Biography of Al Camarillo

Historian Al M. Camarillo was appointed as the chair holder of the Miriam and Peter Haas Professorship in Public Service in 2002. In announcing Professor Camarillo's appointment in April 2002, Provost John Etchemendy said "I am delighted to be able to recognize Al's contributions to Stanford with the Haas Professorship. Al is not only an award-winning teacher, but he has been innovative in his incorporation of public service components into his courses for years. Al will bring further distinction to the professorship."

Nadinne Cruz, former director of the Haas Center, acknowledged that "more than any other single individual at Stanford, Al Camarillo has made service-learning a familiar term and a part of teaching innovation among Stanford faculty. Al has provided sustained leadership to connect faculty with public service education, not only or mostly by words, but through example."

Al Camarillo has been at Stanford University since 1975, the year in which he received his Ph.D. from UCLA. A native of the South Central Los Angeles community of Compton, Camarillo also attended UCLA as an undergraduate. The recipient of all three of the highest awards given by Stanford for teaching and service to undergraduate education, Camarillo won the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award in 1988, the Walter J. Gores Award in 1994 and the Bing Teaching Fellowship Award for Excellence and Innovation in 1997. A leading scholar of the Mexican American experience in the United States, Camarillo also assumed several academic leadership positions of centers at Stanford. He is founding director of Stanford's landmark Center for the Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity, and during the early 1980s, he founded the Stanford Center for Chicano Research. He also served as Associate Dean and Director of Undergraduates Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences during the early 1990s.

Camarillo's course, "Poverty & Homelessness in America" integrates topical literature, class discussion and reflection with an internship experience at various local homeless shelters. Beginning in 2002, Camarillo created a new course that expands the service-learning concept to include a research component involving undergraduates. A group of his students served as interns with a nonprofit agency in the south-central Los Angeles community of Compton in summer 2002. Once they gained experience working in this community that is undergoing rapid ethnic transformations, students enrolled in his new spring 2003 course, "Race and Ethnicity in the Metropolis: A Case Study of Compton," where they read and discussed relevant literature. The final phase of Camarillo’s Compton project required students to return to Compton and participate in collecting and transcribing oral history interviews with a large number of Compton residents.

Professor Russ Fernald, former chair of the Faculty Steering Committee of the Haas Center, a position previously held by Camarillo, noted that he is "delighted by Al's plans to focus on public service research. Al is developing a program for students to engage in research about the unsung heroes of the next frontier in race relations."