CFA Latino Caucus Co-founder Reflects on His Work as an Organizer and Public Intellectual

Gonzalo Santos, retired CFA leader and CSU Bakersfield (CSUB) professor emeritus, served as an organizer and activist in social movements long before and after his leadership in our faculty union.

The public intellectual is known for his work as an immigrant rights champion, advocate for faculty, co-founder of the CFA Latino Caucus, and sociology professor.  

Decades before he began teaching at CSUB, Santos was a leader of the 1968 Mexican Student Pro-Democracy Movement fighting against the authoritarian regime. He had to leave Mexico because of his involvement and came to the US in 1970. Outside of academics, he continued to work in activist spaces, including the peace, Chicano, and Central American solidarity movements and supporting Salvadorian and Guatemalan refugees.

In 1992, Santos began teaching at CSUB. When interviewing for the job, he said that some of the first questions he asked were if faculty were unionized and if he could see the collective bargaining agreement.  

He also requested to meet with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (M.E.Ch.A.) student organization on campus. Santos later became their mentor and said one of the reasons he accepted the job was because he wanted to be close to the children of farmworkers. 

Javier Trigos-Arrieta, retired CFA Bakersfield leader and mathematics professor, described Santos as a wonderful and outspoken friend and colleague. In the ’90s, Trigos-Arrieta said that Santos quickly showed who he was.  

“From the beginning he showed he was concerned with immigrant rights, Latino faculty rights, and lecturer conditions,” Trigos-Arrieta said. “I learned from Gonzalo that we need a union, and he opened our eyes regarding Faculty Merit Increases (FMIs), an unfair system for faculty raises.” 

Santos said he became president of CFA Bakersfield to fight against FMIs, which he described as a salary increase system dependent on being in administrators’ good graces. He was also elected as the chair of the CFA statewide Council of Presidents, which came with a seat on the Board of Directors. During that time, Santos helped lead the successful campaign to go on strike to eliminate FMIs and then contributed to electing new CFA leaders after that.  

Together with Armando Vázquez-Ramos, the only other Latino in statewide CFA leadership at the time, Santos set his sights on a new goal: creating the Latino Caucus. Santos and Vázquez-Ramos asked for the board’s support to create a new institution within the union. The board approved funds for a statewide conference, and the founding two-day conference happened in 2002.  

About 800 faculty and students from across the CSU system met, passed bylaws, elected leadership, established the mission statement, and adopted a program of action for the next year. It was a source of great joy, Santos said, to have been a co-founder of CFA’s first identity caucus.  

“The role that the Latino Caucus played in creating the standard, in creating the whole notion of inclusion in CFA for all of the groups, that made us feel very accomplished and very proud,” Santos said.  

After that, Santos didn’t run again for chapter president but continued to participate in CFA as a member. He began focusing his attention on immigration issues.  

In 2006, Santos marched with his family in Los Angeles in one of the historic immigration demonstrations that launched the modern immigration movement. When he got back to Bakersfield, Santos and fellow CSUB professor Jess Nieto launched the Kern (County) Coalition for Citizenship, which every organization supporting immigrant rights joined, including unions, churches, and student groups.  

Overnight, they organized their first mass demonstration and did what no Latinos or farmworkers had done in conservative Bakersfield before. They marched repeatedly and by the thousands through the white upper-class neighborhoods straight to downtown. In the summer of 2013, Santos also joined a pilgrimage and walked under the scorching sun from Sacramento to Bakersfield for immigrant rights. The coalition went into remission after 2014, but Santos said it made an impact.  

 
“It left a legacy in Bakersfield that has been picked up by other mass mobilizations, whether it’s the women’s movement, longstanding farmworkers movement, LGBTQ movement, or educational movement,” Santos said. “Everybody now knows that it’s quite possible to organize here, even in the most right-wing area of California.” 

Since 2013, Santos has also run a popular movement portal called Kern Action News & Analysis. He archives his writings on his website and maintains an email list. Santos said he takes this public sociology seriously because people need analysis explaining why we are facing such chaotic, horrible situations like the persecution of immigrants in the streets, the violation of citizen rights in the United States, and the Trump Administration’s wars abroad.  

“As a public intellectual, my number one contribution is to analyze the historical conjuncture we find ourselves in to give people a deeper understanding of the causes of why we’re in the mess we are in and encourage them to act according to what the real challenges are,” Santos said.  

Outside of his work in CFA and immigration rights activism, Santos also left his mark on CSUB, where he taught for 30 years. There, he was an advocate for the creation of an Ethnic Studies Department and was the Latin American Studies coordinator.  

Alem Kebede, CFA Bakersfield member and sociology/social theory professor, said Santos was a committed instructor to his students. Santos also supported and guided Kebede, who came to CSUB about eight years after Santos. The two had discussions not just about adjusting to the campus and departmental life at CSUB, but about theory and contemporary issues from the perspective of sociology. 

Kebede also noted that Santos designed a few sociology classes that are still being taught today, including one on immigration. Overall, Kebede said that Santos is his hero and a great public intellectual.  

“My understanding and interpretation of social matters is mostly limited within the bounds of theory only within the classroom,” Kebede said. “But in Gonzalo’s case, he goes out. And when I arrived, he was a CFA representative, and the way he was doing it, the way he was really expressing himself, was really remarkable.”