PRESS RELEASE: Students to Stage Funeral for Academic Freedom at Texas Tech Regents Meeting

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 4, 2026

Contact: Cameron Samuels

press@studentsengaged.org

Students to Stage Funeral for Academic Freedom

at Texas Tech Regents Meeting

LUBBOCK, TX — On Thursday, May 7 at the Board of Regents meeting, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas

(SEAT) and Raiders Against Censorship will stage a funeral at the Texas Tech University System Board of Regents meeting, marking what organizers describe as the "death by a thousand cuts" to academic freedom and higher education in Texas.

Academic freedom, long considered a cornerstone of higher education, has succumbed after what can only be described as a slow and deliberate erosion. Its decline was not sudden. There was no single moment of collapse, no dramatic final breath. Instead, it endured a death by increments — policy by policy, decision by decision — until the thing itself became unrecognizable.

"In lieu of flowers, we ask participants to bring objects representing the blessed memory of academic freedom," said James Snoddy (he/him), a SEAT member and founder of Raiders Against Censorship. "This is not symbolic exaggeration; this is a serious response to a year of decisions that threaten the integrity of our universities."

Many have pointed to leadership decisions by Chancellor Brandon Creighton as part of this decline, describing a shift toward constraint rather than curiosity. Policies affecting marginalized groups — particularly transgender students — became flashpoints, interpreted by many as signals about who belonged and who did not.

The event will feature a memorial wake, press remarks, and a staged procession across campus. Visual elements will include funeral attire and a horse-drawn carriage carrying an urn and books, photographs, and other markers of academic life.

WHEN:

• Thursday, May 7, 2026

• 8 AM - Memorial Wake

• 9 AM - Testimony at the Regents Meeting

• 11 AM - Eulogy Press Conference

• 11:30 AM - Funeral Procession

• 1 PM - "The clock strikes thirteen"

WHERE:

• System Administration Building, 1508 Knoxville Avenue, Lubbock, Texas.

WHO:

• James Snoddy (he/him), Texas Tech freshman and Raiders Against Censorship

• Tara Findley (she/her), Texas Tech junior and Democrats for Texas

• Andrew Martin (he/him), professor of art and president of AAUP-Texas Tech

• T J Geiger, AAUP-Texas Tech

• Matthew Pehl, AAUP-Texas Tech

• Sumya Paruchuri (they/them), SEAT

• Cameron Samuels (they/them), SEAT

• And more

The university and its spirit of academic freedom is survived by those who still insist on asking difficult questions — and by those who believe universities should remain places where such questions are not only allowed, but exalted. May she rest in peace.

###

About Students Engaged in Advancing Texas

SEAT is a movement of young people developing transferable skills and demonstrating youth visibility in policymaking. Advocating for a seat at the table, SEAT is normalizing the presence of students in educational policymaking – nothing about us, without us.

What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back, by Dr. Cesar A. Cruz

Friends:

In a powerful and deeply personal essay, Dr. César A. Cruz sounds the alarm over what he describes as the accelerating dismantling of the historic mission of University of California, Berkeley. Writing not only as an alum but as the parent of a first-year student, Cruz chronicles what he sees as a devastating pattern of institutional capitulation: the university’s disclosure of student and faculty information to federal investigators, the closure and depoliticization of the Multicultural Community Center, the nonrenewal of Ethnic Studies lecturers amid claims of budget deficits, and the construction of athletic facilities on Ohlone ancestral remains. 

For Dr. Cruz, these are not isolated incidents but interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. His essay frames these developments as part of a broader political project of neutralizing dissent, defunding critical scholarship, and erasing historically marginalized communities under the language of “inclusion,” “safety,” and administrative “reform.” 

Ultimately, Dr. Cruz calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to reject silence and organize collectively to defend Ethnic Studies, public higher education, and the democratic purposes the university once claimed to embody.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What Cal Is This?

A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back

Illustration by Masha Noar

By Dr. César A. Cruz | May 1, 2026 | Medium.com

Roll on you Bears has a different ring these days.

