These are brilliant, elegant and provocative essays that sing across generations and geography to create a volume that is as intellectually compelling as it is politically urgent. -Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, The Graduate Center - City University of New York

How can scholars reconnect themselves-and their students-to higher education’s historic but much diluted mission to work for the public good? Through the lenses of personal reflection and auto-ethnography, the contributors explore the intersections of private and public good, and how the tension between them has played out in their own lives and the commitments they have made to their intellectual community, and to their cultural and family communities.
Through often lyrical memoirs, reflections, and poetry, these authors recount their personal journeys and struggles-often informed by a spiritual connectedness and always driven by a concern for social justice-and show how they have found individual paths to promoting the public good in their classrooms, and in the world beyond.

Contributors include: Jennifer Ayala; Dolores Delgado Bernal; Flora V Rodriguez-Brown; Kenneth P. Gonzales; Miguel Guajardo; Francisco Guajardo; Aida Hurtado; Maria A. Hurtado; Arcelia L. Hurtado, Raymond V. Padilla; Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner; and Luis Urrieta Jr.

The Editors: Kenneth P. Gonzalez is Associate Professor of Education at the University of San Diego. Raymond V. Padilla is Professor, College of Education and Human Development, University of Texas at San Antonio.