Margarita Arce Decierdo
mdecierd@austincc.edu

I was born in Santa Maria, California to migrant parents, my father from the Philippines and mother from Mexico. During my early childhood years, we worked as a farmworker family. While an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), I began my community advocacy, starting as an organizer for the United Farmworkers under the leadership of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. We organized to establish social justice for farmworker families and boycotted against growers who would not allow farmworkers union representation. After graduating from UCSB with majors in Sociology and Spanish, I worked for the Agricultural Labor Relations Board; an entity established to protect agricultural workers the right to unionize. I continued my advocacy work while a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). There, I worked as a Paralegal in Oakland’s Centro Legal de La Raza. The cases brought forth at Centro Legal dealt with Police Brutality and immigrant affairs. We joined efforts with the Puerto Rican community to fight against police brutality.

Mentored by Dr. Angela Davis, Dr. Huey Newton, Dr. Robert Allen; propelled me to seek a deeper understanding of empowerment and speaking truth to injustice. My work with the African American Museum in Oakland, trained me to use oral history; a research method I use for most of my writings, including the interviews I conducted on the survivors of Port Chicago (The Port Chicago Mutiny by Robert Allen, 1989).

My professors of Sociology, Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies and History, Professors Robert Blauner, Michael Buroway, Arlie Hochschild, Michael Omi, Bell Hooks and Vicki Ruiz have taught me to bridge gaps in the academic field by using the disciplines reflective and analytical tools to understand power, racism, sexism, and social change. It was my colleagues, a multi-cultural gathering of different voices that got me through the rigors of academic life. In order to incorporate our personal histories, we established the Chicano Political Economy Collective (UCB Institute for the Study of Social Change). This collective helped us to tease out our theoretical ideas about race, ethnicity, gender, identity, and power.

My experience with community advocates and leaders in California ushered me to help East Austin neighborhoods; including Colony Park/Lakeside to encourage change towards a more equitable future. I worked with New Hope Baptist Church during the Katrina Disaster and served on the Colony Park Core Team, where we were able to develop the Colony Park Master Plan for the 208 Acres.

I have been a Professor of Sociology for over 20 years and currently serve as a Faculty Mentor of Sociology and Psychology. Some of my writings include “The Struggle Within: The California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, 1975-1990” in Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by David Montejano; “Life in North Carolina” in Las Obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family (Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Volume 20, Numbers One and Two edited by Vicki Ruiz); “History of Colony Park: Prudent and Deliberate Planning” in City of Austin Colony Park Master Plan Documents.

Finally, as my professor Dr. Ron Takaki once asked, “how do we see our prospects for “working out” American’s racial crisis? Whatever happens, we can be certain that much of our society’s future will be influenced by which “mirror” we choose to see ourselves. (Ron Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, 1993).