julian Samora to George Lawrence (Financial Affairs, Notre Dame), June 21, 1972, Samora Papers, Box 16. The students to be involved were Gilberto Cardenas, Michael Carranza, Delfina Landeros, and Alberto Mata, all from sociology, and Richard Coronado from economics.

15Robert E. Gordon (Notre Dame Vice President, Advanced Studies) to Julian Samora, February 19, 1975; Samora Papers, Box 16.

16Robert E. Gordon (Notre Dame Vice President, Advanced Studies) to Frederick J. Crossan (Dean, Arts & Letters), February 14, 1975, Samora Papers, Box 16.

17Regarding the hires, Julian Samora to Marian Coolen (Ford Foundation), June 16, 1975; regarding Ford’s plans, Samora to James T. Burtchael, C.S.C. (Notre Dame Provost), October 16, 1975—both letters in the Samora Papers, Box 16. Professor Sena-Rivera was recommended to Samora by Jorge Bustamante (Ph.D. ’75), who had first met him at the 1969 American Sociological Association meeting and knew him as a colleague at the University of Texas, Austin. Bustamante noted that Sena-Rivera had founded the journal Aztlan and had impressive analytical ability. Jorge Bustamante to Julian Samora, April 7, 1975, Samora Papers, Box 16.

18Regarding the ideas, Julian Samora to Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., March 12, 1971; expressing frustration, Julian Samora to Jorge Prieto (alumnus, Evanston, Illinois), November 24, 1971.

19“Hispanics on Campuses, Chronicle of Higher Education February 2, 1980, University of Notre Dame Archives UDIS 139/33. The article also notes that of 7,000 undergraduates at Notre Dame, about 200 were Mexican American and 160 African American.

20Julian Samora to Francis M. Kobayashi (Notre Dame Office of Advanced Studies), June 4, 1975, Samora Papers, Box 16.

21Four of the twelve had completed the Ph.D., three were writing their dissertations at Notre Dame, two were writing dissertations elsewhere, one had received a terminal M.A., one was currently taking courses, and one had dropped out. Julian Samora, 1979 Report, Graduate and Professional Opportunity program, Samora Papers, Box 9.

22Julian Samora, 1978-1979 GPOP Annual Report, Samora Papers, Box 15.

23This seems reminiscent of what the clergy and especially the religious did for one another in their residential facilities; see Chapter 6 above. These people included many former teachers who arranged such sessions spontaneously, rather than recent undergraduates.

24Alberto Pulido (Ph.D. ’89) to Julian Samora, May 14, 1984, Samora Papers, Box 9, lists books borrowed and requests permission to photocopy from files.

25Among noted advocates of quantitative sociology in the department at the time were the family sociologist Joan Aldous, the future American Sociological Association president Maureen Hallinan, and the department head David Klein. Professor Aldous specializes in family socialization (the acquisition of culture in the family setting); Professor Hallinan studies children’s friendship networks and the educational impact of grouping pupils by ability in schools.

26August 2, 2000 comment by Andrew J. Weigert on an earlier draft of this chapter.

27June 1, 1999 interview with Richard A. Lamanna (Blasi); June 23, 1999 interview with the Rev. Patrick Sullivan, C.S.C. (Blasi); May 19, 1999 conversation with Andrew J. Weigert (Blasi); Sullivan to Blasi, January 27, 2000, a.m. and January 27, 2000 p.m.

28The following relies heavily on the fine paper by Victor Rios, Jr. (Ph.D. ’82), “The Samora Legacy: The Development of Theoretical Frameworks for the Study of Undocumented Immigration, prepared for the meeting of the Western Social Science Association and the Association of Borderlands Scholars, Denver, Colorado, April 22-25, 1992, a copy of which Dr. Rios graciously sent to Blasi. The creative macro/micro synthetic thought is certainly not unique to those steadying the Border migration phenomenon, but it was pervasive among the Notre Dame scholars conducting that study.

