Dr. Felix Padilla talked last Tuesday on “The Struggle of Latino/a University Students in Search of a Liberating Education” at the Craig Auditorium. Padilla is the Founder and Editor of the Latino Studies Journal, a multi-disciplinary publication devoted to the study of contemporary and historic Latino/a life in US society, and presently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of American Studies at Yale University where he teaches courses on Latino/a Culture and Identity, Sociology of Youth Gangs and Sociology of Latino/a Music.
He started his talk by commenting on how “wonderful [it was] to be back at Oberlin,” and added that he had “a tendency to come and visit [the] campus during moments of socio-political unrest.” Defining the title of the talk, Dr Padilla began speaking of the “struggle” that, he said, “involved the journey in which students find themselves as university students in the present moment, but also the journey which brought them to this present moment.”
“For the most part, that early journey is defined by a wide array of challenges and difficulties which I like to call ‘suffering’ that students learn to use as motivation for personal and academic development and growth,” Padilla said.
But he stressed that many of Latino/a students do not do well in this early journey, and that is why there is a crisis in the youth of today.
“We have our young people falling through the cracks.” Addressing the Oberlin Latino/a students present at the talk, he commented on how they were “the fortunate ones for having used that early journey to bring you here.”
Padilla then introduced the concept of finding “a sense of self” through various media, literary and human resources that have become more readily available over the last 20 years. According to Padilla interacting with literature and information can only begin one’s journey to self-discovery, thus, we must realize that “the intellectual stuff can only take us so far.”
He emphasized that literature is only a part of the process of self-discovery. As essential as academics were to the development of self, they do not provide other important dimensions of human life. “What is missing,” he said, “is the knowledge which comes from within each individual, called wisdom, which exists in the inner core. No book, no article, no professor, no other person than oneself can evoke it.”
According to Padilla, self-discovery is a lost concept, hidden in the hustle and bustle of attempts to understand the intellectual stuff. The task of a student then, of grasping literature and taking tests, which only takes one half-way to where one should go, becomes the focus. The problem that arises, said Padilla, is that by reading the literature alone, students try to seek self-identity and achieve self-empowerment, the pursuit of which is “dangerous” since “today’s society puts emphasis on individualism.”
“As long as we are using intellectual knowledge, for self-empowerment...we will continue to be divided. Students then become ethno-centric and racist, and want to hurt those they believe hurt them earlier,” he said.
“What they don’t understand is that self reflection and contemplation is as important to academics [as connecting to] one’s family, community and then the world, in that order. We tend to become temporarily connected because of pressures, but only inner-wisdom can connect us eternally,” Padilla said.

When asked whether there is room in academics to bring the other part of the formula in this environment, he accented that students have to make that time required to understand and realize their sense of self and develop their inner wisdom. To the question of how to find wisdom from within, he said that one has to practice it.
Padilla’s visit was “refreshing because he spoke from the heart, and refused to engage in over-intellectualized discussions ridden with academic jargon. It was also challenging, though, because as students we are so stuck in academic discourse that in the classroom its so hard to break it down to the essential things of life using simple words,” junior Nicolas Stahelin said. “He’s trying to show us what lies beyond identity politics, and he gave this to us with a spiritual approach.”
His book, “The Struggle of Latino/a University Students” is a compilation of stories written by students in his Sociology of Latino/a culture and Identity class over three different semesters. Prof. Padilla is the owner and publisher of “Libros,” a for-profit cultural initiative which promotes cultural literacy for children.