Meanwhile, the University president, Father Theodore Hesburgh, wanted to expand the social sciences at Notre Dame. The opportunity to do so arose in the academic year 1958-59. It needs to be recalled that it simply was not easy to find Catholic sociologists in the 1950s. Norbert Wiley, who received the M.A. from Notre Dame before transferring to Michigan State University for his doctoral studies, remembers being asked by John Kane whether there were any Catholic sociologists at Michigan State. Wiley said there were two--William D'Antonio and Julian Samora. Nothing, however, seemed to have come from this inquiry. Fortuitously Samora and D'Antonio turned up at Notre Dame for the conference on "Values in America," organized by Donald Barrett.
Julian Samora was born in 1920 in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. He had faced prejudice and discrimination early in life.
Growing up in the Colorado ranching town of Pagosa Springs, young Julian Samora read a sign at a park entrance that stung his soul: "No Mexicans, Indians or Dogs."
It was 1930s America, an era of economic desperation and, in some places, casual racial callousness. In the spiritual furnace of such encounters with Anglo America, young Julian forged a steely determination to prove his worth and affirm the dignity of his people.

Such a retrospective view written sixty years later was formulated with the adult Julian Samora in mind--a reticent scholar who had accomplished a great deal despite humble beginnings and unpromising prospects. He graduated from Adams State College in Colorado in 1942, worked as a high school teacher in the 1942-43 academic year, and earned an M.S. from Colorado State University in 1943. One can readily imagine what kind of work schedule hides behind those bare facts. He alternated between teaching and studying for the next decade--instructor at Adams State 1944-47, teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin 1948-49, associate professor back at Adams State 1949-50, teaching assistant at Washington University in St. Louis 1950-52, Ph.D. from Washington University, 1953. Julian Samora was the first Mexican American to earn a doctorate in the field. His degree landed him back at Adams State as an associate professor until 1955. He came to be involved in research on the reception of modern medicine among Mexican Americans, with the rank of assistant professor, at the University of Colorado School of Preventive Medicine. It was from there that he went to work at Michigan State University in 1957, still an assistant professor. By that point in time opportunities enabled him to publish only three articles, but one of these was in the American Sociological Review.
William V. D'Antonio was six years younger than Samora, born in 1926 in New Haven, Connecticut. His grandparents had emigrated from Italy in the 1880s and 90s and operated a fruit vending enterprise. William's father Albert worked in the New Haven post office at a time when Irish and Italians were struggling against each other for positions there. William attended public schools, in part because of his mother's distrust of Irish nuns. Interestingly, however, he attended a church where there was a refined, almost upper-class pastor, rather than the "Italian" church where his grandfather was a pillar of the parish. Moreover, there was a young priest at the church where he did attend who became a lifelong friend and mentor, who introduced him to a liberal Catholicism and to the world of scholarship. The priest was pursuing a Ph.D. at Yale University. William's high school experience reinforced his Italian ethnic identity and sensitized him to issues of class, power, and status. Even eating lunch marked him ethnically and, by implication, by class; Italian mothers, including his own, insisted on sending their children to school with "proper" sandwiches. A proper sandwich was a half loaf of Italian bread with fried peppers and onions, or with one half dipped into oil and some minced garlic on it. "I...can recall those sandwiches, which I personally like to eat, but was embarrassed by, because everybody else seemed to be eating bologna or peanut butter sandwiches on white bread."
D'Antonio won a scholarship to Yale in 1943. Service in the United States Navy interrupted his college years, and in the service he became cognizant of the importance of religion and class, and concerned about racial discrimination. Back at Yale he majored in Latin American affairs, with a focus on anthropology and Spanish. In January 1949 he began a five and one-half year stint as a Spanish teacher in a New England preparatory school, one of six Catholics on the faculty. He was already a reader of the liberal Catholic press, and this came in handy for answering questions people at the school frequently asked him. His Master's (University of Wisconsin, 1953), was in Latin American studies, and he went to Michigan State for the Ph.D. in sociology (conferred 1958). He stayed on there as a junior member of the faculty. At Michigan State "the most pressing ideological question was how I could possibly be a sociologist and a practicing Catholic at the same time." His research from that era would appear in print after he went to Notre Dame.