29Victor Rios, “The Samora Legacy, interprets Los Mojados as an analysis dependent on an inventory of push and pull factors, and therefore an example of the equilibrium approach. While a synthetic theory had not emerged yet in the book, my reading does not find it to be an instance of that kind of equilibrium theory–AJB.

30Julian Samora, with Jorge A. Bustamante and Gilbert Cardenas, Los Mojados: The Wetback Story (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), p. 4.

31Jorge A. Bustamante, “The Wetback’ as Deviant: An Application of Labeling Theory, American Journal of Sociology 77:4 (1972), pp. 706-18.

32Jorge A. Bustamante, Mexican Immigration and the Social Relations of Capitalism. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1975.

33Gilbert Cardenas, A Theoretical Approach to the Sociology of Mexican Labor Migration. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1977.

34Gilberto Cardenas and Estevan Flores, “Political Economy of International Labor Migration, in Antonio Rios-Bustamante (ed.), Immigration and Public Policy: Human Rights for Undocumented Workers and Their Families (Los Angeles: U.C.L.A. Chicano Studies Research Center, 1978); Estevan Flores, “The Limitations of the Push/Pull Demographic Approach, Mexican Immigration and the Circulation of Class Struggle, paper presented at the I Simposio Internacional sobre las Problemas de los Trabajadores Migratorios de Mexico y los Estados Unidos de Norte America, Universidad de Guadelajara, Guadelajara, Jalisco, Mexico, July 11-14, 1978.

35Rios, “The Samora Legacy, p. 17.

36English language curriculum vitae, Jorge Agustin Bustamante, 1971, in Samora Papers, Box 16; on his leave, Jorge Bustamante to Americo Parades (University of Texas, Austin), December 17, 1971, Samora Papers, Box 16.

37Bustamante, 1971 curriculum vitae. There had been some worry about Bustamante’s status since he was apprehended in the course of his illegal entry into the U.S.; so an understanding was reached with the INS. Julian Samora corresponded with James F. Greene, Associate Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service, to confirm that the understanding was to be kept on file; Samora to Green, November 3, November 18, and December 30, 1970, Samora Papers, Box 16. Interestingly, the correspondence with Greene and the understanding were after the fact, though the INS staff did not know that. See the interview with Samora et al. in Barbara A. Driscoll, “La Frontera and Its People: The Early Development of Border and Mexican American Studies, Working Paper 17, Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, 1993 (no pagination).

38Bustamante, “The Wetback’ as Deviant.

39Interview with Robert H. Vasoli, June 7, 1999 (Blasi).

40Taped interview, Fabio B. Dasilva, May 17, 1999 (Blasi).

41August 2, 2000, comment by Andrew J. Weigert on an earlier draft of this chapter.

42Interview with William V. D’Antonio, August 5, 1999.

43Blasi recollection of the letter by William Liu. Even in 1999 respondents spoke about the affair with passion.

44Julian Samora to Eduardo Venezians (Ford Foundation, Mexico City), November 24, 1971, Samora Papers, Box 16.

45Julian Samora to Jorge Bustamante, January 13, 1972, Samora Papers, Box 16.

46Julian Samora to Jorge Bustamante, May 22, 1972, Samora Papers, Box 16.

47Julian Samora to Jorge Bustamante, June 6, 1972, Samora Papers, Box 16; Blasi recollection of conversations with Bustamante. The farm labor arrangement was re-established under a later president.

48Bustamante, Mexican Immigration and the Social Relations of Capitalism, p. 59.

49Bustamante, Mexican Immigration and the Social Relations of Capitalism, p. 61.

50The dissertation research also appeared in Samora, Bustamante, and Cardenas, Los Mojados; Jorge Bustamante, “Don Chano: Autobiografia de un Emigrante Mexicano, Revista Mexicana de Sociologia 33:2 (1971), pp. 333-74; Jorge Bustamante, The Wetback’ as Deviant, and Jorge Bustamante, “Structural and Ideological Conditions of Undocumented Mexican Immigration to the United States, in Boyd Littrell and Gideon Sjoberg (eds.), Current Issues in Social Policy (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976), and American Behavioral Scientist 19:3 (1976), pp. 364-76.

