Dr. Carla Trujillo was one of the campus’ first staff charged directly with serving as a change agent for increasing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Her outstanding work was instrumental to generating DEI staff positions across the campus, and was influential nationally. She was born to a working class family in New Mexico and grew up in Northern California. She received her B.S. degree in Human Development from UC Davis, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
During Dr. Trujillo’s 30-year tenure at Berkeley, she established the diversity officer model that today is in widespread use on the campus and is emulated nationally. She also created innumerable programs that continue decades later. Above all, she proved the enormous potential that Berkeley has to diversify its graduate population. Through her actions and impact, Dr. Trujillo demonstrated the power of caring mentors and attentive advocates for diversifying the graduate level. Brilliant at recognizing talent, and astute about the conditions necessary for successful student learning and discovery, she became one of the campus’ most highly respected advocates for diversity among faculty, students, and staff, as well as colleagues across the nation.
Dr. Carla Trujillo started working at UC Berkeley in 1985 as an academic advisor in Chicano Studies, and then as an instructor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Dr. Trujillo was determined to help expand Chicano Studies, and succeeded in doubling the number of majors. Soon after, in 1987, Dr. Trujillo was recruited to the College of Engineering, where she served as the college’s graduate diversity officer. She served as Director of the Graduate Academic Diversity program (GRAD) and the Director of the Julia Morgan Engineering Program for 16 years, focusing on increasing the number masters and doctoral degree recipients from underrepresented minority groups (African American, Chicanx, Latinx, and Indigenous students) and all women.
During Dr. Trujillo’s tenure, the College of Engineering increased graduate enrollment 58 percent for women and 460 percent for underrepresented minorities Her accomplishments were so impressive that students in the Biological Sciences successfully advocated for a position to be created modeled on hers. Later, the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Dean created a position, also modeled on Dr. Trujillo’s. While in this position, Dr. Trujillo initiated the highly successful Interactive Theater approach to informing faculty about the ways in which race, gender, and class differentially affected students’ and colleagues’ experiences. She also co-founded the Berkeley Edge recruitment program. Principled and courageous in her work to ensure that the university create conditions that allow all students, including students from underrepresented groups to flourish, Dr. Trujillo became an exemplar of how diversity officers can motivate transformative change on university campuses.
While serving as the College of Engineering’s graduate diversity officer, Dr. Trujillo also continued to teach part-time in Ethnic Studies and, to broaden her skills, took a postdoctoral appointment for a year and a half in the Counseling Center.
In 2003 Dr. Trujillo was recruited to lead the campus’ graduate diversity effort, and joined the staff of the Graduate Division. She served as Graduate Diversity Program Director, then Assistant Dean.
With the inauguration of the Office of Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion (E&I), Dr. Trujillo was invited to join the Division of Equity and Inclusion, which she did in 2008. In E&I, Dr. Trujillo developed several campus wide programs and initiatives, that enabled the campus to increase its impact on the diversity of the graduate population at Berkeley and in the nation. She created Getting into Graduate School (GiGS) for Berkeley undergraduates, and in collaboration with discipline-based diversity officers, co-created the Mellon-Mays University Fellowship program, the AMGEN Summer Research Program. An expert on many aspects of the path to graduate school, including graduate admissions and the advisor-advisee relationship, she created materials and workshops to assist graduate applicants and enrolled students. She was widely recognized as an unparalleled counselor, and became many students’ mentor and coach of last resort. She could facilitate the successful advancement of students even when all other mentors had failed. She consistently said that her greatest joy was assisting graduate students who were undergoing academic difficulties and empowering their success.
With indefatigable energy and determination, even as she was transforming the campus’ approach to graduate diversity, Dr. Trujillo was establishing herself as an award-winning novelist, social and literary theorist, and essayist.
Dr. Trujillo is the editor of two anthologies, Living Chicana Theory (Third Woman Press), and Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Third Woman Press). She is the winner of a Lambda Book Award and the Out/Write Vanguard Award. Her first novel, What Night Brings (Curbstone Press 2003), won the Miguel Marmol prize focusing on human rights. What Night Brings also won the Paterson Fiction Prize, the Latino Literary Foundation Book Award, Bronze Medal from Foreword Magazine, Honorable Mention for the Gustavus Meyers Books Award, and was a LAMBDA Book Award finalist. Her latest novel, Faith and Fat Chances (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press 2015), was a finalist for the PEN-Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Carla has also written various articles on identity, race, gender, and higher education. In demand as a speaker and teacher nationally, Dr. Trujillo lectured at Berkeley, Mills College, and S.F. State University, and taught fiction for the Sandra Cisneros Macondo Writers Program and the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writers Retreat.
Contributed by Colette E. Patt