I am a Cal alum. My wife Jazmin is a Cal alum. And this past fall, we sent our son to UC Berkeley as a first-year student, proud, hopeful, carrying with him everything we believed this university to be, the Free Speech Movement, the Third World Liberation Front, the hunger strikers who built ethnic studies with their bodies, the tradition of a public university that dared to tell the truth about power.

He arrived in August. Within weeks, the chancellor turned in 160 students to the federal government.

That is the welcome Chancellor Rich Lyons extended to my son’s class.

The university that birthed the Free Speech Movement, that has long claimed itself a sanctuary of intellectual courage and public purpose, is finishing a year that should make every alumna, every donor, every student of conscience, every staff person ask the question clearly and out loud: What Cal is this? Who is running it? And who is it running for?

I am not asking as an outsider. I am asking as someone who loved this institution, who sent his family to this institution, who is watching this institution betray everything it claimed to stand for, in real time, in the first year of my son’s education.

I am asking because the evidence is undeniable, the pattern is unmistakable, and the silence of the administration has become its own answer.

Let us go through it, month by month, like a wound that keeps opening.

Fall 2025: The Chancellor Turns In His Own Students

The year began with a betrayal. In September 2025, UC Berkeley provided the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration, complying with a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus. The university’s Office of Legal Affairs sent letters to affected individuals on September 4, notifying them that their names and information had already been disclosed, over two weeks earlier, without their knowledge.

Among those named was Judith Butler, one of the most celebrated Jewish feminist scholars in the world, whose family lost members in the Holocaust, and who has since described the experience as being trapped in “Kafka-land.” As reported in The Guardian, Butler said: “We have a right to know the charges against us, to know who has made the charges and to review them and defend ourselves. But none of that has happened.”

A campus graduate student told the Daily Cal that the disclosure appeared to target anyone who had ever been accused of antisemitism, which, as they put it plainly, “includes a lot of Palestinians.” The same student added that whenever they taught about Palestine, it usually led to an investigation, and they believed those files were what got turned over.

This is not compliance. This is capitulation. This is a chancellor choosing federal favor over the safety of his own students, his own faculty, his own community.

Who is this Cal? Not the one I was taught to revere.

November 2025: The Right Wing Comes to Sproul, and the Administration Rolls Out the Welcome Mat

Two months after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was killed at a Utah university, his organization concluded its American Comeback Tour at UC Berkeley on November 10. According to CalMatters, administrators would not disclose their security plans but confirmed they were prepared to host the event. Outside, students, most of them far younger than the attendees inside, faced police in riot gear, with physical fights and arrests. One man was taken to the hospital with a head wound.

Inside, speakers told the crowd that the left were not their friends and would mock and dehumanize them. Comedian Rob Schneider told the audience that God said Trump is his guy, and that if you do not assimilate, it is an invasion.

The day after, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced a DOJ Civil Rights Division investigation into the event, adding another federal layer of pressure onto a campus administration already on its knees.

The right wing can fund a bus tour to Berkeley, bring riot police, and walk away with a federal press conference. Students of color organizing for Palestinian lives get their names handed to the government. That is the double standard. That is the definition of whose lives this administration is protecting.

Late 2025: The Multicultural Community Center Is Silently Shuttered

Then came the closure, sudden and unexplained, of the Multicultural Community Center, the beloved, student-built, student-run heart of multiracial organizing on campus.

The Daily Californian reported that UC Berkeley indefinitely closed the MCC, a space that offers cross-cultural community building, due to, in administration’s words, “criticism received from a number of campus stakeholders.” The MCC, located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, had been a hub for generations of students of color, a space where LaNada War Jack launched her book, where Alicia Garza spoke, where community was held and futures were imagined.

Interns at the center were initially not even told it was closing. When they found out, they were told the closure was connected to conversations with the chancellor’s office about “operating procedures.” The explicit concerns mentioned by administrators, as the Daily Cal reported, pertained to art and signage on their windows and walls, including anything that related to student activism, international relations, or ethnic studies.

One junior MCC intern, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, connected the closure directly to federal investigations, saying, “We’re caught up in this antisemitism debate that’s going across all university campuses. Because of the signage that was on our walls, they decided to not have the space basically be open for any group.”

