ICW Presents “Compton in My Soul”: A Conversation with Albert Camarillo
About the Book
When Albert Camarillo grew up in Compton, California, racial segregation was the rule. His relatives were among the first Mexican immigrants to settle there—in the only neighborhood where Mexicans were allowed to live. The city’s majority was then white, and Compton would shift to a predominantly Black community during Camarillo’s youth. Compton in My Soul weaves Camarillo’s personal story with histories of this now-infamous place and illuminates a changing U.S. society—the progress and backslides over half a century for racial equality and educational opportunity. More About the Book
Albert M. Camarillo, Compton in My Soul: A Life in Pursuit of Racial Equality, 2024. | Stanford University Press.
About the Speakers
Albert Camarillo is professor of American history and the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor/Haas Centennial Professor of Public Service, Emeritus, at Stanford University. A member of the Stanford University history department for over 40 years, Camarillo is widely regarded as one of the founding scholars of the field of Mexican American history and Chicano studies. He was born and raised in Compton, where he attended public schools before attending UCLA. He received his B.A. in history in 1970 and his Ph.D. in U.S. history in 1975. He is the first Mexican American in the nation’s history to receive a Ph.D. in U.S. history with a specialization in Chicano history.
Kelly Lytle Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022). She also leads the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prizes Board.
George J. Sánchez is professor of American studies and ethnicity and history at USC, where he also serves as director of the Center for Diversity and Democracy and as chair of the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity. In addition, Professor Sanchez is director of USC’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows program and runs the university’s major in Contemporary Latino and Latin American Studies. He is the author of Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (University of California Press, 2021); Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1993); and co-editor of three other books. He received his B.A. in history and sociology from Harvard University in 1981 and his Ph.D. in history in 1989 from Stanford University. He was born in Boyle Heights to two immigrant parents from Mexico and was a first-generation college student.
William Deverell is an American historian with a focus on the 19th- and 20th-century American West. Deverell has written works on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history. He is the founding director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.
About the Organization
The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW) is a center for scholarly investigation of the history and culture of California and the American West. Through sponsorship of innovative scholarship, research, and programming, ICW draws on the resources of USC and the Huntington Library to build a unique collaboration among a research university, a research library, and the public.
