Joseph Morales had no plans to go to University of California, Berkeley, get a PhD, or even attend college.
Yet he accomplished this all (and more) on his own terms. And he did it by responding with conviction to a series of interconnected choices that revealed a new pathway—one he would follow from a job washing cars to community college and on to some of the nation’s most prestigious campuses. That journey has now led him to Chico State, where Morales serves as the University’s top official providing leadership and oversight to the University’s equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives.
His story has many beginnings. An important one stems from his grandmother, a Mexican American born in Southern California.
“My dad’s mother—who I used to call Nana—lost her US citizenship when she married my grandfather, who at the time was an undocumented Mexican migrant,” Morales explained. “She became a disposable citizen under a turn-of-the-century expatriation act, which required that women take on the nationality of their husband. For most of her life, my Nana was undocumented—a woman without a country—all while living in the same state where she was born, California.”
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, during the worst of the Great Depression, the Hoover Administration used a series of xenophobic laws to qualify mass deportation events that expelled countless Mexican American families. Keeping a low profile, Morales’ grandparents moved from Los Angeles to rural San Luis Obispo County, where his father would work as a child in pre-unionized farm labor jobs. Morales’ grandparents never attended school, and his father would eventually drop out of high school.
While the Civil Rights Movement and reforms championed by César Chávez shifted the political landscape in the following decades, the trauma caused by deportation raids and similar discriminatory initiatives lingered.
Morales graduated from high school, but his…
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