A second-year graduate student, Anya Kushwaha, described it as “really devastating, particularly for the student organizing community on campus, but also just for students at large, especially students of color, who’ve been in need of resources.”

Students won this space in 1999, after a hunger strike, after sitting in front of the chancellor’s office with tombstones erected for every class that had disappeared. Now the administration closed it without a word. Not even a phone call.

April 2026: Political Art Stripped from the MCC

After months of community pressure, the university announced it would reopen the MCC, with Chancellor Rich Lyons stating he wanted to make it “more welcoming, not less.” But what reopened was not what the community built.

As reported by Open Campus and Berkeleyside, by April 2026 all political art had been stripped from the center, the same art that reflected the movement from which the MCC was born. The center’s six-point founding mission, student-led, anti-oppression, cross-cultural understanding, sustainability and wellness, popular education, and social justice, has been quietly gutted by administrators who call the erasure “welcoming.”

Doctoral student Sarah Halabe, studying ethnic studies, named the contradiction plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students.”

At a time, as Open Campus documented, when Trump officials and Congressional Republicans have initiated at least seven separate investigations into UC Berkeley since 2024, and when campuses across the country are banning the teaching of race and gender under federal pressure, what is happening at the MCC is not neutral reform. It is a whitewashing under duress, carried out by an administration that has chosen compliance over covenant.

They stripped the walls. They thought no one would notice. We noticed.

This Month: They Build a Volleyball Court Over Ohlone Remains

And then, last week, this. Construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex at Bancroft Way and Fulton Street unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person. The remains were found two feet underground, covered by concrete.

As Berkeleyside reported, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, the Ohlone group with ancestral ties to this land, are now working with the university to care for the remains. Their chair, Corinna Gould, said her community would be involved in determining next steps. California law requires all construction to stop immediately when human remains are found outside a cemetery, and UC Berkeley paused work at the site.

The beach volleyball complex, by the university’s own materials, is a five-court sand facility with berm seating for approximately 500 spectators. It is described by the contractor as a “state-of-the-art home for Cal Athletics beach volleyball” and “a welcoming gateway to the campus park.” Imagine we have money for beach volleyball, but not our collective histories? Chancellor, what priorities do you have? Who do you serve?

A welcoming gateway. Built on Ohlone bones.

This is the same institution that cannot fund the ethnic studies lecturers who teach the history of these very communities. The same institution that stripped the murals from a space named after Martin Luther King Jr. The same institution that handed over the names of 160 people exercising their First Amendment rights to a federal government that has made no secret of its agenda.

They can build a volleyball court. They cannot protect the people who teach us why this land is sacred.

Today: Ethnic Studies Lecturers Are Let Go

And today, April 30th, we learn that UC Berkeley’s ethnic studies department will not renew two lecturer positions for the 2026–27 academic year due to “financial deficits.” The Daily Californian reported that this represents an elimination of ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department, and that the affected lecturers, pre-six faculty who have not yet earned continuing status, received no direct communication from the department or the dean’s office.

Lecturer Diana Negrín found out her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself. “Neither the Dean’s office nor the department have actually said a thing to us as professors, nor to the students,” she said.

Lecturer Juan Berumen believes he may also be cut. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, described the university’s relationship to ethnic studies as clear: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department.”

Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed.”

David Skolnick, co-chair of the Bay Area chapter of UC-AFT, said the budget process is “intentionally opaque so that we can’t really hold the administration accountable for these kinds of decisions.”

We have seen this before. In 1999, students put tombstones in front of the chancellor’s office for every ethnic studies class that disappeared. The tombstones are back. The graves are multiplying.

To the Ethnic Studies Department: You Teach This Moment. Now Live It.

I want to speak directly to the faculty, the lecturers, the graduate students, and the staff of the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, because this moment requires more than a statement and more than a meeting.

You are the department that was born from a hunger strike. You are the discipline that exists because students in 1969 refused to accept a university that erased them, and because they were willing to put their bodies on the line to say so. Your syllabi include Fanon and Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde and Rodolfo Acuña, James Baldwin and Gloria Anzaldúa. You assign bell hooks on love and Paulo Freire on pedagogy. You teach your students that neutrality in the face of oppression is not neutrality, it is complicity.

