I’m essentially a first-generation Mexican American or Chicano, born and raised in El Paso. I later learned that Nana Cuca and her family fled their hacienda during the Mexican revolution when rebels were looting the more affluent families in the area. She was 12 years-old and married very young. My mother was born in Juárez, Mexico in 1917 and immigrated to El Paso with her parents. Much of the knowledge of my Mexican heritage came from Nana Cuca and not from my parents. There was a reluctance on their part to talk about their early lives growing up as immigrants in Texas.

My father had a hard life working as a carpenter and construction worker for most of his life. My sisters and I lived in several rental homes with our parents; they could never afford a home of their own. With the help of Nana Cuca, Papa Luís, and Nana Carolina (my paternal grandmother), who had bought their own homes, my family was able to survive during periods of my father’s unemployment. I knew we were poor, but my sisters and I never felt the sting of poverty that was common in many parts of El Paso.

Because of my fair skin and light hair color when I started grade school, I didn’t experience the bias that my Chicano friends and classmates often encountered. I thought by not speaking Spanish at home and school that I might be accepted more readily by my white classmates and teachers. I wanted to acquire at all costs those American traits or qualities that were identified with Anglos in El Paso. At a very young age, I consciously avoided my Mexican heritage and tried to become Americanized. This process of Americanization corrupted my Mexican identity, and it has taken me a lifetime to confront my mistake, thinking my success later in life depended on it.

It was not until I entered high school in the fall of 1959 that I began to experience more deeply the racial enmity that my father and my brown relatives and classmates encountered for most of their lives. Throughout my high school years as a paperboy, I saw personally the racial bias that some of my Anglo customers had against Chicanos. Some of these customers, thinking I wasn’t a Mexican, openly complained to me about how those “dirty Mexicans” were overrunning the city of El Paso.

I finished high school as one of the seven best students out of a class of 330 graduates. When the top 2% of the graduating class of ‘63 was announced, there were six whites and one Chicano boy—me.  At that time in my life, all I wanted was a degree that led to a good-paying job. I didn’t like medicine; I chose pharmacy instead. I liked chemistry, biology, and science; one needed knowledge of those subjects to succeed as a pharmacist. I was accepted into the pharmacy program at the University of Texas.

For me, going to the University of Texas for my degree in pharmacy was the ultimate test of making it in a society that favored whites. Was I ready to compete with the best students that came to UT? I continued my academic success through college graduating as the number one student in my pharmacy class (With Highest Honors or Summa Cum Laude) at the University of Texas in 1968.

After serving two years in the US Army, I was accepted into the University of Kansas graduate program in pharmacology & toxicology. My four years in graduate school went by quickly, and I was ready to continue my postdoctoral research training at another institution. But I turned down a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship to train at the renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Instead I decided to return to Texas.

I was hired by the University of Texas College of Pharmacy in 1974 because of my Chicano background, or so I was told. By the time I began my academic career at the University of Texas, Affirmative Action (AA) was starting to take effect at most universities across the country. It was hoped that AA would correct past discrimination against certain minority racial groups and women in the workplace and would rectify admission bias in educational institutions. The term Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) was yet to be used. The primary minority group in Texas is Hispanic and UT started to hire more Chicanos and Blacks.

In effect, I was one of the first DEI faculty hires at the University of Texas, unsure what that meant personally for my career. But my training at an elite graduate program at the University of Kansas gave me the skills to succeed as a professor. I didn’t expect much help nor any special treatment to attain my academic and research goals. I never thought I was unqualified or unworthy to be a professor at the University of Texas.

But throughout my 20-plus career at Texas I was told several times by my supervisors that I was lucky to have been hired because of my Chicano identity. After I was informed that I wasn’t suited for administration positions, I left Texas and began a second career as the dean of pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medicine Center, where I served for 15 years. I then took an offer to be one of the top leaders at FDA’s major research center, the National Center for Toxicological Research. I served five years as the Deputy Director for Research and retired in 2019 to live again in Austin.

After 50 years of trying to convince Americans that diversity in the classroom and workplace was good for society, AA and DEI have failed in America. It required the unflinching support of business, government, and education leaders, who in turn needed to give that positive message to its employees. The societal value of diversity in the workplace has never been adequately explained to the American public. With the election of Trump, AA and DEI policies are no longer in effect in the federal government and in many red states. They are essentially now dead.

This past fall, while I was walking the halls of the History Department at the University of Texas, I saw a research poster on the early history of Mexicans living in Texas. There was a table on the number of lynchings of Mexicans from the late 1800s to 1930. The data showed about 27 killings of Mexicans per 100,000 population. These stark statistics reminded me of the hardships my father experienced as a Chicano working under the hot sun in El Paso.

I sensed as I grew older that there had been incidents in his life that influenced his interactions with whites as he progressed from carpenter to deputy sheriff and, finally, to a bailiff in a state district court. But he never told me of his struggles as a Chicano living and working in El Paso. I regret that I never had that conversation with him.

It has taken me a lifetime to become a true Chicano. My hope is that my struggle to accept my Mexican heritage hasn’t been for nothing. I am proud to be an American and a Chicano.

– Daniel Acosta