Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña lived his life following a simple credo: “If you know something is wrong, you have a duty (not an obligation) to do something about it.”
From street protests to campus debates, in writings and speeches, the son of Mexican immigrants made a career out of fighting: for his students, against racism in higher education and society and especially to promote and preserve Chicano studies, a discipline he helped to create and push to become more than just an academic major.
“My strategy,” he once told an interviewer, “has always been to take my cause of the moment to the edge of the cliff and be prepared to go over the cliff if necessary.”
Acuña died Monday of unspecified causes. His death was announced in a Facebook post by Cal State Northidge’s Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies, which Acuña helped establish and where he taught for over four decades.
“We are indebted to his many contributions and will forever carry with us the many lessons learned,” wrote current chair Gabriel Gutierrez. “¡Dr. Rodolfo Acuña, Presente!”
Laura Casas, a trustee of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in Northern California, said that taking Acuña’s classes at CSUN awakened her politically. The professor, she said, “spoke with confidence and knowledge and inspired my generation into activism and political awareness. … He told us that we matter and that we count. That we make a difference and that we belong.”
Acuña was 93.
Frequently wearing sunglasses even indoors, Acuña cut an imposing figure during his classes and in lectures and rallies across the country. Crowds stayed enraptured as the profe cited centuries of Mexican American history to decry the powers that persecuted Latinos in an impassioned, slightly hoarse voice that never lost in power no matter how long he spoke.
Cal State Fullerton Chicano studies professor Alexandro José Gradilla remembered inviting Acuña to speak on his campus in 2011.
“As a newbie to Orange County, I thought Rudy would be too much for” the area, Gradilla said. “Rudy knew better. He had the ability to pivot from holding a colleague and younger scholar accountable to moving the focus to institutional racism in higher ed caused by the academic leadership. And the crowd of students, faculty and staff were ready for him.”
Acuña contributed chapters in dozens of anthologies and scholarly texts and wrote numerous book reviews, several children’s books, scholarly articles and opinion pieces in academic journals, magazines, listservs and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. His subjects ranged from L.A. politics to issues in higher education, U.S.-waged wars to Donald Trump to his long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Though fluent in academic lingo, his verse was approachable, written with students and the public in mind and indicative of someone who always made sure to not stay stuck in the proverbial ivory tower.
“I’m like Doubting Thomas: I want to touch the wounds,” he told an oral historian in 2022. “I want to see what they are.”
Among the more than 22 books Acuña wrote on Chicano and Mexican history, his 1972 tome, “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” which recounted the history of Mexican Americans from the indigenous empires conquered by the Spaniards to the present day, would become a foundational text for Chicano studies in high schools and universities across the country.
“The book created a knowledge base that we didn’t have,” said Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez, an Arizona State University professor. Never out of print, “Occupied America” is now it its ninth edition.
Chicano studies was more than just a set of classes for Acuña — it was a philosophy that underscored the ethnic pride and cultural awareness spurred by the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and ’70s. Its purpose, he wrote, “was to liberate students through literacy.”
“An ethnic group unable to define its past is unable to take pride in its accomplishments,” Acuña wrote in his 1996 book, “Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles.” “History is more than just an esoteric search for facts; it involves a living community and its common memory.”
His work was often targeted by conservatives. In 2011, Acuña was one of many authors who saw their works lambasted by then-Arizona Atty. Gen. Tom Horne and others as they campaigned to ban ethnic and Mexican American studies programs in Tucson. At the time, Horne accused the professor of fostering “ethnic chauvinism.”
Years later, Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign rallies frequently displayed mug shots of undocumented immigrants accused of crimes below the title “Occupied America.” But whatever controversies shadowed him, Acuña never backed down from what he wrote and spoke about, whether in the classroom or at protests.
“I’m proud of being a militant,” he told The Times in 1993. “I’m proud of being a radical. I’m very proud of my age. … I’m very proud of being a Mexican!”
Acuña was born in Boyle Heights in 1932, and his upbringing in South L.A. and East Hollywood helped establish his strong racial identity as a youth. In first grade, he was placed in a slow learners’ group in first grade school because he didn’t speak English. Another time, a principal at a public school asked whether he and his sister, who was darker-skinned, had the same father.
“Even though I was first-generation and born in the U.S., we always had that sense of being Mexican,” he told The Times in 2016.
The future academic served in the Army during the Korean War and was also stationed in Germany, which he described in his 2022 oral history as “an awful lot of race riots.” He later enrolled in what’s now Cal State L.A. under the G.I. Bill and earned his bachelor’s degree in social sciences before pursuing a master’s in history from the same school before eventually earning a doctorate at USC.
Acuña went into teaching “because it was the fastest thing that I could do.” He bounced around schools in the San Fernando Valley — including a stint at a yeshiva where he was required to wear a yarmulke during class — before working at what’s now Pierce College and Mount Saint Mary’s University, where he taught his first course on Mexican American history around 1965.
It didn’t take long for Acuña to spearhead an academic revolution he knew was emerging.
In 1969, he became the first professor in CSUN’s Mexican American studies department, now called the Chicano and Chicana Studies Department, which became an incubator for Latino activism in L.A. and beyond. He mentored thousands of students and faculty members for decades, and frequently confronted administrators for what he believed was their lack of concern over the needs of minority students and staffers.
Harry Gamboa Jr., a Chicano artist, writer and educator, recalled seeing Acuña promote equal education and decry restrictions on the Chicana and Chicano studies department during a mid-1990s rally on the lawn of CSUN’s Oviatt Library.
“Here you have a Chicano studies professor speaking to 10,000 people of quite possibly every ethnicity and every represented language in Southern California present before him and being moved by his words,” said Gamboa, who photographed Acuña in his later years. “He never wavered from speaking his mind, and when he did, people listened.”
Around that era, Acuña made national news for suing UC Santa Barbara, where he had applied for a teaching position. In the suit, Acuña accused the campus of discriminating against him because of his age and race. When the professor’s job application was rejected, more than 500 students, many from the Mexican American student group MEChA, converged on campus to protest the university’s decision.
A jury found that Acuña had been discriminated against based on his age and awarded him $326,000 in 1996. In denying Acuña’s request for a tenured position, the judge argued that the hostility between Acuña and his potential co-workers would make his appointment “both impractical and inappropriate.”
That battle inspired him to make the film “Barbara & We” about his thoughts on the university and its chancellor, Barbara S. Uehling, who he believed was incapable of helping Latinos. Uehling died in 2020.
Acuña used the judgment from his lawsuit to fund a foundation to help people who experienced employment discrimination in higher education. He chose to stay at Cal State Northridge for the rest of his career.
On social media, dozens of people posted remembrances of their encounters with Acuña, relationships he prided himself in maintaining over the decades.
“You become like a grandfather and look at the kids, and you take pride in them,” Acuña told a Cal State Northridge publication in 2016. “Life has been good to me, and I have to give back. That’s about it.”
He is survived by his wife, Guadalupe Compean, and daughter Angela.
Pineda is a former Times reporter.
