University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Spring 2010 Before We Were Chicanas/Os: The Mexican American Experience in California Higher Education, 1848-1945 Christopher Tudico University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Chicana/o Studies Commons, History Commons, and the Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons Recommended Citation Tudico, Christopher, "Before We Were Chicanas/Os: The Mexican American Experience in California Higher Education, 1848-1945" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 148. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/148 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/148 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Before We Were Chicanas/Os: The Mexican American Experience in California Higher Education, 1848-1945 Abstract Mexican American students have a long and proud history of enrolling in colleges and universities across the state of California for nearly 160 years, since shortly after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Yet, inexplicably, historians of higher education have virtually ignored the Mexican American experience in California higher education. Based on the examination of primary sources such as the diary of Californio Jesús María Estudillo, the records of the University of California, and the college student-led Mexican American Movement’s newspaper, The Mexican Voice, this study reconstructs the history of the Mexican American experience in California higher education from not long after statehood through World War II. The children of Californios (wealthy landholders who stressed their “Spanish” heritage) attended Santa Clara College and the College of Notre Dame from the early 1850s to mid 1870s, and Mexicans and Californios also took part in the preparatory program known as the Fifth Class at the University of California in the early 1870s.