Friends and Family of John Borrego

To the Friends and Family of John Borrego,

 

Over the past few years John’s health has severely deteriorated. A combination of cognitive impairment and ongoing heart problems have made it impossible for him to live independently. In addition, his health issues have caused him huge financial strain. His debt does not allow him to access some of the vital services to support his needs. His daughter recently moved into his home, and now serves as his primary caregiver. However, at this time, John needs additional support. His health issues do not allow him to be at home without proper supervision and to assist him with his daily activities. With your support, the funds you contribute would go toward hiring part-time in-home healthcare and addressing some of John’s debt.

 

John’s Contribution to Teaching at UC Santa Cruz:

 

In his nearly 40 years at UC Santa Cruz, John’s great and often unacknowledged contribution was to the education of undergraduates who sought to understand the inequalities in society that they experienced. However, calling his work “unacknowledged” applies to officialdom, but not to the large number of students who benefitted from his close-in mentorship and committed teaching. He often bore an almost unbelievably heavy load. (At one point he was overseeing 30 senior thesis students in the Community Studies Department).

What John had to teach—the colonial relationships between core societies and peripheral ones, the effects of capitalist extraction not only on developing countries but also on person of color and immigrant communities within the core—was eye-opening to students. And fresh. A Community Studies major returned from graduate school once came back to report at UC Santa Barbara she was being taught as “new” what she had learned from Borrego a decade earlier. The syllabi for John’s world-systems theory courses challenged students, but those who stuck with John soon learned that he led them through the ideas with great care and his own special ingenuity. (For example, from his background in architecture he took and used the element of autogestion or self-education which group learning makes possible.

His course, Global Capitalism and Community Restructuring, on Watsonville (where he lives), was like nothing else in the university, an immersion study of the community with guest presentations by people from all walks of life in this farmworker community. The format of the course, including the long final paper, showed undergraduates how to move out of the passive “consumption” of their education into active engagement with critical issues as researchers and problem solvers.

 

John’s commitment to teaching influenced decades of students committed to addressing social justice. Like him, many of his students went on to become educators (from K-12 to university professors), while others chose to address social injustices as policymakers, legal advocates, and grassroots organizers.