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  • A College “Down There”: Resistance, Community Control, and Higher Education in South Phoenix, 1977–1981
  • Summer Cherland (bio)

On a warm August morning in 1981, Dr. Raul Cárdenas stood near a flagpole at the front entrance of South Mountain Community College. Excitement and pride washed over him. It was his first day of school on a new campus. Technically, he had been presiding over, planning, and organizing the college for years, negotiating and all but dreaming it into reality in an environment of complex state and local politics. But today was different. Today, students would learn in classrooms on campus. He squinted south toward the Western Canal, which ran parallel to Baseline Road. His eyes drifted to the sprawling mountains of the South Mountain Preserve, and then toward the cotton fields framing the school’s parking lot. Raul Cárdenas thought about his childhood in Del Rio, Texas, and what it meant for him to be welcoming students to a college where he was the president. He wondered about children enrolled at the nearby elementary schools who might one day attend his “Little Harvard” of South Phoenix.

From 1977 to 1981, people living in South Phoenix fought to bring a community college to their neighborhood. The years they spent struggling for a college revealed nearly a century of state and local measures to segregate the poorest Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians living in Phoenix. From its very first days as [End Page 35] a townsite, Phoenix practiced de jure segregation, which ultimately isolated the city’s most vulnerable in the least desirable neighborhoods for generations. This article charts the founding and early years of South Mountain Community College (SMCC) from 1977 to 1981 as one battle in the community’s fight to bring equity and community control to the segregated neighborhoods of South Phoenix. In doing so, it demonstrates that the story of South Phoenix in general, and the story of South Mountain Community College in particular, were part of the national movement for educational equality brought on by local grassroots activism in the twentieth century. The struggle in South Phoenix was one of many that took place across the country. This story illustrates an archetypal call for civil rights but in a uniquely southwestern place. This is the story of civil rights and Chicano organizing in which local actors emerged and took part in a long, broad, and sweeping movement for social change.1Although the South Phoenix struggle had a specific localized identity, just as similar activism in places like Denver, Las Vegas, and Seattle did, the national significance of local movements cannot be overstated. In the case of South Phoenix and SMCC, we see how community members viewed education as a catalyst for revolutionary social changes. And, like the stories of so many other seemingly ordinary people across the country, the histories of local leaders, parents, and students are often forgotten or told as anecdotes outside of the context of major historical movements when, in fact, their stories ultimately make up the national history of civil rights and Chicano power.2 This is a story of how a historically dismissed [End Page 36]


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South Mountain Community College campus, August 1981. Image provided by South Phoenix Oral History Project, South Mountain Community College.

community waged an unprecedented campaign to secure a full-service college campus in their segregated and underserved area. With the help of some key city and state leaders, people of South Phoenix overcame challenges to their legitimacy, shaped curriculum, and brought access to education and other vital community resources that they had been lacking for nearly one hundred years.3 [End Page 37]

The Historical Boundaries of South Phoenix

South Phoenix has a lot of nicknames. The Akimel O’odham (federally known as Pima) called it S-ki:kig, which roughly translates to Many Houses. They are descendants of the Hohokam, who called the area Moadag or Muhadag Du’ag (Greasy Mountain).4 In the 1980s, citizens of the community began efforts to officially title it “South Mountain Village.”5 Outsiders flippantly refer to it as “down there.” This nickname remains the most pervasive, and...

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