Remembering “El Profe,” a Long-Time CFA Member, Educator, Community Organizer, and Immigrant Rights Advocate

This tribute was authored by members of the CFA Immigration Task Force and the Chicanx/Latinx Caucus.

On August 4, 2024, Armando Vázquez-Ramos passed away at his home in Long Beach. Armando, known by his students and those in the community as “El Profe” was a long-time educator, community organizer, and advocate for the rights of immigrants, in particular for Dreamers, many of whom he taught at CSU Long Beach for 25 years in the Chicano and Latino Studies Department that he advocated for when he was a student at CSULB. 

Armando was a long-time member of CFA and helped launch CFA’s Latino Caucus in 2002  (now the Chicanx and Latinx Caucus) and served as its co-founder with Professor Gonzalo Santos, then CFA Bakersfield President. Together with the organizing committee they co-chaired, delegations of Latinx faculty and students from each of the 23 CSU campuses held the first systemwide “CFA Latino Caucus Founding Conference” in October of that year.

In 2010, Armando established the non-profit California-Mexico Studies Center, Inc. (CMSC) to establish exchange programs with and between higher educational institutions, governmental agencies, and social organizations in California and Mexico.  . 

In 2014, Armando and his daughter, Luz, started a Dreamers Study Abroad Program, designed exclusively for DACA recipients. Over the past ten years, over 800 DACA recipients have benefited from participating in this study abroad opportunity, visited their families, learned about their country of origin, and returned legally to the U.S. under the Advance Parole status. 

Also, in 2014, Professor Vázquez-Ramos helped convene the Campaign to Promote Ethnic Studies (CPES) Summit at CSULB, which helped spark several campaigns to make Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement in California high schools.

Armando was a lifelong advocate for the Mexican diaspora in the United States, beginning with his participation in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s, and advocating for immigrant rights from the 1990s on. As such, he participated in many advocacy organizations, marches and rallies; he worked tirelessly to lobby legislators to pass pro-immigrant legislation at the federal and state levels, international educational exchanges Mexican institutions; and the adoption of an expanded curricula in ethnic studies in both California and Mexico to include all diasporic and transnational aspects of the history of North America up to its present patterns of integration.

Professor emeritus of sociology and faculty advisor for United Now for Immigrant Rights  of CSU Bakersfield Gonzalo Santos summed up Armando’s life of service and legacy this way:

“In all my years of teaching and social advocacy, I never met a colleague and compañero more committed, consistent, and indefatigable in building bridges of rigorous academic knowledge and deepened historical understanding of, and principled human solidarity with, not just Latinos in the United States, not just the other panethnicities in our evolving multicultural society, but between all of these diasporic peoples and their original homelands. Armando was at heart an internationalist teacher-activist whose legacy lives on in the many programs, students, movements, and institutions he touched and changed for the better, on both sides of the border,” said Santos.

Santos’ complete remembrance can be found here.

In addition, the upcoming September 27 Lead Summit XIII “ El Plan de San Bernardino” will be dedicated to the Memory of “El Profe” Armando Vazquez-Ramos.

Vazquez-Ramos was born in Mexico City and was part of a large family. He was the second oldest of seven brothers. His mother, Doña Lourdes Ramos, and father, Don Fernando Vázquez, brought the family to the U.S. in 1961, when Armando was 12 years old.  He leaves behind his daughter Luz and his son Armando, Jr, as well as the mother of his children, Dolores Ramos, four younger brothers, and many nephews and nieces.

Long life friend and colleague CSU Northridge Professor of Chicana/Chicano Studies Theresa Montaño shared that, “Armando was born into a family that valued unions, his dedication to labor issues and to the Latino students was incomparable. He spent his life building bridges between Mexico and the United States so that Dreamers could visit their homeland and learn to advocate for immigrant rights. We will miss his tenacity, his fierce loyalty to the community and his activism on behalf of dreamers–everywhere.”

A community memorial is being planned and this information will be shared as it becomes available.