MEIER, Matt S(ebastian) 1917-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 4, 1917, in Covington, KY; died of complications from leukemia August 11, 2003, in Santa Clara, CA. Historian, educator, and author. Meier was a scholar of Latin American history who helped establish the field of Chicano history studies in the United States. His interest in Latin American history and culture began while attending the University of Miami, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1948; the next year, he studied at Mexico City College, receiving a master's degree before taking his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in 1954. He then taught in Argentina for a year while on a Fulbright scholarship, returning to the United States to lecture at Bakersfield College from 1955 to 1963. Meier was also on the faculty of Fresno State College in the early 1960s; he joined Santa Clara University in 1966 as an associate professor, chairing the Latin American and Mexican American department from 1968 to 1971 and from 1976 to 1979, and retiring in 1989. Meier's enthusiasm for Latin American history and culture did much to help establish these subjects as areas of study in academia. As a writer, he was especially noted as the author, with Feliciano Rivera, of The Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans (1972), which was later revised as Mexican Americans/American Mexicans: From Conquistadors to Chicanos (1993), and for his solo works Bibliography of Mexican American History (1984) and Mexican American Biographies (1988). Other works by Meier include Notable Latino Americans (1997) and Encyclopedia of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement (2000).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2003, p. B19.

San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 2003, p. A18.