Chapter 18: Un Camino Solitario!/A Lonely Road!: Chicana/o Faculty Storytelling and Counterstorytelling in Academia

Several years ago, as we were together for a national conference, enjoying cafe con leche and discussing our challenges as Chicano faculty, Juan Carlos said:

These national academic conferences give us the opportunity to discuss our struggles and successes as faculty and learn from one another about how to engage higher education’s political systems, and re-energize by being among other Chicano colleagues.

We have been faculty now for an average of 7 years—two of us have been promoted with tenure, and two are at their second institution going through the tenure process. As Chicano faculty in academe who study Latinos in education and society, we are keenly aware of how racial privilege operates. We feel compelled to write about social justice issues that are of interest to our communities, and to teach on substantive topics in which we are specialists. In this chapter, we share our challenges and successes in hopes that we can inspire and educate other Chicanos to enter the academy as faculty, and add to the literature on the Chicano faculty experience in higher education.