Sonny Montes and Mexican American Activism in Oregon

From Mt. Angel College to Colegio Cesar Chavez

135 From Mt. Angel College to Colegio Cesar Chavez Fifteen miles northeast of Salem, set amid rich farmland in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Adams, the municipality of Mt. Angel, Oregon, was, in many respects, the quintessential American small town, a real-world equivalent of Clark Kent’s Smallville, where family and church were the bedrock of the community, where several generations of a family lived in close proximity to each other, and where children were expected to go to school, follow the rules, then go to work, marry, settle nearby, and produce a new generation of children whose lives were expected to follow essentially the same pattern. At its core, the place was conservative, accepting the existing social, religious, political, and economic order and adopting change cautiously. A white social and political elite was firmly in control of the town. Of the 1,973 residents of Mt. Angel counted by federal census-takers in 1970, 1,941 of them were classified as white, 0 as “Negro,” and 32 as “other,” a category that included Japanese, Chinese, and various other groups. The 1970 census offered no hints about how many Mexican Americans were in the town—in those days, the census takers included most of them in the total for whites—but it seems likely that there were at least 100 to 200 of them, a not-inconsequential number in a small Oregon town of that day.1 A sizable percentage of the white townspeople who ran the town traced their ancestry back to German Catholic settlers who had begun arriving in the area in the 1860s, and most of Mt. Angel’s officials in the early 1970s came from families with central European origins.2 In 1966, Mt. Angel began holding an Oktoberfest, a central European tradition, and for four days, visitors were treated to sausages, stuffed cabbage, sauerkraut, strudel, and an assortment of beer and wine. Crafts were displayed, bands played oompah music, and German dances were performed.3 Mt. Angel, remote, rustic, and conservative as it was, was a very unlikely setting for the two significant developments that were to unfold there in the 1970s—the creation of a college that was Sonny Montes and Mexican American Activism in Oregon 136 committed to providing an education to Mexican American students, a radical idea at the time; and the waging of a social movement led by Sonny Montes that aimed to save the college from extinction. How was it that this experiment in higher education and this social movement would be launched in such an off-the-beaten-path place? To answer that question, we must first direct our attention to the history of Mt. Angel College, the institution that had hired Sonny in 1971. A Small College in Trouble Mt. Angel College had its origins in a girls’ school called Queen of Angels Academy, opened in 1888 by a group of Benedictine sisters from Switzerland. The institution underwent a series of name and mission changes over the next decade, and by the turn of the twentieth century, it was known as Mt. Angel Academy and Normal School. The normal school developed a solid reputation as a teacher-training institution, and many of the state’s schoolteachers were educated there. In 1947, the normal school was renamed Mt. Angel Women’s College, and seven years later, it was accredited as a four-year college, still specializing in teacher training. Up to this point, its students had come primarily from Oregon’s Catholic families, and virtually all of its instructors and administrators were Benedictine nuns.4 Then came a period of dramatic transformation. In 1958, the college decided to admit men, and its name was changed once more, this time to Mt. Angel College. Enrollment crept above 100 for the first time. New buildings were completed in 1960, financed by loans received from the federal government’s Housing and Home Finance Agency.5 Also in 1960, the college began to offer degrees in subjects other than elementary education. Enrollment continued to climb, and increasingly non-Catholics were admitted. In the 1964– 65 academic year, there were 450 undergraduates on campus, and only slightly more than half of them were Catholics.6 Another change was structural. In 1965, a decision was made to incorporate the institution as a private college, legally independent from the Benedictine sisters. While a Benedictine nun still served as president and nuns taught most of the classes, laypersons were added to...