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Faculty Profile: Arthur Campa Plays In The Dirt
By Mellisa Blackburn
mblackb4@mscd.edu

Photo by William Blackburn • wblackb2@mscd.edu Professor Arthur Campa at his home in Bailey.

Anthropology is just a word, and a lot of anthropology work amounts to just more words. Real anthropology takes action, and adjunct professor of anthropology and associate professor for Chicano studies Arthur L. Campa Jr., has been encouraging Metro students to take action for positive world change since 1993.

“I work with small communities to help them help themselves,” Campa said. “Rather than sitting around writing articles, I feel like I’m doing something. It’s a professional commitment. I feel we have to help others, especially in the Third World.”

In 2000, Campa started the nonprofit organization Peruvian Eco-sustainable Research and Understanding, and is the cultural broker for regional governments of Peru, Peruvian anthropologists and local villagers.

Campa spends two weeks every summer in the Atacama Desert highlands of Peru, where he takes a group of University of Colorado at Boulder engineering interns, who are part of the local Engineers Without Borders chapter, to participate in sustainable development work with Peruvian peasants.

“Community development takes patience,” Campa said. “You don’t push things down there. You’ve got to go at their pace – or you’ll alienate yourself in no time. That’s what I tell these engineering students. You have to shift … from fifth gear down to second.”

Campa and his interns usually take two to three days to talk to the villagers, and then have a community meeting. One of their first projects was repairing a previously installed potable-water supply and teaching the villagers how to maintain it.

With a sink and some soap, they were able to educate the children on hygiene.

“Several villagers took the impetus to build their own septic tank,” Campa said. “The idea is sustainable – a simplified way of doing it, using local … inexpensive materials.”

Campa was inspired to become an anthropologist at an early age. He traveled with his father, a doctor of anthropology, to gather folk tales from various Southwestern regions of the U.S.

Campa’s father, one of the first Hispanics in New Mexico to earn a Ph.D., migrated to the U.S. in 1912 and worked as an agricultural laborer for five years.

“He was a fighter, he didn’t let people bully him around,” Campa said.

His father’s legacy motivated Campa to be more than just a blue-collar worker. His high school counselor told him he would make a good mechanic, despite scoring in the 97 percentile of the Iowa standardized tests.

“Because I was Hispanic the expectations were lower,” Campa said. “After I graduated, I went back to South High to look for that counselor -– to flaunt my Ph.D. in his face, but he was retired. So I never got the opportunity.”

Campa is the co-director of the Metro College Assistant Migrant Program, which provides financial and other support for students from migrant farming families. After graduating from CU-Boulder in 1980, he taught anthropology and worked with migrant related programs until 1993.

In 1999 Campa married his wife, Ellen, an anthropologist and textile artist whose baskets have been featured at the Denver Art Museum. They started dating after she graduated from Metro. Together, they developed a weaving cooperative in Peru.

Campa’s hands-on philosophy spills over into his hobbies – home improvement projects and rebuilding engines.

“I like to work with my hands,” Campa said. “That’s partly why I am in Peru … a sense of doing things, other than mental.”

His dream is retirement – more time to work on his case-study and to expand his work in Peru.

“Teaching people how to cooperate among themselves is a major effort,” Campa said. “But the satisfaction of getting people to successfully … help themselves is the whole idea.”