During the 1960s, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) hosted research surveys focused on two of Southern California’s largest communities of color: the Japanese American Research Project (JARP, 1962–1970) and the Mexican American Study Project (MASP, 1964–1968). While conceived in separate sectors of the university’s research apparatus, JARP and MASP together exemplify UCLA’s gradual institutionalization of racial diversity over the course of the decade. In the years before UCLA could claim a critical mass of nonwhite scholars and students, these projects inaugurated campus-community relations with local civil rights organizations as both collaborators and critics. Together, JARP and MASP demonstrate that the multiracial integration of California’s higher education system was a prolonged process, first requiring the state’s predominantly white public universities to develop institutional vocabularies of racial difference where none existed prior.

During the 1960s, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) hosted research surveys focused on two of Southern California’s largest communities of color: the Japanese American Research Project (JARP, 1962–1970) and the Mexican American Study Project (MASP, 1964–1968). While conceived in separate sectors of the university’s research apparatus, JARP and MASP together exemplify UCLA’s gradual institutionalization of racial diversity over the course of the decade. In the years before UCLA could claim a critical mass of nonwhite scholars and students, these projects inaugurated campus-community relations with local civil rights organizations as both collaborators and critics. Together, JARP and MASP demonstrate that the multiracial integration of California’s higher education system was a prolonged process, first requiring the state’s predominantly white public universities to develop institutional vocabularies of racial difference where none existed prior.

In the forty years since the publication of the special issue devoted to Chicano history in the Pacific Historical Review in 1973, the literature on Mexican Americans has flourished. In the early 1970s, the nascent subfield of Chicano history was established, and in subsequent decades it reached maturity as the number of historians writing in this area increased significantly, as did the number of monographs and articles. By the early twenty-first century, the importance of historical studies of Mexican Americans is reflected in the literature of many subfields of U.S. history—labor, women, U.S.-Mexican borderlands, urban, immigration—and in the curriculum of colleges and universities across the nation. This article provides a personal perspective on the origins, foundations, and maturation of Chicano history.

This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los Angeles after 1965. It argues that activists and workers used the mechanisms set up by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to attack the barriers that restricted blacks and Mexican Americans to poor job prospects. It shows that implementation of fair employment law was part of a dialectic between policymakers and regulatory officials, on one hand, and grass-roots individuals and civil rights organizations, on the other. The bureaucratic mechanisms created by Title VII shaped who would benefit from the implementation of the law. Moreover, blacks and Mexican Americans mixed ethnic power and civil rights frameworks to make the bureaucratic system more capacious and race-conscious, which challenged the intentions of the original legislation.