by Saul Ruiz
Just before the crack of dawn, a ten year old boy and his brother would be up and out of the house. Their destination? Panaderia San Jose on Vallarta in Mexico. There, the boys would be paid in freshly baked bread. The brothers would pick up batea boxes filled completely with fresh bread. Setting them atop their heads in a balance, and venturing out into the city, they would visit various businesses and deliver them fresh bread. The businesses received hot, soft birotes for their tortas, sandwiches and such. After deliveries were made, the boys waited until the afternoon to return to Panaderia San Jose, where more batches of bread, including pan dulce and pastries, were awaiting delivery. Being a panadero, a bread delivery boy, was among Carlos Contreras’ first experiences working throughout childhood.
Carlos Alberto Contreras is a professor of history at Grossmont College. His doctorate in history allows him to create and manage courses pertaining to topics like American History, Mexican History, and Ethnic Studies. Contreras is a passionate professor who wants his students to take in as much about history as possible, a means to help future generations understand and recontextualize the society around them; to look at life through a lens many people either may not be aware of or avoid altogether. Contreras’ career of twenty-six years teaching at Grossmont has in turn made him a staple of the community. He is more than meets the eye, however, as not only is he a professor, but an elected council member to the American Council of Learned Societies. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) being a private federation focused on humanities and social studies. A soft-spoken man, Contreras is arguably an approachable professor with whom you may expect to hold a fun, captivating conversation with.
Only three months old, and Contreras had immigrated from the state of Jalisco, Mexico, to the city of Los Angeles, California. If you were to ask him, he’d say he’s “living his life on survival mode” due to his status as an immigrant. The year was 1957, and Contreras’ father was recruited by the United States from Mexico as part of the Bracero Program. “The Bracero Program is when the United States reached into Mexico to recruit five million agricultural workers to come to the United States to fulfill- to feed America,” Contreras described. The Bracero Program recruited five million Mexican braceros and imported them as workers to help fulfill the United State’s agricultural labor shortages caused by the second world war; among those men were Carlos’ father, who has lived in the states ever since. A young Carlos was raised primarily in south central Los Angeles, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had his fair share of moving around.
A rich plot of land in western Mexico holds many different types of agricultural features. A plot of land where the soil and plant life is rich enough to support growing vegetables, fruits, and many other crops. Such plantations can bring cash crops to support farmers and their families. One aspect of the Mexican migrant’s dream is to come back with enough profits from the United States to achieve such a goal.
“We lived for a while in Western Mexico, because one of the dreams of all of the Mexican migrants to the United States is to make enough money to go back home to buy their ‘pedazito de tierrita,’ to buy their land,” Carlos’ father was a sugar cane farmer who purchased such a plot of land, “and so we lived there for three years, it was a very important part of my upbringing.”
As a teenager, Carlos faced a challenging education as a high schooler in Waxahachie, Texas. A young man, an immigrant, pursuing education in a segregated Texas high school. That kind of separation which hinders a full fledged worldview was not what Contreras was looking for in life after high school. “I didn’t want to stay to do university there because Waxahachie was very segregated and so I didn’t apply to any Texas universities,” Contreras said when talking about his earlier education in Texas. He opted not to apply to any Texas colleges or universities, choosing to move back to California, where he applied and attended the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA.
Initially, Contreras attended and majored in the medical and doctoral school of UCLA, as in Waxahachie he always saw people in the medical field living the nicer, more luxurious lives. Carlos instead found himself being drawn gradually into topics such as humanities, cultures, and history. Immediately after starting at UCLA, he acquired a job at the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library on campus, as well as a position in the campus’ cash office.
“I’ve always had at least two jobs… the very first thing that I did when I got to freshman summer program was to get a job because I was paying out-of-state tuition,” Contreras spoke on acquiring jobs on campus. These positions helped him cover the expenses of out-of-state tuition as a Texas citizen going to school in California, which back then costed him an additional ten thousand dollars. “My parents had paid taxes here for many years when we lived here, but we hadn’t lived here in a while,” Carlos commented as to why he was classified as a Texas citizen rather than Californian. Contreras worked on the UCLA campus for five years whilst completing his bachelor’s degree as an undergraduate.
In UCLA, Contreras studied under a professor by the name of Edward Bradford Burns. “He wrote many books on Brazil and the poverty of progress, he was just so dynamic and he loved the field and he loved making something complex digestible and understandable to a class of two hundred students,” Contreras described one of his professors at UCLA. Burns was a historian and professor whose intense passion for history seemed to have rubbed off onto Carlos greatly.
“I’ve always been interested in stories, family stories and stories of nations and the stories that nations tell themselves,” Contreras described his love for history and historical events. Whilst working as a researcher in the biomedical laboratory’s program on Mexico, Contreras gained a connection with an additional UCLA professor, Jeffrey Bortz, who studied in Chile around 1973. Bortz was in the country of Chile when a military-backed coup d’état occurred and overthrew president Salvador Allende. This led to a United States-backed dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. Pinochet rounded up accused “dissidents” who were suspected of being communist, about two thousand of them, and began torturing and murdering them. “Having that personal relationship where he could tell me his story and how he came to do what he did, that was also important too,” Contreras described the meaningfulness of a relationship with someone who had personal experience with history. That personal relation to somebody who had endured and survived such an atrocity was pivotal to Contreras’ venture into history and social studies.
Carlos Contreras soon after continued to work in the historical field until acquiring his Ph.D from UCLA. Soon after, Contreras married and had a son, who is now thirty, and who would go on to be appointed as a congressional aid in Washington, D.C. Professor Contreras then went on to adopt a position at Grossmont College in the year 1999, as a professor in the history department. If one were to visit his page on the school’s website, they’d find he had also earned a black belt in TaeKwonDo!
Within the past few years, Professor Contreras found himself as an elected council member of the American Historical Association, the AHA, which, as Contreras says, is on a national scale. “That was very challenging for me… I was intimidated, a little, at the beginning. Though I knew my stuff and I’ve got a PhD in history and have been doing this for many years… this is an organization of sixteen thousand historians and research historians,” Contreras described the scale of the AHA. Though he knew his stuff, Contreras found himself intimidated but faced forward and developed expertise within the organization. The organization being comprised of some sixteen thousand history professors from around the country. Carlos views himself as not only a member of the council, but as a representative of community colleges as a whole. Contreras has been working on many teaching initiatives and broadened panels to extend to conversations of teaching. He is among the people who chooses to reach out to and include historians who teach and write for a living. Contreras wants to ensure that “people that didn’t necessarily write books for a living but taught history for a living were welcomed and included in the sessions and sharing teaching strategies and that.”
Contreras now represents the American Historical Association, among the American Council of Learned Societies, which works over a multitude of other associations relating to humanities and education. He finds his position and the association he works with as a vital part of democracy, especially in a time where we have appointed a president that is waging war on scholarships, inclusion, and education.
Carlos Contreras continues to spend his time teaching history at Grossmont College. Peering into one of his lectures, one may find a man passionately educating his students on foreign history and the challenges various races have faced when brought into the United States. Contreras fills his lectures to be rich with content that both entices a student and informs. He may even call upon his students to discuss amongst each other, share ideas, and express to the rest of the class their findings and remembrances.
Contreras continues to fight for representation and humanistic education to remain instated today. His life as an immigrant drove him to pursue work and education to not only make a living for himself, but to benefit the community, future generations, and by extension the nation as a whole. Contreras is more than just a history professor, he is a symbol for a dedicated community who has not let his background bring him down; but rather he embraces where he hails from and is driven to leave an impressive mark on education in the United States. For his entire career, Contreras has strived for inclusivity and to create a safe space for all, whether that be for students or educators alike.
We can have many different takeaways from Contreras’ story. To acknowledge and recognize the efforts of people with diverse backgrounds. To know that one does not need to be confined to the same space their whole life, that it is important to move around sometimes. To recognize that not every plan may be fulfilled and that their is a possibility of pivoting. To acknowledge history and remind ourselves that it is reality. Lastly, to be welcoming towards each other and our ideas.
