Yo Soy Volume 14

Roberto E. Villarreal received a PhD in political science from the University of Oklahoma. He taught for nearly thirty years at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he also was vice president for academic affairs, cofounder of the Hispanic Leadership Institute, and a Fulbright Scholar. He is the author of Chicano Elites and Non-Elites and coeditor of Latino Empowerment and Latinos and Political Coalitions. He was named as one of one hundred most influential Hispanics in the US by The Hispanic Business Magazine.

“Yo Soy nostalgically retrieves the rural life of a family working as sharecroppers in a community named El Oso (Karnes County, in South Texas). Family members, headed by hard-working parents, struggle and labor tirelessly to make ends meet. The author offers excellent descriptions of aspects of home life and social life in El Oso and surrounding areas. Villarreal’s story is an admirable one of success against immense odds, poverty, prejudice, and an unsympathetic school system. We find the author making explicit observations about his first entry into teaching at the higher education level, about his quest to acquire his PhD, and finally finding a tenured post as a college professor. The account given of his incumbency as a faculty member and administrator at UTEP and his engagement in the Chicano Movement is most informative and instructive.” - Arnoldo De Leon, author of They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 and coauthor of North to Aztlan: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States “The Yo Soy story is about a remarkable journey—a South Texas kid who went from agricultural field worker to university professor. The odds against attending college are huge for that group of workers and the path to success in going beyond a bachelor’s degree for Villarreal is an impressive story. The strength of the manuscript is its narrative about the life of a migrant family in the US in the post–World War II era.” - Ricardo Romo, author of East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio