1984. Wasn't George Orwell. 1984 really took place in 1991, during the so-called Gulf War, but that's not the point. The point was, I was living off a steady diet of marijuana and Milky Way bars, and living in a two-room on-campus apartment with 4 other chicanos. To make money, I worked as a research assistant/part-time programmer for the Stanford Center for Chicano Research.

It was a strange summer. It was the summer of Purple Rain, the last interesting Democratic National Convention. Remember that one? Mario Cuomo's slap in the face to Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill" speech. Remember Jesse Jackson's kick-ass address to the convention - "It's time for a change! It's time for a change!" Who would have thought that he'd wind up offering spiritual counsel to the pervert currently housed at 1600 Pennsylvania? Remember the first and only woman (besides Angela Davis) ever nominated for the office of Vice-President?

Working at the Center for Chicano Research gave me a chance to transition from the weird little chicano engineer stage of my life to the weird little chicano activist stage. Like a lot of my fellow techie friends at the time, I didn't have confidence in my words, or in my ability to communicate. I was too much a slave to what I thought the word arts were supposed to be, not what they truly are, or the fact that they need to change. I naively believed that numbers, equations, the ones and zeroes that are the building blocks of the technological revolution were somehow objective tools that would lead us all to understanding and justice.

Looking back, I realized that I was afraid, afraid of being judged by white men. I was afraid of telling the truth, my truth, and being laughed at for thinking things could ever really change in the first place. Today, I look at the writing of my younger chicana/o sisters and brothers, and I see how timidly their words walk across the page, how much they separate themselves and their passions from their words, and how far their written words ever come to sounding like their own speech.

During my time as a research assistant, I was involved in developing statistical analyses of 1980 census data, producing reports on latino representation in state senate and state assembly districts throughout California. While I learned that my technical knowledge and skills were able to play a role in latina/o political empowerment. But I was also able to learn that those problems were much deeper than the objective facts would ever reveal, and simply revealing injustices under the light of scientific reason would never be enough to change them. It made me want more, much more.

Of course, the future of the Stanford Center for Chicano Research is totally up in the air now. It's budget is being pulled, and it's highly unlikely that the center wil get the chance to play the same role in the intellectual development of future generations of chicana/os, and it's totally unclear what role chicana/o students will play in trying to save it. Because of deliberate underdevelopment over the last ten years, the SCCR has played a smaller and smaller role in the lives of chicana/o students. Most undergraduates have no idea what this office represents. And that's a shame.