Trading the Law for Academia

When he arrived at Harvard four years ago, Gonzalo C. Martinez '98 wanted to be a lawyer and hadn't even considered joining an ethnic student organization.

But by the second semester of his junior year, the Adams House resident was the president of Raza--the undergraduate Chicano/a and Latino/a organization--and was preparing to apply to graduate school in English.

Martinez says when he came to Harvard, he found himself seeking out his ethnicity more than he ever had before. He says he found it in Raza.

"I was identifying more because I felt estranged," he says. "Raza has its problems, but Raza tends to be more accepting of others in part because there are so few of us here."

As president of Raza, the history and literature concentrator says he was faced with a variety of issues ranging from increasing the group's campus-wide presence to taking a leadership role in the grape boycott controversy this past fall.

Dominique B. Garcia '98, a history and literature concentrator who was secretary of Raza when Martinez was president, says Martinez dedicated his term to trying to improve the visibility of the organization.

"Nothing had been done by the organization that made it as visible as it [has] become," she says. "I think that was one of the goals that he worked for."

As part of this goal, Martinez worked with Raza members in the fall to organize a conference to discuss issues facing the Latino community. Martinez says the conference made him more aware of those issues.

"Discrimination still exists and even though I happen to be in this ivory tower, it still affects people outside of it," he says.

In the thesis that was voted the best by a man in his department this year, Martinez examined that tower in relation to his ethnicity, researching "writing against prevailing notions of Chicanism."

But he says the lack of Chicano/a scholars at Harvard took its toll on his research.

Martinez says he tried to compensate for that lack by seeking the guidance of graduate students and visiting professors in Chicano/a studies.

Martinez found Bill Johnson Gonzalez--a fourth-year graduate student in comparative literature and one of his secondary advisers--through this process.

Gonzalez said he was "very happy" to help Martinez on his thesis and was pleased and surprised by the senior's grasp of his subject manner.

"What was really impressive was that he had done so much on his own," Gonzalez says. "He really needed to use all the resources at the University available to him."

Next year, Martinez plans to go to English graduate school at Stanford University where he wants to study the concept "American-ness" and examine who is excluded from that category.

While Martinez says he had a difficult time deciding to attend graduate school and having to forgo his life-long dream of becoming a lawyer, Garcia says Martinez is well-suited to a career in academia.

"Gonzalo is just an intelligent individual," she says. "You can say that about so many people at Harvard, but he just thinks about things on such a different level than other people."