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  • Embracing Equity:Discussing Inequity
  • Deena J. González (bio)

I attended Berkeley in the 1970s, an era when only three women (out of a history faculty of over fifty) were housed in the department. They were models of what a historian could be—analytical, graceful, professorial, and energetic (Natalie Davis, Paula Fass, and Lynn Hunt). I did not reckon from the outset with feminism, theirs or my own, with sexism, that of the department or in the university, or with homophobia. Rather, my focus as a graduate student of color in those years was largely grounded in the racism and prejudices that ran rampant through all university environments. All the other intersecting –isms were there, to be sure, either in blunt attacks or subtle slights. Until I took my first job, truly a novice as I was ABD, had been away from the dissertation, and had written no pages in over three years, I had no vocabulary to name my situation. The roles of sexism as well as racism, of heterosexism as well as of homophobia, in the modern academy came to shape me early in my career as they infused my scholarship in those first years of nervous instructorship. The two years flew by and my position was converted into an assistant professorship when I squeaked to the finish line and Pomona College deemed me worthy of tenure-track employment, but as a joint appointment in the history department and Chicano/a Studies. That signified one body and two full-time jobs, which I then occupied for the next eighteen years. I would also serve on over twenty search committees in that same period and would help increase the number of women of color whose areas of specialization explored the lives of women of color from one to seven by the time I left the post.

Perhaps this level of biographical detail will one day be woven into a pattern measuring my "success" as an historian, or alternatively of what it meant to be the first Chicana to receive a PhD in history at Berkeley (three others so identified have followed in the intervening twenty years). A bit more of my history toward what some will inevitably read as "strident" in identity, or approach: I was a risky graduate school applicant because I came from the colonies (more specifically, the New Mexico public educational system, but my advantages outweighed my disadvantages, as Natalie Davis would note in presenting my case for admission). I was an equally risky tenure-track appointment in 1983 because I had left a research university and the cosmopolitan Bay Area environment for a small, private college "of the New England type" located in the suburbs of southern California (but, again, where Steve Koblik would present the case that I brought different [End Page 158] qualities or advantages).

The steps I took to get there—obviously aided by mentors and other faculty with a vision for change—were not the largest in the context of my other life events. At seventeen, I had moved from the family farm to college, and at twenty-one, I left my native land or state for the Bay Area; at age twenty-nine, in that all-important "first" job, I found myself staring out of a college-owned, subsidized "ranch" house's windows into a suburban street where the largest of community events would occur just after our move-in date on the Fourth of July: Claremont's annual patriotic demonstration, the parade, complete with a "U.S. out of El Salvador" contingent! It began to sink in that I was no longer at Berkeley. At the office just three short blocks away, I had no clue about how I was to organize my time and work, as a trained "Americanist" hired to teach Latin American history, as an historian hired to also help develop Chicano/a studies, as an ABD fully expected to complete the dissertation and teach new classes.

Other pressures seemed, in this formula for failure, less significant but in hindsight were equally compelling in helping me to view realistically the task that lay ahead. In that first week in Claremont, the Lacys from next door had...

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