Hasta Siempre, Dr. Rodolfo "Rudy" Acuña (1932-2026), ¡PRESENTE!
- Dra. Siu
- Mar 24
- 3 min read
This was hard to begin.
Because beginnings—los comienzos—were never ours until you insisted they be.
You, Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña, were, and will remain, a force of beginnings:
a refusal to accept the lie that history had already been written.
Janitor,
Public school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District,
Community College Instructor.
Before “Professor,” there was all the work that never appeared in their histories of beginnings,
the work the universities did not cite,
and then—1969.
You founded Chicano Studies,
not as an academic program, but as rupture;
a foundational rewriting and re-grounding, a declaration of presence that cut through the illusions of inclusions you dissected, unapologetically, every day, in the classroom.
A field not only of study, but of power.
Of praxis.
From the very fractures of their order, you wrote it, and us, into existence, Rudy.
Twenty-two books.
Textbooks that were never just textbooks.
More than 40 initial course proposals.
Columns that moved between street and university walls—asserting knowledge is never abstract, never neutral,
but accountable.
Countless chapters, articles, palabras sembradas like semillas in dry, occupied soil.
And so you did not just write history, Rudy,
you made denial impossible.
So we would know.
So they could no longer pretend not to.
And for this, your presence holds, Rudy:
At marches, walking with us.
In the hallways, cracking jokes while teaching how power moves—and how we move against it.
In the lobby, sunglasses always on, observing, laughing with us, or at the moment, plotting your next sharp remark, or article. Always teaching.
At meetings, holding the line when the institution and its enablers tried to shrink us—voice raised, space claimed, futures insisted. El Rudy was with us. I’ll never forget those meetings, you defending our right to exist, insisting again that even within their structures, we had the right to begin.
You seeing Central Americans before we had even named ourselves, writing us into relation before we could locate our place in the center of empire.
You opened the space from where Central American Studies emerged, Rudy, it was you.
Chicana/o Studies was never just a field to you.
It was a method.
A weapon.
A home
that you shared.
Fifty years a professor.
Sixty years an educator.
But those numbers do not contain what you gave. Because what you built is not measured in time or quantity,
but in transformation.
Rudy the mentor,
the maestro,
the teacher,
in every one of us you taught.
And for this, we will always see you, Rudy:
Por esto y siempre, gratitude for each one of your words,
por abrir camino donde no había,
for your insistence that to have rostro in occupied lands was
but the clarification of what history tried to deny.
“History can either oppress or liberate a people,” you wrote.
And because you insisted on liberation, we will always see you, Rudy—not only on the page,
but in the work carried forward by those you refused to leave unchanged,
in the spaces you brought into beginning,
in the refusal to be erased,
in the siempre, Rudy.
With full admiration and profound gratitude. Gracias por todo y por siempre, Rudy,
Oriel Siu
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