Julian Samora and William D'Antonio came to know one another at a church near Michigan State, where they both brought their families for worship. The two families socialized on a regular basis. Julian Samora had become involved in charitable activities under the auspices of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and persuaded D'Antonio to assist in helping a circle of people whom Samora had already identified as needy. Meanwhile D'Antonio's sociological mentor at Michigan State, William Form, had been asked to serve as a discussant for one of the papers to be presented at the conference on "Values in America" at Notre Dame, organized by Donald N. Barrett. Form, jokingly at first, asked Samora and D'Antonio to accompany him to Notre Dame as Catholic guides. The conference was scheduled for the week of Michigan State University's spring break, and a number of notable social scientists were on the program. Since the system of values was an aspect of the ongoing research that Form, Samora, and D'Antonio were conducting on the United States-Mexican border, the project coordinator, Charles Loomis, agreed to pay for the major expenses--hotel and meals.
Thus it was that Julian Samora and William D'Antonio arrived at Notre Dame, having driven down from Lansing with William Form. After the conference had begun, Form introduced them to Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., of Fordham University, one of the speakers. Seizing the opportunity to recruit two Catholic sociologists for his university, Fitzpatrick tried to lure them to Fordham. Unfortunately, Fordham could not be expected to come up with an adequate salary package for families having four or more children. Father Fitzpatrick then introduced them to John Kane, department head at Notre Dame. When Kane found out that the two were Catholic, he began to wine and dine them. Samora and D'Antonio found all of the attention they were getting comic, until Kane explained over dinner that there would be a real opportunity at Notre Dame because the president, Father Hesburgh, had serious plans for the social sciences at the University. At first glance, it would appear quite unwise to leave an established department at Michigan State with its funded research on United States-Mexican border communities. However, the state of Michigan was beset with a financial crisis in the late 50's. And as "low men on the totem pole," Samora and D'Antonio had little expectation of teaching any graduate courses at Michigan State. Kane continued cultivating the two, introducing them to the other members of the Notre Dame department--Barrett, Hughes, Francis, O'Brien.
A formal invitation to interview and to make some presentations followed. They talked it over with Form, who was noncommittal. Samora went down for the interview first and returned disposed to accept Notre Dame's offer, which represented a 20% salary increase. When D'Antonio went down, he pointed out the inadequacy of the office provisions at Notre Dame. He received an offer that represented a 25% salary increase and a much better teaching load, as well as real offices for the department members, with telephones and filing cabinets. When John Useem, the Michigan State sociology department chair, heard of all this, he called the two into his office and advised them that they would be crazy to go to Notre Dame. However, Useem was unable to match the Notre Dame offer in terms of working conditions and not quite able to match the Notre Dame salary offers. The more Samora and D'Antonio talked it over, the more they were inclined to accept the Notre Dame offers. They did so. President John Hannah of Michigan State University called them in to discuss the matter, but learning that it was too late he joked about Father Hesburgh stealing his faculty.
With Julian Samora and William V. D'Antonio on the faculty, President Hesburgh could attract grant money to Notre Dame with greater success, especially for research related to civil rights and Latin American development. D'Antonio would become involved in actively raising questions about the impact of rapid population growth in developing Latin American countries and challenging leaders to think about the causes of high abortion rates in countries such as Chile. Both ecclesiastical authorities and traditionalist Catholics lodged protests with Father Hesburgh. It was President Hesburgh's practice to check the text of his responses to these protests with D'Antonio; he defended his new sociologist as a serious scholar concerned with family and population issues. .....

The expansion and modernization had begun, albeit in the face of some opposition within the department itself, in the final years of John Kane's tenure as department head and in the period of Julian Samora's term in that position. Samora did not want to serve more than one term as department head; he really had other work to do. D'Antonio assumed the office in 1966. The expansion took the form of adding "outsiders," and the modernization entailed not only a heightened emphasis on research but also a willingness to promote untraditional, or "unsafe," viewpoints. This would mark the period of time that members of the department would later look back upon as the golden age of the program. We will highlight the major figures of the era and their work in this chapter and the next.

