The historian and professor receives the Bert Corona Lifetime Achievement Award for inspiring progressive social change to advance the inclusion of the poor and oppressed.
Read more about the honor
Among the first generation of professionally trained historians to excavate and record Chicano and Chicana history, UC Santa Barbara professor Mario T. García helped set the foundation for emerging scholars during the past half century.
His body of work as a self-described liberationist historian aiming to inspire progressive social change includes more than a dozen books and several edited collections, all of which advance the inclusion of the poor and oppressed, and spotlight the leaders of social justice movements.
García’s legacy will be the focus of a special symposium as part of the sixth bi-annual Sal Castro Memorial Conference(link is external), Feb. 17–18, in the McCune Conference Room of the campus’s Humanities & Social Sciences Building. Named after Salvador “Sal” Castro, a high school social studies teacher who helped lead the historic 1968 Chicano student walkouts to protest bias and inequalities in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the conference is free and open to the public.
Guest speakers will cover recent books about the Chicano movement, plus history, art and culture. The symposium on García’s work will include a keynote video presentation about his life and career, a panel discussion on civil rights leadership and reflections on his work’s impact on graduate students and fellow academics.
By Jim Logan • UCSB SANTA BARBARA — When teacher and activist Sal Castro encouraged students in Los Angeles to protest what they saw as decades of substandard education for Mexican-American youths, he helped kicked off what was then the…
By Andrea Estrada / UCSB The Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was the largest and most widespread civil rights and empowerment movement by Mexican-Americans in U.S. history. But without strong and dedicated leadership, it might not have…
By Sonia Fernandez / UCSB Alma Cortez-Lara immigrated to the United States from Mexico when she was very young, and lived the life of the child of migrant workers. She lived in poor neighborhoods and learned English, serving as the…
