Dr. Álvaro Huerta
About
Dr. Álvaro Huerta is an Associate Professor at Cal Poly Pomona. From 2021 to 2024, Dr. Huerta was a Religion and Public Life Organizing Fellow at Harvard Divinity School. He’s the author of the forthcoming book, "Jardineros/Gardeners: Cultivating Los Angeles’ Green Landscapes with Rugged Brown Hands, Migrant Networks and Technology" (The MIT Press). Experiencing poverty and violence, he spent his formative years in public housing projects in East Los Angeles. He holds a Ph.D. in City & Regional Planning from UC Berkeley. He also holds an M.A. in Urban Planning and a B.A. in History from UCLA.
Contrary to what the mainstream media reporters and others say, Brown men didn’t elect the convicted felon Donald J. Trump and his sidekick J.…
For over 50 years, Chicanas/os have been creating art in various mediums at various venues. A great sample of beautiful Chicana/o art can be found in The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum. While not all Chicana/o artists have had the opportunity to exhibit at prestigious museums and galleries, the art pioneers of the past have broken the doors open for brown artists–present and future. The artists of Mexican origin in el Norte must be understood in the context of racial capitalism and anti-Mexicanism—a term best understood by the late and great historian, Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones, in his brilliant essay “La Realidad: the Realities of Anti-Mexicanism.”
In short, if we want more brown kids from America’s barrios to become great artists and exhibit their art–domestically and internationally–they must first see themselves in the best museums and galleries the world has to offer
In 1992, after working with residents and staff to help the homies to secure employment through a non-profit, Jobs for a Future (JJF), Father Boyle founded Homeboy Industries.
I ask, “Why was my father incapable of saying the three magic words—’I love you’—to his children and wife?” Without getting all Freudian, I’ve learned that it goes back to his turbulent and harsh upbringing in a small Mexican rancho in the beautiful state of Michoacán: Zajo Grande. At the rancho, along with his parents and 10 siblings, he experienced/witnessed poverty, violence and death.
In the case of Hollywood movies, for too long — past and present — Latinas/os (in general) and Chicanas/os or Mexican Americans (in particular) have been mostly invisible and marginalized.
As a “guest” of the American government, my father—Salomón Huerta, Sr.—worked as a farmworker during the early 1960s under the Bracero Program. Officially known as the Mexican Farm Labor Program (1942-1964), this guest worker program recruited 4.6 million Mexican laborers to toil in America’s agricultural fields, along with the railroad and mining sectors.
Yet, if not for my participation in Upward Bound (a federally funded program to help prepare historically marginalized, first-gen kids to pursue higher education), I wouldn’t be able to compete at the highest level in my mathematics. More specifically, if not for my childhood friend Hector from the projects, who peer pressured me to apply to Upward Bound at Occidental College (Oxy) – a six-week, residential program – I would be oblivious to the college application process.