The Sociology of Julian Samora
Julian Samora authored or co-authored some eighteen scholarly articles, several reports, and four books; he also edited an important volume of studies, as well as supervising or consulting on many other publications and productions. He brought numerous grants and contracts to the department, and he gained considerable visibility by serving on national governmental panels. One detects no artificial multiplication of articles in his work, no slicing of a single study into as many small articles as possible. Every study is meritorious in its own right, and many of them are co-authored with co-researchers. Several of the studies were reprinted because editors of later volumes found them worthy of a wider circulation. And yet, there is this:
At the time Julian Samora was one of six or seven full professors in the department. I wanted to take his course but was advised by other professors not to waste my time. Julian, they said, was a very minor figure, working on a field that was marginal, at best. Stupid of me, I followed this advice and never took a course with Julian. As a professional, I came to admire the pioneering work of Julian Samora.

How can this be? Some people undoubtedly resented the change toward research and publication that Samora and D'Antonio represented, but in the case of Samora's work there was an inexcusable failure on the part of many Notre Dame sociologists and officials to see the importance of the Mexican American presence in the United States. Northeast and Midwest Americans did not realize that there were ethnic Mexicans anywhere but in a few "western" movies. Having an ethnic Mexican in the department, even as department head, was one thing, but making his ethnic-based studies programmatically focal was another. In that sense, Notre Dame was not ready for a Julian Samora, and it did not know it.
Samora's dissertation at Washington University in St. Louis focused on leadership in a Mexican American community. He collected information in a mountain village by a means of participant observation on the part of both himself and his family. The Anglos in the community were economically and politically dominant. "In situations of dominant-subordinant relationships," he hypothesized, "where the goals of the subordinate group are largely goals to be achieved within the dominant system, the in-group cohesion of the subordinate group will be considered inadequate by members of the subordinate system." That is to say, would-be Mexican American leaders in such a community would have to operate in the Anglo world on Anglo terms, and in the process lose their attachment to the Mexican community. Samora thus articulated early on a dilemma endemic to minority group leadership. He also evinced methodological sophistication in using his family as a research entity rather than adopt the more Anglo individual investigator model. The result was an account articulated from the perspective of the minority rather than the majority, albeit translated into the abstractions of a Simmel-like "form sociology."
Early in his career Samora worked in a medical school context. He found that a pre-paid health plan failed in a Mexican American community in Colorado because the cooperative's procedure of regular meetings was unfamiliar, because health was seen as an individual or family concern rather than a community matter, because a board was set up on an electoral rather than patron basis, because the future orientation implicit in a prepayment plan was unfamiliar, and because information had been disseminated through the media rather than through families. He was concerned with the degree of acculturation to the subculture of the medical establishment that was needed for access to medical care. He even explored the use of linguistic measures for the purpose of measuring degrees of such acculturation. He saw his role as a teacher in the medical school as that of making medical practitioners aware of social and cultural factors that may influence the success of preventative and therapeutic measures. The arcane vocabulary used by physicians, for example, posed problems to members of the working class.
Samora's research at Michigan State University focused on the rural-to-urban migration of Mexican Americans in the Southwest. He focused on nine families who migrated from El Cerito, New Mexico, to Pueblo, Colorado. The household heads were often unemployed, but their older children had jobs, provided for the family reasonably well, and served as links for them to the outside Anglo world.
After arriving at Notre Dame, Samora received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to investigate Mexican American conceptualizations of health and medicine. Conducting the field work in the summer of 1959 in a New Mexico village, he found religious dimensions in the world of Mexican American cultural complex to be relevant to health. The villagers saw ill health as a punishment from God for untoward behavior; consequently preventive medicine was little understood. However, illness had to be treated with this-worldly means, not by prayer alone. Much prayer concerning health was not "for" a cure in a magical sense but for patience, endurance, and fortitude in a time of trial. Implicitly there were two levels of explanation and treatment for illness--the medical and the supernatural.
