Meet Albert Camarillo: Mentor and ‘mayor’ of the Stanford community

“If Stanford had a mayor, it would be Al [Camarillo],” Tomás Jiménez, a professor of sociology and comparative studies in race and ethnicity (CSRE), said. “I cannot think of anyone who was more universally respected and revered as a scholar, colleague and administrator.”

Albert Camarillo, a professor of history, founded the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) in 1996. During his 50 years at Stanford, Camarillo also founded the Stanford Center for Chicano Research and the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, serving as the first director of both his endeavors.

Since then, Camarillo has produced valuable research on the topics of race and ethnicity, establishing these areas of study as not just areas of student interest, but as “important and legitimate scholarship,” according to professor of history Gordon Chang.

Growing up, Camarillo lived in a segregated Mexican-American neighborhood in Compton, California. He said most of his childhood was “seeing but not understanding the legacies of racial discrimination and structural racism.” It was not until he took his first ethnic studies course at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) that Camarillo began understanding and articulating his experiences.

After graduating in 1970 with a degree in history, Camarillo continued his graduate education with a Ph.D at UCLA before coming to Stanford to teach in 1975 as an assistant professor of history.

Chang, who worked closely with Camarillo over the past three decades, said when Camarillo first came to Stanford, the studies of race and ethnicity were not as well established as they are today. Camarillo became a pioneer on an institutional level, becoming a valuable mentor to colleagues and students through his work.

“He always knew how to work with faculty and the administration to develop a step-by-step strategy to advance what we all saw as the common good,” Chang said. 

Fellow professor Jiménez first met Camarillo while being recruited to teach at Stanford. Camarillo took Jiménez out to dinner with both of their partners.

Jiménez said he and his wife, after meeting Camarillo and his wife, thought: “We want to be like that.” 

Aron Ramirez ’19 studied with Camarillo during his last years of teaching. While working on his undergraduate thesis in history, Ramirez said Camarillo considered him “seriously as a thinker.”

“I never had a shortage of things to ask him, and he never made me feel like any of my questions were dumb,” Ramirez wrote in an email to The Daily.

Even outside of the classroom, Camarillo has supported the larger Stanford community in social justice work, like advocating for Latino alumni across institutions, former student Chris Arriola ’92 said.

Camarillo’s latest book, “Compton in My Soul,” is a memoir of his life, with themes of history, race and ethnicity in the context of education. 

He partly wrote the book to inspire his current students to pursue higher education, but he also wrote it for his family. He had hoped that the book could fill in the generational space for his grandchildren, who are far removed from his immigrant experience.

Since the publication of the book, readers from immigrant families have reached out to him, sharing how his writing resonated with them, Camarillo said. 

“There are some universal things in there [the book] about growing up as an ethnic person in America,” Camarillo said. “You don’t even know what you’re dealing with. You contend with it, but you don’t understand it.”

On a larger scale, Camarillo hopes his account can “open people’s eyes to things that we take for granted but are under assault right now” in the context of recent political policies laid out by the Trump administration.

Despite current challenges in racial equality, Camarillo is hopeful about the open doors for the younger generation.

“The beauty of people is to break historical barriers and understand themselves across ethnic, racial and other kinds of division,” Camarillo said, and by breaking these barriers, he hopes to unshackle “the America we had hoped to build.”