Don't miss the Office for Religious Life's popular discussion and lecture series encouraging members of the Stanford community to reflect on matters of personal values, beliefs and motivations. Come discover what really matters to and inspires those who help shape the University. All students, faculty, staff and friends are welcome to attend this free event. Bring your brown-bag lunch, if you like.
Al Camarillo was born and raised in the South Central Los Angeles community of Compton. After attending the Compton public schools, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles in 1966. He continued his education at UCLA in the Ph.D. program in U.S. History where he received his doctorate in 1975 and where his dissertation was nominated that year as one of the best Ph.D. theses in the nation in American history.
Camarillo was appointed to the faculty in the Department of History at Stanford University in 1975, a position he still holds. He has published seven books and over three-dozen articles and essays dealing with the experiences of Mexican Americans and other racial and immigrant groups in American cities. Camarillo is widely regarded as one of the founding scholars of the field of Mexican American history and Chicano Studies.
Over the course of his career, Camarillo has received many awards and fellowships - a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship - among them. He was also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Stanford Humanities Center. His awards for teaching are also numerous, and he is the only faculty member in the history of Stanford University to receive the three highest awards for excellence in teaching and service to undergraduate education.
In addition to teaching and research, Camarillo has occupied several administrative positions, including founding Director of the Stanford Center for Chicano Research, founding Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, Associate Dean and Director of Undergraduates Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and founding Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (1996-2002). In 2002 he was named the Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professor in Public Service, and he currently serves as President of the American Historical Association, Pacific Coast Branch.