Before his death in 2020, eminent Chicano historian Juan Gómez-Quiñones packed decades of Mexican American history into the garage and shed of the Pacific Palisades home he’d lived in for half a century —books, poetry, artwork, unpublished essays, research, police records and investigations. Among the records were stories about labor, Indigenous communities, race and the struggles of working-class Mexican Americans that few others had collected.
The Palisades fire destroyed the home and almost all of the collection — except for some digital copies his family managed to save.
Historians are now grappling with the loss.
“It’s heartbreaking, not just from a scholarly standpoint, but from a human standpoint,” said Reynaldo Macías, an emeritus professor of Chicano studies at UCLA, who was an undergraduate there in the late 1960s when he met Gómez-Quiñones, a graduate student at the time.
“This was not just history; it was also memory, and we need historical memory in this community still. We needed it in 1968 when the high school students walked out, and we need it even now,” Macías said.
Gómez-Quiñones was a groundbreaking scholar who pushed the bounds of American academia from the moment he taught some of the first classes dedicated to Chicano history in the late 1960s, challenging long-standing norms against teaching about discrimination toward Latinos and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.
He was also a “pack rat” who stored everything he could get his hands on, said Albert Camarillo, an emeritus professor of history at Stanford and Gómez-Quiñones’ first doctoral student at UCLA.
Gómez-Quiñones’ life “weaves a story” from the early decades of Chicano history through the 1990s, when students led a hunger strike at UCLA to create what is now the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, Camarillo said.
“He had intergenerational material there … I cringe to think what we lost potentially,” Camarillo said. “I had asked him the last time I saw him, I said, ‘What do you need to write your memoir?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll do that,’ but he never got to it.”
Macías says there were plans in place before the COVID-19 pandemic for UCLA to transfer Gómez-Quiñones’ prized records to the university’s Chicano Studies Research Center, but it never happened.
The plans fell through after the pandemic due to “backlog,” Macías said: “It was just a bad draw in terms of timing and where people were … there was little chance to follow up and get it done before the fire.”
Veronica Terriquez, who directs the Chicano Studies Research Center that Gómez-Quiñones led in the 1970s, said in an interview that she knew she was entering her role on “the shoulders of giants, Gómez-Quiñones among them.” But, having arrived as the center’s director in 2021, during the pandemic, she was not aware of plans to have his collections stored on campus.
“The loss of his papers, the loss of other people’s archives — I think of all those families in Altadena who have historic documents that are an important part of Black history,” said Terriquez, who is also a professor of urban planning and Chicana/o and Central American studies at UCLA. “We’re losing something really precious.”
In a follow-up statement on behalf of UCLA and the research center, Terriquez said the university continues to retain Gómez-Quiñones’ administrative records and other collections reflecting his work at the center.
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of his personal and professional documents in the Palisades fire, which represented an invaluable part of his life’s work,” she wrote. “Their loss is a tragedy for all who value his contributions.”
Irene Vásquez, Gómez-Quiñones’ wife and chair of the University of New Mexico’s Chicana and Chicano Studies Department, said her husband’s ties to the Palisades run deep. It was the place where the couple married and raised their family, and where Gómez-Quiñones’ grandmother took him to watch polo matches as a child.
“[She] found places of beauty in the natural landscape and shared that with Juan,” said Vásquez. “He always remembered the Palisades, and he told the children that it was, for him, a place of endearment.”
Carlos Haro, an assistant director emeritus of the research center who had Gómez-Quiñones on his graduate committee, remembers spending time with the scholar at his Palisades home and listening to him talk about the backyard shed he was constructing in 2018 to store more materials. It was more than photos, archival material, murals and books, Haro said, calling it “one of a kind.”
“I and others are mourning the loss of what I call his legacy in the archive, the collection that he had brought together over his lifetime,” he said. “That was a gift that was going to continue to give.”
Gómez-Quiñones’ family, meanwhile, is still processing the destruction of their primary home. They were able to visit the site last week, as Palisades residents slowly began to return to ashes, dust and crumbled walls.
On her visit, Vásquez said, she was able to recover a few small items, including a sculpture her son made when he was in preschool. She also found her husband’s family photos, but the garage and the shed are gone, as is the room where the scholar spent much of his final days, with his postcards, music CDs, a stuffed bear he‘d had since he was 2 years old, and his grandparents’ jewelry.
When it comes to her husband’s legacy, though, Vásquez knows it will continue. She sees it in young people’s movements for better living conditions today and in their daughter Evan Vásquez-Gómez, a UCLA senior studying American Indian and Chicana and Chicano studies.
Kodialam Nanguneri is a freelance writer and senior at UCLA.
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