Office hours are a pleasure for Paula Moya. Every 15 minutes or so, a new student with a new passion bursts through her door.
“They’re students who care about social justice and who are interested in studying race and ethnicity,” she says. “But other than that, they are infinitely varied—interested in art, drama, English, political science. They’re likable, they’re fun to work with, and they’re running the world in their spare time.”
Moya, an associate professor of English, clearly has enjoyed her first year as director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. With more than 100 students completing majors and minors, comparative studies in race and ethnicity (CSRE) is one of the fastest-growing degree-granting interdisciplinary programs on campus—and a model for several new programs at other universities. Students can choose from four majors: CSRE, Asian-American studies, Chicana/o studies and Native American studies. Those majoring in African and African-American studies and Jewish studies also enroll in CSRE’s core curriculum.
Moya talks with every student who enters the program and she advises seniors, helping them all find a thematic focus for their work—literature and the arts in minority communities or liberation studies, among others. “One can’t hope to understand race and ethnicity in America in four years,” Moya says. “But we want to make sure that when they graduate, they have a better understanding of some aspect.”
As Moya recalls the 13 honors theses of the Class of 2003—one of which won the University’s Firestone award—she is struck by the range of interests. In a paper titled “Politickin’ and Knowledge Kickin’: Political Mobilization and Hip Hop,” Kia Franklin looked at what Moya calls the “sharp critiques” of politics in hip-hop lyrics. Two seniors examined one of the major emerging topics in comparative ethnic studies: biracial identities. Katrina Logan asked and answered the question “Who Am I? The Construction of the Self in Three Biracial Autobiographical Works,” and Jill Parker addressed “The Stigmatization of African American Multiracial Individuals and Its Impact on Multiracial Kinship.”
More than 100 faculty are affiliated with the CSRE center, offering some 120 courses that are cross-listed in 14 departments. The center also provides fellowship programs, seminars, study groups and career development for graduate students and includes the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, which sponsors policy-oriented conferences.
When the center was established in 1996, Moya had just been recruited to Stanford to teach Chicana/o cultural studies and feminist theory. In her second year on campus, she co-taught Introduction to Chicano History and Culture with founding center director Al Camarillo, and in 2000 she received funding from a junior faculty development project at the center to finish the last chapter of Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press, 2002). Moya credits that book with helping her earn tenure in the English department last year.
As a graduate student at Cornell in the early 1990s, Moya was attracted to a literary theory called postpositivist realism. As a Latina raising two young daughters on her own, she also was confronted with the reality of her own experience. Those themes are evident in the title of her recent book and they have determined the focus of much of her scholarship. “Some of the extreme claims of people in literary criticism make no sense to me,” Moya says. “They claim there’s no reality out there, that we make it up in our heads, that it’s all discourse. But I think part of the reason you talk about truth is because you believe [something is] true. You’re not just expressing an opinion or preference.”
In her latest writing, Moya draws on a lifetime of what she calls deep, sustaining, important friendships with people of other races. “When we’re thinking about race and racism and emotions, it’s often negative emotions that come to mind first,” she says. “But at some level I really get tired of the assumption that my racial identity is always a negative one. For me, it’s not. I don’t forget about it—it’s always there—but it’s often a very positive thing. And I’m enjoying writing about interracial friendship more than anything I’ve ever written.”