51Julian Samora to Barbara Norwood (Cambridge, Massachusetts), November 19, 1975, Samora papers, Box 16.

52A list of these essays in the Samora Papers, Box 2, provides titles and dates for no less than 61 of these articles from 1977 through 1979.

53Jorge A. Bustamante, “Undocumented Immigration from Mexico: Research Report, International Migration Review 11:2 (1977), pp. 149-77; Bustamante, “Las expulsions de indocumentados mexicanos, Demografia y Economia 13:2 (1979), pp. 185-207; Bustamante, “The Mexicans Are Coming: From Ideology to Labor Relations, International Migration Review 17:2 (1983), pp. 323-41; Bustamante, “Mexican Migration to the United States: De Facto Rules, Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 5:3 (1988), pp. 225-36; Bustamante, “Generalizing and Sampling (comment on an article by Douglas S. Massey and Emilio A. Parrado), Social science Quarterly 71:1 (1998), pp. 21-22; Bustamante, “La emigración desde Mexico y la devaluación del peso: debelación de un mito, Migraciones 2 (1997), pp. 99-123.

54Interview transcript, Gilberto Cardenas, in Driscoll, “La Frontera and Its People, no pagination; resumé information in Gilbert Cardenas, A Theoretical Approach to the Sociology of Mexican Labor Migration. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1977.

55Samora was sufficiently impressed by Cardenas’ draft papers that he saved them, and they remain today among the Samora Papers (Box 2).

56Gilberto Cardenas to publishers, August 10, 1972, Samora Papers, Box 16. Dasilva always had the latest works in social theory in evidence at Notre Dame; neither work was available in translation until 1971. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971); Georges Gurvitch, The Social Frameworks of Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

57Gilbert Cardenas, “Why Do Farm Workers Need a Union? (1972), Samora Papers, Box 16. Some Notre Dame graduate students picketed at nearby markets that did not honor the boycott.

58Gilbert Cardenas and Ricardo Parra, La Raza in the Midwest and Great Lakes Region (Notre Dame: Mid-West Council of La Raza, Institute for Urban Studies, University of Notre Dame, 1973 (35pp.), consisting of background information for the study of the Mexican American population in the North Central states; Julian Samora, 1978-79 GPOP proposal, Samora Papers, Box 9, describing Cardenas working in association with La Raza; Gilberto Cardenas, “The Status of Agricultural Farmworkers in Indiana/Statement by Gilbert Cardenas on Behalf of the Center for Civil Rights, University of Notre Dame, prepared for Indiana State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, hearings, August 16-17, 1974, South Bend, Indiana, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas; Gilberto Cardenas with Jim Faught (Ph.D. ’73) and Estevan Flores (M.A. ’75), A Profile of the Spanish Language Population in the Little Village and Pilsen Community Areas of Chicago, Illinois, and Population Projections, 1970-1980, prepared by Centro de Estudios Chicanos e Investigaciones Sociales, Inc., University of Notre Dame (Chicago: Chicano Mental Health Training Program, 1975); Gilberto Cardenas, Manpower Impact and Problems of Mexican Illegal Aliens in an Urban Labor Market. Unpublished thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1977. It should be recalled that Joan Huber was leaving Notre Dame for the University of Illinois at the time.

59Julian Samora to Gilberto Cardenas, November 24, 1975, Samora Papers, Box 16; Gilbert Cardenas, “United States Immigration Policy Toward Mexico: An Historical Perspective, Chicano Law Review (U.C.L.A.) 2; Gilberto Cardenas, “Public Data on Mexican Immigration into the United States: A Critical Evaluation, in W. Boyd Littrell and Gideon Sjoberg (eds.), Current Issues in Public Policy Research (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976); Gilbert Cardenas, “Who Are the Midwestern Chicanos: Implications for Chicano Studies, Aztlan 7:2 (1976), pp. 141-52; Gilbert Cardenas, “Los Desarraigados: Chicanos in the Midwestern Region of the United States, Aztlan 7:2 (1976), pp. 153-86.

