BY DIANE MANUEL

When freshman Genevieve Aguilar first saw the name Albert Camarillo in a book about Chicano studies, she didn't make the connection.

The third time she came across Camarillo's name in a textbook, it began to click. The scholar whose work was being cited was the unassuming guy who sat across the seminar table from her on Wednesday afternoons.

"I was like, 'Wow!'" the El Paso native says. "I couldn't believe I was taking a class with this person who other authors were saying was the most influential Chicano historian they'd ever read."

As the Mellon Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Camarillo is widely credited with training almost half of the university faculty currently teaching Chicano studies in the United States. But for many students, he is the teacher in muted polo shirts and casual Dockers who has a sunny office on the third floor of History Corner where they can go to talk.

His popular class on "Topics in Mexican American History" attracts mostly Mexican American students, many of whom bring illuminating personal stories to the discussion. One recent afternoon, a young woman expanded on the history of agricultural workers in California's Imperial Valley by telling how her grandparents had followed the seasonal stoop-labor force each year.

"I let them know there's room for that in the discussion, that they can illustrate with personal examples what we've been reading in the literature," Camarillo says. "You can tell that they're trying to make the connections between their own familial stories and the larger historical record."

Sometimes Camarillo will touch on his own experience. He has told minority students who feel estranged from the Stanford campus that when he and his brother enrolled at the University of California-Los Angeles in the 1960s, they were two of only 44 Mexican Americans in a student body of 27,000.

"There was no room for me or for the people from which I arose," he says. "There was no history for me. I was excluded."

Camarillo teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in modern U.S. history, with an emphasis on ethnic and racial minorities in 20th-century cities. He is a past director of the Chicano Fellows Program and the Stanford Center for Chicano Research. He currently serves as director of the new interdisciplinary Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) program. He also is the first faculty member ever to receive three of the university's most distinguished awards: the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for outstanding service to undergraduate education and two excellence in teaching honors ­ the Walter J. Gores Award and a Bing Fellowship.

As associate dean and director of undergraduate studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences in the early 1990s, Camarillo advocated putting students in small classes with senior faculty, and he was an energizing force behind the development of sophomore seminars.

"They bring a dimension of engagement to the literature that makes teaching an absolute joy," he says about the students he has taught during the past 23 years at Stanford. "One of the key reasons I'm in higher education is to help shape young minds and careers, but I wouldn't get any gratification if the teaching were secondary to the research. I really have to try to do both."

Camarillo joined the Stanford faculty in 1975, after earning his doctorate at UCLA and holding faculty posts at Yale University and the University of California-
Santa Barbara. His first book, Chicanos in a Changing
Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930, was published in 1979 and marked an important transition in the historiography of ethnic Mexican people in the United States. Previously, scholars had explained the apparent inability of Mexican immigrants to assimilate into American society by focusing on alleged passiveness or clannishness in Mexican culture or by charging Anglos with racism. But Camarillo looked at internal political disagreements and cultural clashes between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants and saw a more nuanced history.

"The ultimate significance of this more complicated and messy story was that it allowed readers to get a glimpse of just how intricate the process of conquest, ethnic formation, cultural maintenance and exchange and political struggle was for ethnic Mexicans in the 19th and early 20th centuries," says David Gutierrez, associate professor of history at the University of California-San Diego and co-director of the school's Southwest History Project.

In his research, Camarillo has examined the origins of the Chicano civil rights movement, as well as family, labor and immigration patterns in urbanized populations. He has studied the compacts between employers and school districts in California that permitted Chicano children to leave school to help their families with agricultural work, and he spent 150 hours interviewing the owners of Spanish land grants who lost their homes and lands to 20th-century gerrymandering. His most recent book, Not White, Not Black: Mexicans and Ethnic/Racial Borderlands in American Cities, looks at patterns in several large metropolitan areas.

"It started out originally as a history of Mexican Americans in cities in the Southwest, but bigger questions began unfolding for me and I wondered where that group fit into broader patterns of race and ethnicity in American society," Camarillo says of his recent work. "I'm trying to ask, 'How does the African American adaptation to Atlanta or Chicago compare with what Italian Americans went through in Detroit?'"

Barrio is the word Camarillo often uses to describe the black and Chicano neighborhood in Compton, Calif., where he was born and raised. Although he was the youngest of six children, he worked with his three older brothers on the construction projects their father followed throughout Los Angeles.

"We dug the ditches and did all the dirty work," he says fondly, remembering the summers he spent learning the cement mason trade from his dad. "I can still
drive up and down Venice Boulevard and La Cienaga
and see his work."

Compton, however, had little to offer its youngsters but empty days, hot asphalt and too much idle time.

"My friends and I were all headed toward gangs," Camarillo remembers. "Of my three closest childhood friends, I'm the only one who survived. Had I stayed, I'd probably be dead."

His family moved across town into a better school district when he was 9. Then came the riots of 1965 in neighboring Watts, followed by forced busing to end segregation in schools, and overnight Camarillo was reunited with friends from his old neighborhood.

"The black kids they were busing in to our high school were kids I'd grown up with," he says. "So I knew them, and of course I knew the Chicano kids, and I was friends with the white kids, too. I was in the middle and had experience with all of them, and I guess that's why I was identified as someone who could help to facilitate some interaction."

As student body president of his high school, Camarillo set up a mediating council to douse the smoldering racial tensions. After graduation he enrolled at UCLA as a biology major, then bounced between sociology and political science courses. Finally, in his junior year, he took the first Mexican American history class offered at the university and knew he'd found his calling.

Since then, Camarillo and his wife, Susan, have made sure that their three children have the same exposure to diversity they both found at UCLA. Their kids attend public schools in Menlo Park, and last year their oldest son, 18-year-old Jeff, was one of 13 Menlo-Atherton students who teamed up with Stanford undergraduates enrolled in the "Poverty and Homelessness in America" course Camarillo teaches each winter and spring quarter. Together, the high school and university volunteers piloted an after-school tutorial program for children at two local shelters for homeless families.

"I told them . . . 'You're about to be engaged in a journey that's . . . going to raise profound questions about disparities in our society,' '' he warned.

"In my discipline, we don't just want to fill the heads of our students with history. We want them to be educated and trained to be fully engaged citizens who will go out there and change the world." ST