And now the institution you have served, many of you for decades, is firing your colleagues without notice. It is building a volleyball court on the bones of the people whose stories you teach. It is stripping the walls of the center your students won through hunger. It is handing the names of students, many of them yours, to a federal government that has declared war on the very communities ethnic studies was created to center.

This is not abstract. This is not a case study. This is your department. This is your moment.

Ethnic studies was never meant to be a safe academic harbor. It was meant to be a site of transformation, a place where the knowledge produced by communities in struggle became power, became praxis, became movement. Lecturer Jesus Barraza already named it: you are in an “academic ghetto,” underfunded and undervalued by design. You have always known this. The question is what you are going to do about it now, when the stakes are highest and the administration is most exposed.

We are calling on the ethnic studies department to hold emergency town halls with students and community. To refuse the opacity of budget decisions made without consultation. To stand publicly and loudly against the firing of Diana Negrín and Juan Berumen. To demand that every retired or departing faculty line be replaced. To partner with the MCC and refuse to let the administration neutralize either institution in isolation. To use your scholarship as testimony, your classrooms as organizing spaces, your collective voice as the instrument it was always meant to be.

You teach Ella Baker, who said the strength of the movement is in the people, not in the charisma of a leader. You teach the Combahee River Collective, who knew that their liberation was bound up with everyone else’s. You teach Larry Itliong and Dolores Huerta, who built power not through permission but through presence and sacrifice.

The administration is counting on your exhaustion. It is counting on the precarity of your lecturers to keep everyone too afraid to speak. It is counting on the siloing of departments, programs, and communities to prevent a unified response.

Prove them wrong.

Your students are watching. Your ancestors are watching. The Ohlone, whose remains were found beneath the ground where the university builds its athletics complex, are watching. History is watching.

You did not choose ethnic studies as a career. You chose it as a calling. Answer it.

The Pattern Is the Message

Let me be clear about what this is. This is not a series of coincidences. This is not budget math. This is not a neutral response to federal pressure.

This is an administration that has, over the course of one academic year, handed students to the federal government, welcomed a right-wing organization with riot police escort, closed and gutted a student-built multicultural center, built a volleyball court on sacred ancestral ground, and fired the professors who teach the history of the people whose bones they found in the dirt.

This is an administration doing the work of those who have always wanted to erase us, bury us, neutralize us, and call it welcoming.

And the funders who bankroll this institution, many of whom profess to care about justice, about equity, about the university’s public mission, need to ask themselves: Is this the institution I am funding? Is this the legacy I am building? Can you write a check to this chancellor and sleep well?

We are calling for the resignation of Chancellor Rich Lyons.

We are calling on the UC Regents to do what they were appointed to do and govern.

We are calling on alumni, and I count myself and my wife Jazmin among you, to withhold donations until this administration demonstrates through action, not press releases, that it serves all of its students and not just those whose politics make the federal government comfortable.

As alumni, we did not give our years and our tuition and our love to this institution so that a chancellor could hand our children’s classmates to the federal government in the first month of school. Jazmin and I sent our son to Cal because we believed in what Cal said it was. We are still here. We are still watching. And we are not writing another check until this administration remembers who built it and who it was built to serve.

We are calling on students to keep organizing, keep documenting, keep showing up to Sproul Plaza the way those who came before you did when they put tombstones outside the chancellor’s office. My son is among you now. You are not alone.

We are calling on ethnic studies faculty, emeriti, allies in every department, to refuse to let the department be starved in silence.

We are calling on the Ohlone community, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, to be centered in every conversation about this land, because it is their land first, and whatever is built here should honor that truth, not pave over it.

This is Cal. It always has been. And as alumni, as parents, as community, as people who have not forgotten what this place promised, we are taking it back.

Do Not Let Business as Usual Continue. Contact Them. Now.

If you have read this far and you are feeling something, good. Now do something with it. Because the people who came before you did not just feel things. They acted. They fasted. They occupied buildings. They put their bodies and their futures on the line. They did not wait for the right moment or the polite channel or permission from the very institution they were challenging. They moved.

