When Al Camarillo grew up in Compton, California, racial segregation was the rule. His relatives were among the first Mexican immigrants to settle there--in the only neighborhood where Mexicans were allowed to live. The city's majority was then White, and Compton would shift to a predominantly Black community over Al's youth. Compton in My Soul weaves Al's personal story with histories of this now-infamous place, and illuminates a changing US society--the progress and backslides over half a century for racial equality and educational opportunity.

Entering UCLA in the mid 1960s, Camarillo was among the first students of color, one of only forty-four Mexican Americans on a campus of thousands. He became the first Mexican American in the country to earn a PhD in Chicano/Mexican American history, and established himself as a preeminent US historian with a prestigious appointment at Stanford University. In this candid and warm-hearted memoir, Camarillo offers his career as a vehicle for tracing the evolution of ethnic studies, reflecting on intergenerational struggles to achieve racial equality from the perspective at once of a participant and an historian.

Camarillo's story is a quintessential American chronicle and speaks to the best and worst of who we are as a people and as a nation. He unmasks fundamental contradictions in American life--racial injustice and interracial cooperation, inequality and equal opportunity, racial strife and racial harmony. Even as legacies of inequality still haunt American society, Camarillo writes with a message of hope for a better, more inclusive America--and the aspiration that his life's journey can inspire others as they start down their own path.