Juan Gomez-Quinones

Biography

“Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones,” oil on canvas, Salomón Huerta (2018)

Our community mourns the loss and celebrates the brilliant career of Juan Gómez-Quiñones, who died on November 11, 2020.  Juan earned his B.A. in Literature, M.A. in Latin American Studies, and  PhD in History, all at UCLA.   After a brief stint as a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, he returned to UCLA as a tenured full professor in 1974.  Juan’s research and writing ensured that he would emerge as a leading light in the first generation of Chicano Studies scholars.  By envisioning a Mexican American past, he created a model of politically-engaged scholarship in line with the Chicano Movement’s political thrust as it emerged in Los Angeles and throughout the U.S. Southwest in the late 1960s and 1970s. At UCLA, Juan played a critical role in the formation of a Chicano Studies community, through the founding of the Chicano Studies Research Center in 1969 (serving as its second director from 1974 to 1985), an archive and library dedicated to the historical experiences of Mexican Americans, and of Aztlán in 1970, which is still the premiere journal of  Chicana and Chicano Studies.  Ultimately, Juan’s tireless efforts to establish a scholarly community dedicated to the study of Mexican Americans led in 1995 to the establishment of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA, which now houses 17 full-time faculty members and a student body of about 1000 majors and minors. His work as the quintessential activist-scholar garnered him many honors including the National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies Scholar of the Year Award in 1990 and the 2003 UCLA Ann C. Rosenfield Distinguished Community Partnership Prize.

Juan’s wide-ranging intellect and expansive record of publication inspired subsequent generations of scholars from a variety of disciplines to focus on the Mexican American experience(s), generating new lines of scholarly inquiry. He wrote about Chicano/a culture and politics, but also about anarchism, the borderlands, political economy, indigeneity, labor, gender and immigration. Juan was also a poet; his collection of poems, Fifth and Grande Vista, was a tribute Boyle Heights, the neighborhood he grew up in.  In the span of his over fifty year association with the UCLA History Department, Juan left a powerful and lasting legacy, not just as an activist/scholar in the field of Chicana/o Studies, but also in ethnic studies more broadly, opening access and promoting equity in higher education.

Please click here for a post from the Director of the Chicano Research Studies Center.

“To L.A.’s Chicano studies professor, icon: Rest in Power” – Los Angeles Times article about Juan Gomez-Quinones.

“In Memory of the Legendary Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones: Chicano Scholar, Educator, Activist, and Poet,” Medium, November 12, 2020, by Dr. Álvaro Huerta.