And what are you doing?

If you are an alum writing a check every year and telling yourself that your donation supports students, ask yourself which students it is supporting right now, because it is not the ones who got turned in to the federal government. It is not the ones losing ethnic studies courses. It is not the ones who walked into the MCC and found the walls stripped bare.

If you are a faculty or staff member watching colleagues lose their positions and telling yourself this is not the right time to speak, ask yourself when that time will come, because the people who built this department did not have a right time either. They had a hunger strike.

If you are a student who has been told to keep your head down and focus on your degree, ask yourself what that degree is worth if the institution granting it does not believe your life matters enough to protect.

Stop cowering. That is not what people before you did, and it is not what this moment asks of you.

Contact Chancellor Rich Lyons directly. Tell him you see what he has done. Tell him a chancellor who hands students to a hostile federal government, strips student-won spaces, and defunds ethnic studies does not deserve to lead UC Berkeley.

Chancellor Rich Lyons

Office of the Chancellor, UC Berkeley

200 California Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720

chancellor@berkeley.edu

(510) 642–7464

Contact the UC Regents. They govern this system. They are accountable to the people of California, not to the Trump administration or to donors who want the campus made safe for their politics.

UC Board of Regents

1111 Franklin Street, 12th Floor, Oakland, CA 94607

regents@ucop.edu

(510) 987–9200

Contact the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Department. Let them know you are watching, that you stand with the lecturers being let go, and that you expect the department to fight openly and without apology for its survival and its mission.

Department of Ethnic Studies

506 Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley

ethstd@berkeley.edu

(510) 642–1508

Contact your UC Regents representative. Contact state legislators who fund this university. Contact the UC Office of the President. Write emails, make calls, show up to public meetings, flood their inboxes, and refuse to let any of them pretend this is normal, because it is not normal, and normalizing it is how they win.

The Free Speech Movement was not started by people who sent a politely worded letter and waited. It was started by people who sat down in front of a police car and did not move. You do not have to block a car today (at least not yet). But you do have to do something. Pick up the phone. Send the email. Show up. Bring your friends. Bring your rage. Bring your love for what this place was supposed to be.

The people who hunger-struck for ethnic studies, who occupied Alcatraz, who marched down Telegraph, who built the MCC from nothing, they are not asking you to be perfect. They are asking you to be present. They are asking you to be counted.

Do not let them down. Do not let your silence be mistaken for consent.

Asé. Amen. Así sea. Mexica Tiahui. In Lak’ech. Ubuntu. Ameen.

Dr. César A. Cruz is Co-Founder of Homies Empowerment in East Oakland, a doctoral candidate at Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union, and a longtime educator, poet, and organizer rooted in the traditions of liberation. He is a (proud) Cal Alum.

Quinceañeras, Community, and the Power of Being Seen by Bobby Pulido in South Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. 5 de Mayo, 2026

Quinceañeras, Community, and the Power of Being Seen by Bobby Pulido in South Texas

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Feliz 5 de Mayo! Happy 5th of May! 🇲🇽 

A recent piece by Joe Holley appearing in the Washington Post asks a question that has quickly entered public debate: Is the shift in Hispanic voters permanent? It’s an important question—but perhaps not the most generative one.

What we are witnessing in South Texas is not a simple story of partisan movement, but a powerful reminder of how communities respond, adapt, and reassert themselves under changing political conditions. The congressional race between Monica De La Cruz and Bobby Pulido has captured national attention, but its deeper significance lies closer to home—in the everyday lives, relationships, and cultural practices of the Rio Grande Valley.

Yes, the district lines matter. Yes, national narratives matter. But what stands out most in this moment is something far more grounded: the enduring importance of connection. When quinceañeras become campaign stops, it is easy to reduce them to strategy. But that misses the point. These are not just events—they are intergenerational spaces of family, memory, aspiration, and belonging. To show up in those spaces is to recognize a community not as a voting bloc, but as a living, breathing social world.

And a beautiful one at that. 🩷

That kind of presence matters.

