My father was Arthur Omar Olivo (1934-2001). He was born in a migrant camp in Texas, and later his family moved to the California Bay Area. My mother met my father on the campus of De Anza College in Santa Clara, California. My father worked for Center for Employment Training in San Jose, California. CET is a job skills training program funded in part by the United Farmworkers union founded by Cesar Chavez. My father was a friend with many of the Chicano activists, including Jose Angel Gutierrez and Cesar Chavez.

Later, when I was four-years-old, my family moved from the California Bay Area to Oregon. My father moved us to Oregon so that he may set up an Oregon branch of Center for Employment Training in Tigard, Oregon. While working at CET in Tigard, Oregon, my father learned of a college named after Cesar Chavez in nearby Mt. Angel, Oregon: Colegio Cesar Chavez, the nation's first fully accredited Chicano/Latino college. For three years, my family actually lived on the campus grounds of Colegio Cesar Chavez, in a house called "Studio San Benito" which was right behind the main campus building called "Huelga Hall."

After my father died in 2001, I donated some of his materials to the Multicultural Archives at Oregon State University, including materials pertaining to his employment and education at Colegio Cesar Chavez. A link to the archives is provided above.

As a child, I had the honor of appearing in an advertisement for Colegio Cesar Chavez. A scan of that advertisement is now available on the website of Oregon State University. I'm the little boy standing, wearing the hat: http://oregondigital.org/cd...

To read the Wikipedia article about Colegio Cesar Chavez, click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

My background picture is of me as a child with my parents, Karen and Arthur Olivo. I donated my father's papers to the Multicultural Archives in Oregon State University as a means of creating a type of memorial for my father and the work he did. As a result of donating my father's papers to OSU and studying classes about Chicano History at Western Oregon University, I came to understand aspects of my childhood. As one professor of Chicano History said to me, "Andrew, the people you knew were famous!" I really had no idea. It was just my life, my childhood.

Various professors and other people have told me that my story is interesting and unusual because my father was not my biological father. That means that I was given insight into a civil rights movement that is rare for a person without any biological Mexican ancestry. (I have no memory of it, but I'm told that as a child I even met Cesar Chavez himself.)

During his life, my father forbade all mention of my biological father and instructed that we were to tell people that I was his biological son, which would mean by deductive reasoning that I was half-Mexican American. Various scholars have helped me to understand that this is a relatively common phenomenon in Mexican culture, though, in the words of a Mexican scholar, mine is the first case he'd ever seen where this aspect of the culture "crossed ethnic lines." During my childhood, and particularly the years while my family was living at Colegio Cesar Chavez, I didn't know that my father wasn't my biological father.

I want this YouTube channel to be something of a memorial to my father, Arthur Omar Olivo (1934-2001).