Tomás Rivera: The Man Behind the Name
Tomás Rivera was born in Crystal City, Texas on December 22nd, 1935. Both his parents, Florencio and Josefa Rivera, were migrant farm workers. A job he would eventually take on after high school before pursuing higher education. He gained his primary education in Spanish from barrio schools in Crystal City, until he graduated in 1958.
He decided to leave to go to university when he was 20 years old at Southwest Texas University, where he earned his B.S. and M.Ed. in English Education (1958). He attended the University of Oklahoma to receive both his M.A. in Spanish Literature (1964) and his Doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature (1969). His career spanned a multitude of educational institutions from public high schools to 4-year universities. He even taught as a visiting Professor of Spanish at Trinity University before moving to a professorship at UTSA in 1971. He became the first Hispanic Chancellor of the University of California at Riverside in 1979, a role he held until his death on May 16th, 1984. During his career as an educator but also a student he pushed the ideology that education had the power to initiate social change, a belief that was conceptualized in the Tomás Rivera Center itself.
Rivera’s writings from his adulthood were heavily influenced and inspired by his upbringing as the child of migrant workers. They shaped the subjects of his published works, and his most famous, y no se lo tragó la tierra, (and the Earth Did Not Devour Him) is reflective of that origin. The piece received the Quinto Sol Award in 1971.
Before his untimely death, Tomás Rivera had been passionate about establishing a national research institute focused on Hispanic/Latino populations. One year after he died in 1984, the Tomas Rivera Center, A National Institute for Policy Studies, was created in 1985. The Center’s Texas location opened in 1988 at Trinity University.