It matters especially in a time when policy decisions—particularly around immigration—are being felt in deeply personal ways. Across South Texas, families are navigating uncertainty, economic strain, and fear. Workplaces are disrupted. Schools feel the absence. Churches and community spaces carry a quiet tension. In this context, politics is not abstract. It is lived.

And yet, what also emerges in moments like this is resilience.

South Texas has long been a place where people hold multiple truths at once: pride in hard work and citizenship, deep cultural roots, strong family networks, and an unwavering belief in a better future. As Bobby Pulido himself has put it, many do not see themselves as poor, but as “broke”—a temporary condition tied to aspiration, not defeat. That distinction speaks volumes about how communities understand themselves and their possibilities.

So rather than asking whether voters have permanently “shifted,” we might ask a different question: What does it mean to truly engage a community on its own terms?

The answer, at least in part, is visible in this race. It looks like showing up. Listening. Being present in the spaces that matter. It means recognizing culture not as a prop, but as a foundation. And it means understanding that policy decisions—especially those that impact families and livelihoods—will always shape political response.

South Texas is not a mystery to be solved. It is a community to be understood.

And if this moment tells us anything, it is that when people feel seen, respected, and connected, they respond—not just politically, but collectively. The future of this region will not be determined by a single election cycle or a single narrative. It will be shaped by the ongoing relationship between communities and those who seek to represent them.

That story isn’t about permanence.

It’s about possibility.

Is the shift in Hispanic voters permanent? This Texas race could tell.

A Tejano singer challenges the Republican incumbent in a high-stakes House battle.

Campaign signs for Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas) and Democratic candidate Bobby Pulido
stand in Edinburg, Texas, on Feb. 10. (Eric Gay/AP)

By Joe Holley | April 29, 2026 | Washington Post

Joe Holley is based in Austin and writes about Texas politics.

It’s been a long time since South Texas politics has produced such an unusual and high-stakes congressional race as this year’s battle between a two-term Republican incumbent and her Democratic opponent, a charismatic political neophyte who’s accustomed to being in the public eye. In fact, you might have to go back nearly 80 years to find the campaign equivalent.

That would be the 1948 Democratic primary race for a U.S. Senate seat between a popular governor and a young congressman from the Texas Hill Country. The Democratic primary was the race in those days; Republicans were as rare as a South Texas snowstorm. With Gov. Coke Stevenson seeking to go to Washington, and a hyper-ambitious congressman named Lyndon B. Johnson swooping down from the Texas sky in a helicopter — the “Johnson City Windmill,” the Associated Press dubbed it — the hot race was in the headlines day after day during that long-ago summer.

A bitterly disputed result in the primary runoff kept it in the news for days after the election. Relying on sleight-of-hand shenanigans from a magician’s top hat of campaign dirty tricks, both campaigns searched for uncounted votes around the state. As Robert Caro reported in the second volume of his monumental LBJ biography, “Means of Ascent,” an election official in Jim Wells County — a South Texas ranching area — declared the numeral 7 in the 765 vote tallies of the county’s Box 13 should have been read as a 9 for a total of 965 votes. That tally helped put Johnson over the top — by 87 votes out of nearly a million cast.

No one’s charging dirty tricks this time — unless you consider mid-decade gerrymandering a dirty trick — but the 15th Congressional District contest between Rep. Monica De La Cruz and Democratic challenger Bobby Pulido will serve as a test case to determine whether the shocking 2024 swing of South Texas voters toward President Donald Trump was a fling on the part of fickle Democrats — the vast majority Hispanic — or a paradigm-shifting relationship.

Bobby Pulido, Democratic candidate for Texas’s 15th Congressional District, 

sings at a quinceañera in Edinburg, on March 14. (Gabriel V. Cardenas/AFP/Getty Images)

Although the young LBJ taught for a year in a predominantly Hispanic school in South Texas, it’s probably safe to say that he never made appearances at quinceañeras a staple of his campaign. (A quinceañera is a traditional Latin American celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday.) Pulido, a 53-year-old Tejano singer whose first album went platinum three decades ago, has never run for public office, but when he shows up at a quinceañera on a Saturday night, as he’s wont to do these days, it’s the equivalent of Bad Bunny dropping by.