There was still work to be done on the United States-Mexican border study directed by Charles P. Loomis at Michigan State University. One article from this period, co-authored with D'Antonio, found unexpected Latino upward mobility in the health-care professions. Some Mexican Americans had taken advantage of the G.I. Bill after World War II. Migration to urban areas led to an assimilation and breaking out from a previous isolation. At the border, if not elsewhere in the United States, community leaders realized that language instruction had to be introduced into the schools. Moreover, the Catholic hospitals preferred hiring Mexican American Catholics to non-Catholic Anglos. Another article focused on medical knowledge, which was best predicted by educational attainment; levels of such knowledge either facilitated or hindered communication between physicians and patients.
Samora began to develop a sociological account of Mexican Americans in general, going beyond micro issues of their access to medical care in small communities and their status in one industry. In so doing he met a need in the discipline and, for that matter, in the United States at large. There was widespread ignorance about Mexican Americans. In a study of education, Samora demonstrated that dropping out of school occurred primarily in the high school years. He refused to believe that the family and culture supported education in the earlier years and reversed themselves in the high school years. The problem of Mexican Americans dropping out of high school had to be rooted in the school. Samora began to receive grants that were broadly defined, beginning with one from the United States Civil Rights Commission on the civil rights problems of Mexican Americans (1960). He assembled manuscripts on the Mexican American people into a volume, the publication of which was supported by the Max L. Rosenberg Foundation. The title was appropriately, La Raza: Forgotten Americans:
For many years I have admired the patience, tenacity, and courage of the Spanish-speaking people, the subject of this report. This population, exploited at times, living mostly on the fringes of society, misunderstood by public and private agencies, and largely ignored by the federal government and its programs, has managed to survive with dignity, composure, and pride.

The Ford Foundation funded a two-year study of Mexican Americans in the Southwest, and Samora joined two collaborators in offering the report in 1966. The study found that the Mexican American population comprised to a great extent the urban poor of the Southwest. Collaborating with his Notre Dame colleague Richard A. Lamanna, he also studied the Mexican American community of East Chicago.
In the 1970s Samora succeeded in attracting grant money for a Mexican American Studies Program and scholarships for graduate students in a setting designed to establish mutual support and an esprit de corps. Some of his finest work, done in collaboration with his students, dates from that decade. We will turn to those studies in a later chapter. Suffice it to know that United States President Lyndon Johnson had appointed Samora to a commission on income maintenance programs, that the Ford Foundation appointed him a consultant on family planning issues, that he accompanied United States Vice President Hubert Humphrey to Mexico City for a treaty signing, and that he was an at-large member of the executive committee of the Southwestern Council of La Raza, funded by the Ford Foundation.
A number of students point to Julian Samora as a major intellectual influence in their development. Richard Juliani (B.A. 1960) found Samora to be something like a cousin because of the similar experiences of Mexican Americans and Italian Americans. Samora advised not trying to change attitudes on race directly, but by establishing contact. Juliani also notes that Samora was a good teacher, and very approachable. Approachable yes, but Daniel Koenig (B.A. 1962) observes that Samora did not suffer fools gladly. Julian Samora seems to be remembered uniformly as low key but firm. James Fendrich (M.A. 1962) mentions Samora as one of the best teachers in the graduate program and credits him with changing the course of his career: "I was...provided a tremendous opportunity when Julian Samora got a contract to do research for the Civil Rights Commission." "When he asked me to work on his research project, I was propelled into the cauldron of the civil rights movement and the federal government's response." Alberto Mata attended Notre Dame because of Samora. "Julian Samora got me interested in Chicano studies," says Anthony Cortese (Ph.D. 1980). "He was a charismatic role model dedicated to the cause." Cortese's work in Mexican American studies began, he says, with Samora's mentoring. Victor Rios (Ph.D. 1982) notes that Samora led him to his dissertation topic, immigration. During a later, even more conflict-ridden time in the department, Samora supported Alberto Pulido (Ph.D. 1989), steering him clear of potential traps.

Footnotes 19 to 43 from Chapter VII

Hernan Vera to Blasi, May 2, 1999.
As late as 1977, Andrew M. Greeley published The American Catholic. A Social Portrait (New York: Basic Books), leaving Mexicans out of his data. The mind-set of even talented scholars simply did not make room for the realities of the Southwest United States.
