The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2009
Finding a Place
Los Universitarios laid the groundwork for first-generation Hispanic students at The University of Arizonaby Tim Vanderpool
From across Arizona they came — from small towns and bigger towns or no towns at all — bright-eyed young Hispanics striving for the opportunities higher education could provide. Some came toting scholarships. Others relied on support from their working-class parents, and held down a job or two to make ends meet. Indeed, they already had overcome daunting odds just to reach The University of Arizona. Too often, that included ignoring the low expectations of high-school teachers who tried to funnel them off to vocational school.
But it was the 1950s, and the campus community hadn’t yet carved out a niche for its newest members, who numbered only about 150 in a student population of nearly 6,000. And so they could have found themselves lost. Instead, they founded Los Universitarios. Begun in 1954, this remarkable group offered a refuge where these young people could feel at ease, find academic support, and discover the camaraderie so vital to a new way of life.
John Huerta, a political science major, was the social club’s first president. “The university was essentially made up of three elements,” he says. “There was the Greek system. There were veterans surviving on the G.I. Bill at $90 a month. And then there were the rest of us. There were so few Hispanics, and we all were really the first generation in our families to attend college.
To soften the huge adjustment, “we started having picnics and that sort of thing,” he says. “And after awhile, we thought we ought to organize ourselves and try to make a social group. So Los Universitarios — which means ‘university student’ in Spanish — was organized.”
With about 125 members, the group started a fund for scholarships, which typically totaled $250. That was plenty to pay for tuition, books, and often dormitory quarters.
Huerta was raised in Tucson, which eased his transition to college life. “My father was a sports fan, and he used to take me to watch the UA football games as a kid,” he says. “So I was familiar with the university when I graduated from Tucson High School. But that was not true of the majority of Hispanics around me.” To them, “it was a strange surrounding. Maybe they were away from home for the first time. Many of them were from corners of the state and small rural areas, so there was some loneliness involved. It gave us a sense of belonging.”
Guadalupe Romero was among those who found a place in Los Universitarios. Born and raised in the southern Arizona mining town of Bisbee, she’d been prodded by a teacher to give up on college, to settle for a job at a local mercantile.
“When I told my parents that, they hit the roof,” she says. “My father had a good job at the mine, but he said, ‘This isn’t for you. You need to get an education.’”
When Romero arrived at the UA, Los Universitarios provided an immediate social circle, she says. “We had dances at the Student Union, and we played the popular music of the time — both in English and Spanish. We were very bicultural.”
For others, Los Universitarios provided an identity. “We were isolated,” says Rodolfo Bejarano, who came to the UA in 1962. “In high school, we were big-time guys. But at the university, we were suddenly just ants on a big hill.” But now, that hill would become much smaller for Bejarano, who went on to serve two terms on the Tucson City Council. “We sort of banded together by accident more than anything else,” he says. “Here was something we could do for ourselves.”
That was a powerful notion, nourished by encouragement from prominent Hispanics such as future Arizona governor Raul Castro and Ralph Estrada, president of Alianza Hispano Americana. The group announced its existence in 1954 with a formal Christmas dance themed Candilejas (Lamplight) at downtown’s swanky Santa Rita Hotel. It was a smashing success, and the group went on to gain notoriety for performing Christmas carols around town and continuing to provide scholarships.
These students had found their niche, and they were thriving. “Los Universitarios became a rallying point,” says Huerta. “We really had something in common. The culture was one. Language was another. And there was a little bit of religion involved in that, too.”
The group also served as a bulwark against a campus culture that wasn’t necessarily ready to accept them. “As minority students, we didn’t hold our breath that we were going to be invited to join fraternities and sororities,” says founding member Marty Herman Cortez. “We also ran into some controversy with other students who asked, ‘Why do you want to call your group by a Spanish name? And is this for Spanish kids only?’ Well, we weren’t Spanish, we were Mexican Americans. And back then, Mexican was a bad word.”
After flourishing for a decade, Los Universitarios began fading in the mid-1960s, as many of its most active students graduated. But its spirit remains vibrant as ever, laying the groundwork for later organizations such as the UA Hispanic Alumni Club (UAHA), Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), and several fraternities and sororities. Patrick Bryan helped found the UA Latino-based Lambda Theta Phi fraternity chapter in 2005.
“Lambda Beta Phi was started in the same vein in New Jersey,” says Bryan, who is half Mexican. “There was also a lot of infighting between Latino groups. So this was a way to bring people together. We brought it to the UA because we felt the need we had for service and cultural understanding wasn’t being met.”
The Los Universitarios scholarship tradition continues as well, under the Hispanic Alumni Club banner. Since 1986, the UAHA Club awarded no fewer than 2,000 scholarships totaling nearly $5 million.
But as with that earlier generation, providing money is only part of the task. Marty Cortez heads the UAHA Club student-retention program. “When we started giving out scholarship money through Hispanic Alumni,” she says, “we were finding that we were funding these kids and they were dropping out.”
What was missing? Just as the founders of Los Universitarios discovered so long ago, providing students with support and a sense of connection was key. “You have to give them a group to identify with and feel comfortable with,” she says. “Once you’ve achieved that, then you work on the other stuff [such as academics].”
Her strategy includes the Success Express class, required for freshmen, and taught by Chicano/Hispano Student Affairs. The yearlong course details the countless resources available at the university, and offers help with problems ranging from housing to classwork. But most importantly, it creates a bond among those new to campus. And it works: Students in the program enjoy a 90 percent graduation rate, compared to only 50 to 60 percent for the university as a whole.
Cortez says this work comes with plenty of rewards. “What our kids tell us year after year, as they’re leaving us as graduating seniors, is that we’ve been their family at the university — that ‘You guys are always here and will help us with whatever comes up.’” Some things, it seems, never change. And when it comes to the spirit of Los Universitarios, that’s a very good thing indeed.
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