BC History Highlight: Dr. Nieto's Impact on Chicano Culture at BC

Cover photo: 1975, Jess Nieto and Al Noriega research trip to Mexico.

Any discussion about the rise of cultural identity among Mexican American students at Bakersfield College must center on Dr. Jess Nieto, who in the early 1970s began building BC’s Chicano Studies curriculum into a nationally prominent program, founded the Chicano Cultural Center, and became a respected and effective community leader as well as an educator.

But there were signs of change in the air even before Dr. Nieto was hired in 1971 to bring all of this about. A 1968 walkout organized by East Los Angeles high school students had already brought attention to longstanding inequities in education.

“Mexicans had been tracked into trades for decades,” Dr. Oliver Rosales, a BC history professor, said of the walkouts. “Expectations for Mexican students were very low.”

Similarly, many Mexican students entering college had little trust in higher education after experiencing elementary and high schools that had largely failed them. Rosales credits a 1969 conference of Mexican American students, faculty, and attorneys with shaping the Plan de Santa Barbara, a blueprint for Chicano studies programs in colleges and universities throughout the US. The plan called for admission and recruitment of Chicano students, faculty, administrators, and staff; Chicano curriculum; student support and tutorial programs; research; and community, cultural, and social action programs.  

Also emerging from the conference was a new student group, MECHa: the Movamiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan. The term Chicano, originally a slur used toward low-income Mexicans, was reclaimed in the 1940s among Pachuco and Pachuca youth and was widely adopted in building the Chicano movement to increase political empowerment and ethnic pride. Aztlan, according to Rosales, was the indigenous homeland of the Aztecs in the southwestern U.S., while La Raza refers to the common cultural identity of Mexicans living across the Southwest from Texas to California.

When Black and Mexican American students at Bakersfield College called for these same educational changes in late 1968, the administration designed a forerunner of Chicano Studies as part of an Ethnic Studies program aimed at Black and Mexican American students. Courses in Mexican history, art and literature were included. Although more than 9% of BC’s student body that year had Spanish surnames, BC’s faculty included only one Mexican American, Spanish professor Ray Gonzales.

After the arrival of Spanish professor Ramon Melendez doubled the Mexican American faculty to two, BC President Burns Finlinson recruited Jess Nieto, himself a BC grad, to build a Chicano studies program in 1971. The change from Mexican American to Chicano identity was proudly proclaimed in 1971 Renegade Rip op-ed authored by the United Mexican Students and titled, “Viva la Raza y El Movimiento Chicano de Aztlan.”  “The Chicano will no longer tolerate the life of a second-class citizen!” UMS stated, calling for “equal justice, education and equal opportunities to live and work as first-class citizens!”

Led by Elias Muñoz, UMS obtained the use of a campus center room to set up a Chicano Information Center to offer supportive services for Chicano students such as tutoring, textbook loans, job information, peer counseling, and military draft counseling. The center served a more important purpose by offering Chicano students a place of their own to gather, much like its Black counterpart, the Martin Luther King Center.

The center quickly became a de facto cultural center as well, where students planned Cinco de Mayo Week, Chicano musical concerts, and guest speakers. Strong student leaders such as ASB Presidents Vernon Valenzuela, Deborah Beadle and Duane Goff, who would go on to become a trusted aide to César Chavez, emerged. UMS became a MeCHA chapter in 1972-73.

In 1974, Nieto authored a proposal to expand the one-room center into a full-fledged Chicano Cultural Center with more floor space and budgeted resources. In his proposal, which is among his papers at the Archives, Dr. Nieto noted that the number of Spanish surnamed students at BC had more than doubled from 1967 to 1973, with more growth in Chicano enrollment projected to come.

Nieto argued that even with financial aid, tutoring, and other services available to non-traditional students, “many still fail because their learning experience, their school environment, and its values, and the supportive services offered them are not related entirely to their needs and backgrounds…It is important to create that over-all environment…that will make all (BC’s) clientele feel they belong and are a part of the college.

Since his arrival on campus, Nieto had also been working with the library to expand its holdings of Chicano authors and subjects as well as magazines and journals on Chicano Studies, and his 1974 proposal not only envisioned a Chicano library but establishment of a Chicano Studies Department whose faculty would eventually be housed in the Cultural Center. Nieto’s goal of a separate department was not realized, but with the support of BC President John Collins, he did obtain expanded course offerings as well as more space and dedicated funding to help the new Cultural Center to operate.

Nieto’s proposal also contained the seeds of other projects that would break new ground while enriching the life of BC students and the community. Nieto worked with Dr. Rudolpho Acuña, a noted Cal State Northridge Chicano historian, to develop a series of taped Chicano Studies programs that could be offered as modular courses to Tehachapi State Prison inmates.

The prison project was a logical extension of Nieto’s work to bring Chicano perspectives on history, art, and education to audiences outside the college. He produced three local television specials in 1973 and 1974, then secured a federal grant to enlist the help of Chicano Studies faculty in producing a series of 14 television programs covering Spanish, Latin American, Mexican, and Chicano literature, Chicano art and history, pre-Columbian history, and the Mexican Revolution.

“There were no Chicano media at that time,” Rosales explained, “so Dr. Nieto started making documentaries.”

Nieto proposal envisioned a cultural and academic exchange of faculty and students between BC and a university in Mexico, and the project soon launched when an initial group of 15 BC students and faculty member Fred Nuñez spent the 1974 fall semester at the University of Cuernavaca, which sent its own cohort to BC the next semester.

By the time he became dean of the Delano Center in 1976, Nieto had built a solid framework in which Chicano students could thrive at BC. Before the college closed the Chicano Cultural Center in 2003 over the objections of Nieto and many others, Chicano identity had evolved into Latino identity and today Latinx.^[1]

Rosales notes that Mexican American history has been shaped by distinct generations, from the initial immigrants in the 1920s to the Mexican American generation of the 1940s and 1950s to the Chicano generation of the 1960s and 1970s and the Latino generation today.

“Successive generations do build on one another,” Rosales said. “However, collective memory is also lost over time, and many Latinos today forget about the triumphs, accomplishments and shortcomings of the Chicano generation.”

Rosales, who was a pallbearer at Jess Nieto’s funeral in 2018, is working to carry on Nieto’s legacy at BC by educating students not only about their deep historical and cultural roots but about more recent struggles that have shaped Latinx identity.

[1] While “Latinx” is included to reflect contemporary terminology, the term is not universally accepted within Hispanic and Latino communities.