Julian Samora, Minority Leadership in a Bi-Racial Cultural Community. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University, 1953 [Reprinted: San Francisco: R & E Associates, 1973], p. 2.
The study was published in article form as James B. Watson and Julian Samora, "Subordinate Leadership in a Bicultural Community: An Analysis," American Sociological Review 19 (1954), pp. 413-21.
Lyle Saunders and Julian Samora, "A Medical Care Program in a Colorado County," in Benjamin Paul and Walter B. Miller (eds.), Health, Culture and Community. Case Studies of Public Reactions to Health Programs (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1955), pp. 377-400.
Julian Samora and William N. Deane, "Language Usage as a Possible Index of Acculturation," Sociology and Social Research 40:5 (1956), pp. 307-11.
Julian Samora, "The Social Scientist as Researcher and Teacher in the Medical School," Journal of Health and Social Behavior 1:1 (1960), pp. 42-46; Samora was at Notre Dame by the time this article reached print.
Julian Samora, Lyle Saunders, and Richard F. Larson, "Medical Vocabulary Knowledge among Hospital Patients," Journal of Health and Human Behavior 2:2 (1961), pp. 83-92. Larson had earned the Ph.D. at Notre Dame in 1961 and had assumed an appointment at the University of Alabama.
Julian Samora and Richard F. Larson, "Rural Families in an Urban Setting: A Study in Persistence and Change," Journal of Human Relations 8 (1961), pp. 494-503.
Julian Samora, "Conceptions of Health and Disease among Spanish-Americans," American Catholic Sociological Review 22 (1961), pp. 314-23.
William V. D'Antonio and Julian Samora, "Occupational Stratification in Four Southwestern Communities: A Study of Ethnic Differential Employment in Hospitals," Social Forces 41 (1962), pp. 17-25.
Julian Samora, Lyle Saunders, and Richard F. Larson, "Knowledge about Specific Diseases in Four Selected Samples," Journal of Health and Human Behavior 3:3 (1962), pp. 176-85. One sample, from South Bend, was Larson's dissertation data, funded in part from Loomis' project at Michigan State University. Richard F. Larson, An Analysis of Selected Health Knowledge, Values, and Practices as Related to Social Class. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1961.
Julian Samora, "The Educational Status of a Minority," Theory Into Practice 2:2 (1963), pp. 144-50.
Julian Samora, "Acknowledgments," in Samora (ed.), La Raza: Forgotten Americans (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), pp. vii-viii. Samora did not entirely abandon his line of work in medical sociology; see Antonio Ordones Plaja, Lucy M. Cohen, and Julian Samora, "Communication Between Physicians and Patients in Outpatient Clinics. Social and Cultural Factors," Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 46:2 (1968), pp. 161-213.
The report was published three years later: Ernesto Galarza, Hernan Gallegas, and Julian Samora, Mexican-Americans in the Southwest (Santa Barbara, California: McNally & Loftin, 1969).
Julian Samora and Richard A. Lamanna, Mexican-Americans in a Midwest Metropolis: A Study of East Chicago. Advance Report 8, Mexican-American Study Project. Los Angeles: Graduate School of Business Administration, University of California, Los Angeles, 1967.
South Bend, Indiana , Tribune, January 10, 1968; Notre Dame Department of Public Information press release, April 7, 1968; Ford Foundation press release June 17, 1968--all in the Notre Dame University Archives Julian Samora file UDIS 139/33.
Telephone interview with Richard Juliani, March 22, 1999 (Blasi). Richard F. Larson (Ph.D. 1961) to Blasi, January 14, 1999, also spoke of Samora as "approachable."
Daniel Koenig to Blasi, April 25, 1999.
James Fendrich to Blasi, April 20, 1999.
James M. Fendrich, Ideal Citizens: The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. xiii.
Alberto Mata to Blasi, April 22, 1999.
Anthony Cortese to Blasi, April 21, 1999.
Telephone interview with Victor Rios, April 19, 1999.
Alberto Pulido to Blasi, March 30, 1999.