60Gilbert Cardenas, A Theoretical Approach to the Sociology of Mexican Labor Migration. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1977, p. ii.

61See C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 25-75; Herbert Blumer, “What is Wrong with Social Theory? American Sociological Review 19 (1954) and “Science Without Concepts, American Journal of Sociology 36 (1931), pp. 515-33. The two Blumer essays were widely circulated when included in Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism. Perspective and Method (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969). I borrow the suggestion that sociology has “lost its mind from Eugene Halton.

62Perhaps the most cogent articulation of his argument was the co-authored paper, Gilbert Cardenas and Estevan Flores, “Political Economy of International Labor Migration, presented at the joint meeting of the Latin American Studies Association and the African Studies Association, Houston, 1977, in Samora Papers, Box 3.

63The Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas houses a considerable body of these works.

64Estevan T. Flores and Gilbert Cardenas, “Chicano Drug Dealing in Marijuana: The Probationers’ Interpretive Past, Self-Perception, Moral Evaluation and Possible Future, mimeo. University of Texas (1978?), Samora Papers, Box 3.

65Gilberto Cardenas interview in Driscoll, “La Frontera and Its People (no pagination). Jorge Bustamante and Estevan Flores also testified in the proceeding, which ran through February and March, 1980. Microfilms of the court transcripts (Multiple District Litigation 398) are in the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas under the title “Alien Children Education Litigation Transcripts, 1975-1980.

66Noted in Antonio Ugalde and Gilberto Cardenas (eds.), Health and Social Services among International Labor Migrants. A Comparative Perspective (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 171.

67Generations Newsletter (Notre Dame Department of Development), “winter 1999 published fall 1999, p. 6. The agreements that lengthened Bustamante’s stay each year to a full term and brought Cardenas up to Notre Dame were finalized in the summer of 1999, while Blasi was interviewing people at the campus. How much of a turnaround from the 1980s these developments represented was not lost on people in the department.

68Michael A. Carranza and Ellen Bouchard Ryan, “Evaluative Reactions of Bilingual Anglo and Mexican American Adolescents towards Speakers of English and Spanish, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 6 (1975), pp. 83-104; Michael A. Carranza, Language Attitudes and Other Cultural Attitudes of Mexican-American Adults: Some Sociolinguistic Implications. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1977.

69Miguel Carranza, Gretchen Bataille, and Laurie Lisa, Ethnic Studies in the United States (New York: Garland, 1996); “Dr. Miguel Carranza web page, University of Nebraska Lincoln, March 8, 1999.

70Alberto Mata, The Drug Street Scene: An Ethnographic Study of Mexican Youth in South Chicago. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1978. In the acknowledgments he not only mentions the NIMH grant, but comments and assistance from James Tallon (Ph.D. ’78).

71Julian Samora to O.A. Haller (University of Wisconsin, Madison), November 14, 1975, Samora Papers, Box 16.

72Estevan Tim Flores, Post-Bracero Undocumented Mexican Immigration to the United States and Political Recomposition. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 1982.

73“Estevan T. Flores web page, University of Colorado, Boulder, April 24, 1999.

74Anthony Joseph Paul Cortese, Ethnic Ethics: Subjective Choice and Inference in Chicano and Black Children. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1980, “biography; Anthony Cortese to Blasi, April 21, 1999.

75Anthony Cortese, Ethnic Ethics. The Restructuring of Moral Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); “Anthony J. Cortese web page, Southern Methodist University, March 8, 1999.

76Victor Rios, Jr., International Capitalism and Mexican Migration to the United States. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1982; telephone interview with Victor Rios, April 19, 1999 (Blasi).

77Alberto Pulido to Blasi, March 30, 1999.

78Alberto Pulido Lopez, Race Relations within the American Catholic Church: An Historical and Sociological Analysis of Mexican-American Catholics. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1989.

79Alberto Pulido, The Sacred World of the Penitentes: Religious Memory and Storytelling in New Mexico (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2000).