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Return to topFrom the window in his third floor office at 16th and Mission streets, Professor Rafael Díaz, the new director of SFSU's Cesar E. Chavez Institute, has a constant reminder as he looks at the bustling street below.
Our location puts San Francisco State University in the heart of the community. This is very fitting because our research at the Institute will help bring social justice to communities that have been disenfranchised and our work also will be research that people in our communities can use," he said.
Since his appointment as director last fall, Díaz has made rapid progress in creating at the Cesar E. Chavez Institute what is being called a community of researchers in partnership with the work of social justice.
Rafael Díaz has done a remarkable job in such a short time to reinvigorate the Institute and broaden the scope of its original mission, said Tomas Almaguer, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies. Díaz is an outstanding scholar who cares deeply about our communities. He and our faculty are helping give national recognition to SFSU as an institution committed to engaged scholarly research on social justice issues in communities of color here and elsewhere.
Díaz joined SFSU in 2000 with an appointment in the Human Sexuality Studies Program in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. He helped create and served as director of research for SFSU's Institute of Sexuality, Inequality and Health.
After earning his bachelor's degree from Fordham University, Díaz began his career as a social worker while receiving a master's in social work from New York University in 1977. He earned his doctorate in developmental psychology from Yale in 1982 and spent 13 years as a professor of psychology and education, first at University of New Mexico and later at Stanford.
Then, as the AIDS crisis began to escalate, Díaz decided to change his academic focus. It was the late 1980s and I felt that we were in a war against the spread of AIDS, he recalled, and as a gay, Latino man I needed to step up and do what I could in the fight.
Díaz left his tenured position as a bilingual education specialist at Stanford to enter a two-year postdoctoral traineeship in epidemiology, biostatistics and prevention science at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at University of California, San Francisco, where he spent seven years conducting research on Latino gay men and HIV.
During that time, Díaz was the principal investigator on a four-year National Institutes of Health study titled A Sociocultural Model of HIV Risk in Latino Gay Men, a ground-breaking project that studied men in Los Angeles, Miami and New York and included intervention strategies. Based on his work Díaz wrote a book in 1998 titled Latino Gay Men and HIV: Culture, Sexuality and Risk Behavior.
Díaz's work reflects the renewed research focus of the Cesar E. Chavez Institute.
As Cesar E. Chavez and Martin Luther King, Jr. worked for social justice, the Institute will work toward that same goal, Díaz said. Social injustice exists all around us. Why is it that Latino and African American men have higher rates of HIV infection? There are social, not medical, factors involved and we need to document what they are and devise strategies to overcome these conditions.
Díaz believes that social oppression, which can take the form of poverty, discrimination or racism, can partially explain problems that continue to affect ethnic minority communities in areas such as health and education.
In addition to examining social oppression, the Institute's work will look at factors of resiliency and strength that empower communities in their struggles for equality and self-determination. I believe there is a lot we can learn and share with each other. We also need to document the things that work, Díaz says.
A key part of the institute's work will be the creation of strategies that can be implemented by policy-makers in government, practitioners in community-based organizations or teachers in schools, says Díaz, who has built an extensive list of community contacts in his work. We are not planning to produce studies that get put on a shelf. Our studies need to be useful to practitioners-those who work directly with people in need-so the work will be useful for our communities, he says.
One of the efforts in that direction will be the Institute's first research-practice forum on March 28 in commemoration of Cesar Chavez's birthday that weekend. Titled Towards Educational Equality in the 21st Century, the forum will examine the ethnic and racial disparities in both educational outcomes and employment opportunities. The forum, designed by Díaz and Harvard's Gilberto Conchas, who was appointed the Institute's first fellow, features noted Harvard scholars Gary Orfield, Pedro Noguera and Marcelo Suarez-Orozsco and Patricia Gandara of UC Davis as well as SFSU faculty experts (For registration information about the March 28 forum, visit: www.sfsu.edu/~cci).
A research-practice forum will be held annually by the Institute, and plans are under way to focus on addressing health disparities among ethnic minority adolescents in 2004.
The Institute's work also will find its way into the classroom on campus. During the spring 2004 semester, Díaz will teach a new seminar titled Cesar E. Chavez Seminar: Impact of Social Oppression on Education and Health for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. The seminar will explore social factors in determining education and health disparities in ethnic minority communities.
Díaz believes faculty research on issues of social oppression can make a substantial impact in local communities.
In making social justice a hallmark of our research, San Francisco State can be known as the university that is working to make our communities better places to live, Díaz said. Our research can bridge the gap between the academic world of a college campus and the real world communities we serve.
--Ted DeAdwyler
Photo: Caitlin Ryan
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Last modified February 28, 2003, by the Office of Public Affairs
