Felipe Gonzales is happiest engaged in research and writing, yet administration has again pressed him into service, this time as associate dean for faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences. Gonzales earned his bachelor’s in sociology from UNM in 1972, he earned both a master’s and doctorate at Berkeley. He joined the UNM faculty in 1987 and served as chair of the Sociology Department for three years and director of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute for six.
Photo: Felipe Gonzales
The challenges in his current role are many. A&S employs 369 faculty, making it three times larger than the next largest, the College of Education, he said.
As associate dean, he addresses personnel issues, hiring, promotion and tenure, sabbaticals, research semesters, teaching awards, annual reviews, counter offers and more.
Gonzales applied for the position because he thought he could contribute to the development of A&S. “I found it appealing to help shape policies, be a part of the discussion, and take the idea of diversity and look at how it might be promoted,” he said. Gonzales is also a member of the Title V faculty steering committee.
He looks at this learning experience critically to see how a large research institution works; he’s intrigued by the contingencies and factors that make it run. “I translate – or tease out what’s uniquely UNM and what’s part and parcel of higher education in the United States,” he said.
This is not Gonzales’s first sociological or historical study involving UNM. His dissertation, “Forced sacrifice as ethnic protest: the Hispano cause in New Mexico & the racial attitude confrontation of 1933,” was a study of an incident involving a UNM social psychology professor who attempted to measure anti-Hispano attitudes among high school students.
Gonzales was raised in Albuquerque and graduated from Valley High School. He was drafted into the Marine Corps and spent 13 months in Vietnam. “I was not a combat soldier. I was assigned to a Navy field hospital,” he said.
Fresh out of the service in 1968, he enrolled at UNM. “I was drafted into the service, then drafted into the Chicano movement,” he said. He became involved with the United Mexican American Students. “We presented a proposal to President Ferrel Heady for a Chicano Studies program,” he recalled. Heady hired a student to research the idea and Gonzales was selected. Heady funded similar initiatives for African Americans and Native Americans, Gonzales said.
Gonzales and a couple buddies, Ricardo Barras and Prospero Montoya, jumped in a black VW bug to go to California to see Cal State’s Chicano Studies program. He came back and submitted the proposal, which was accepted. Gonzales changed his major from journalism to sociology.
“I was part of a large cohort – a wave of Latinos moving into academia – who worked to serve Latino student bodies,” he said. He points to Political Science Professor Christine Sierra who was at Stanford; Architecture and Planning Professor Teresa Cordova at Berkeley; and David Montejano, also at Berkeley.
Montejano was formerly on the sociology faculty at UNM. Esteban Flores was active at Austin, (area of research..where is he now? Did he work at UNM?)
While a grad student at Berkeley, Gonzales knew he wanted to research, study and write about New Mexico. His recent book, “Expressing New Mexico,” is the result of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that he got when he was SHRI director. The grant had two components. One was to address the unsatisfactory graduation/retention rates at UNM.
“The goal was to develop humanities courses that reflect the culture at UNM – for those from Northern New Mexico to see their life in the curriculum,” he said. English Professor Jesse Alemán organized a symposium that brought together accomplished Southwest and New Mexico researchers to reflect on their latest work.
“The papers presented at the symposium were converted into chapters for the book,” he said. Among the UNM contributors are Anthropology Professor Sylvia Rodriguez, Spanish Professors Enrique Lamadrid and Tey Diana Rebolledo and American Studies Professor Gabriel Melendez, he said.
Gonzales is hard at work on a book on territorial New Mexico and how New Mexican Hispanics were incorporated into the U.S. political scene.
Away from the university and away from the computer, Gonzales spends time with family. He has four brothers, one of whom is the artist Edward Gonzales. “And my other two brothers, Mark and Roy are accomplished guitarists,” he boasts. He has one sister, Pearl. He has four children, ranging in age from 37 – 26; and also seven grandchildren.
Sometimes he really gets away – traveling to Mexico, Spain and India