Open Plaza and the Legacies of 'El Plan de Santa Bárbara' at Age 50
Dr. Jacqueline Hidalgo on the anniversary of the historic document in Latinx education
Fifty years ago, in April 1969, more than one hundred staff, students, and faculty from twenty-nine college campuses and organizations around California met in Santa Barbara. They wanted to produce a Chicano version of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, a plan that would also be a resource for the growth of Chicano Studies courses and programs throughout the state. Also, participants created a broader student organization, el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), an organization still found on some high school and college campuses.
The participants worked en conjunto. Dreams were dreamed together, through fiesta and conversation among people and with their communities. The ultimate 155-page El Plan de Santa Bárbara, published in October 1969, was the work of multiple people, not one person alone.
Cover image of El Plan de Santa Bárbara, the document that catalyzed the establishment of Chicano Studies departments across the United States half a century ago. Source: UC Santa Barbara
As the Hispanic Theological Initiative’s (HTI) Open Plaza launches, I am reminded of the dreams, the accomplishments, and the failures of 1969. Our existence partially owes itself to the work and the dreaming of the Santa Barbara Conference and many other meetings like it over the years, meetings that, in the field of religion, gave rise to the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS) over thirty years ago, the Hispanic Summer Program (HSP), and the HTI itself. Cognizant of the generations who struggled so we might exist, the Open Plaza seeks to create a virtual space for Latino/a/x reflection on urgent issues that confront our communities. It is also a space of virtual en conjunto.
“No one person represents Latina/o/x perspectives. Our goal is to struggle and dream together.”
El Plan de Santa Bárbara partially came about because, thanks to the USA Civil Rights Movements and Educational Opportunity Programs, more students from minoritized backgrounds entered the leading state universities. Once there, they longed to see themselves reflected in the courses they took. They wanted to know about their histories as well as the histories of other minoritized communities.
The participants in the Santa Barbara conference dreamed of greater equality, self-confidence, and self-determination for ethnic Mexicans in the U.S.A., but they also spent the weekend crafting institutional possibilities. They discussed, and often disagreed, about the structures necessary to build a better world. They also recognized that their universities often practiced a greater commitment to businesses and industries than to local Latino/a/x communities.
“El Plan de Santa Bárbara’ asked: ‘What would it mean for the university to create knowledge in service of poor and marginalized communities instead?’”
The Open Plaza launches because, for more than 20 years, HTI has dared to dream and to struggle, fostering Latina/o/x doctoral study and academic success. Those of us who have graduated from HTI have often gotten to live some of the dreams articulated in El Plan de Santa Barbara as many of us are Latina/o/x scholars teaching courses about Latino/a/x histories, religions, and cultures.
We now ask, what would a space for Latina/o/x public intellectual reflection look like? How do we create a space for Latina/o/x religious thought that is accessible beyond the academy and that serves our diverse communities? How can we bring our en conjunto model of scholarship into the realm of public intellectual life? How do we provide a space that is more representative of and responsive to the needs of our diverse communities, particularly the most marginalized?
Just as we inherit the dreams of those activists from fifty years ago who fought so hard for more and better educational options, so too must we reckon with their flaws. As scholar Michael Soldatenko has observed, El Plan de Santa Barbara reproduced many academic structures that centered Euro-descended histories and experiences. They separated scholarship and service in ways that mimicked normal university structures rather than the en conjunto practices they valued. By contrast, we at the Open Plaza hope ultimately to integrate diverse media and diverse writers and topics in a way that resists neat circumscriptions of the “intellectual.”
El Plan de Santa Bárbara refused to acknowledge how integral difference was in Chicanx/a/o and Latina/o/x communities. The authors were not as sensitive to other Latino/a/x communities as well as other minoritized communities as we hope to be. They ignored internal distinctions of class, gender, race, religion, and sexuality. In imagining an authentic Chicano subject, the authors often homogenized the community and alienated Chicana/o/xs who did not share their views. Prominent Chicana feminist Anna Nieto Gómez and a few other steering committee members were cut out of the editorial process that produced El Plan de Santa Barbara.
“Today the Open Plaza follows a path opened by ‘El Plan de Santa Bárbara’: we hope to build an intellectual space that grows out of and responds to the needs of our communities.”
At Open Plaza, we hope to provide a space that is structured with and open to difference. Our contributors will disagree with each other. We seek to become a real Open Plaza reflecting a diversity of perspectives and a greater openness to the range of complex histories and experiences that makes us Latinx/a/os.
With the Open Plaza, we hope to honor the yearnings of so many Latina/o/x students, activists, and scholars over the generations, yearnings for spaces Latina/o/xs can control for themselves, so that they can laugh, learn, dream, and make a better world together. El Plan de Santa Bárbara reflects only one moment and one vision for those yearnings. We can learn from what it accomplished, and we can learn from its failures as well. We invite you to join us in this virtual space for ongoing conversation.