“The knock against De La Cruz,” said Carlos Sanchez, a retired South Texas journalist and former Hidalgo County official, “is that she’s taking her orders from Washington, and they don’t have an appreciation for the culture.”

Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas) poses for a photo during the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (Jae C. Hong/AP)

Pulido’s quinceañera campaign was a serendipitous response to a tone-deaf comment from his opponent. After Pulido secured the Democratic nomination in March, De La Cruz posted a video saying that the election “isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera. It’s about who you trust with your family’s future.”

In an interview with the New Yorker, Pulido’s campaign manager, Abel Prado, recounted his immediate response: “Which gringo consultant wrote that?”

Prado had no trouble persuading the candidate to announce that he was happy to stop by quinceañeras in the district. He’s getting thousands of invitations, a campaign spokesperson told me, and is performing at as many as seven in one night. Fifteen-year-olds can’t vote, of course, but their parents and family friends can.

Pulido sings to Melanie Nieto, 15, during her quinceañera on March 14 in Edinburg. (Gabriel V. Cardenas/Getty Images)

Although the national spotlight is on the Latin Grammy Award winner, De La Cruz has one big advantage, aside from incumbency. The district she represents is part of what redistricting expert Richard Murray describes as “a masterfully gerrymandered” map drawn in 2021. It runs northward from the populous Rio Grande Valley, traditionally Democratic, through Republican-rich rural areas into the equally Republican outskirts of San Antonio.

De La Cruz may have owed her 2022 victory to that customized district, but in a rematch two years later with Democrat Michelle Vallejo, she cruised to a 14-point win— this time relying on a huge swing toward Republicans in Hidalgo County.

When Trump pressured Texas Republicans to redistrict yet again last year, in a scheme to pick up five new seats, the partisan makeup of De La Cruz’s district didn’t change much, but it includes residents who weren’t within the boundaries before. They may not be familiar with her, but they do know Pulido.

De La Cruz has another challenge. The Brownsville native, 51, ran in 2024 as a supporter of Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigration. Among Hispanics in South Texas, many of whom are proud of becoming citizens “the right way,” the tough approach resonated.

But then came Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Images of agents brutalizing residents in Minneapolis and elsewhere, combined with accounts of Valley residents being rounded up, have had a disturbing effect on Hispanics throughout South Texas. Many are reluctant to send their kids to school, to drive to work, to venture out to shop or attend church.

Their apprehension has impacted local economies, particularly in agriculture, construction and health care, where they are mainstays. Construction projects are stalled; crops are going untended. “Restaurants are closing, either temporarily or permanently because of raids,” Sanchez told me.

Antonio Gamez Cuéllar, 18, walks out of a detention facility in Raymondville, Texas, on March 9, escorted by his attorneys, Efrén C. Olivares and Carlos M. Garcia, and De La Cruz, on right. (Valerie Gonzalez/AP)

De La Cruz has sought to moderate her position on immigration. She has proposed a new visa category that would allow employers in construction to hire foreign workers. She also introduced legislation that would make it easier to hire seasonal agricultural workers.

Pulido, who majored in political science and considers himself a conservative Democrat, has said the immigration debate in Washington ignores reality in border communities. “I believe we can secure the border without destroying families and our local economy in the process,” the Rio Grande Valley native says on his website.

The issues — whether border security, water or the economy — may be less important than Pulido’s charisma. The son of a farmworker, he seems to be connecting with working-class voters in the 15th.

“We’re very aspirational,” he told the “Latino Vote” podcast. “The people down here do not consider themselves poor. They consider themselves broke. And there’s a big distinction. Because when they’re poor, the image is ‘Well, we want you to help us out.’ But when you’re broke you say, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to make it.’”

De La Cruz has tried to muddy her opponent’s image by highlighting a New York Post story saying that one of Pulido’s band members was a registered sex offender convicted of indecent contact with an 8-year-old girl. In a statement, Prado said Pulido was not aware of the musician’s criminal history and fired him as soon as he found out.

The De La Cruz campaign also has pointed to misogynistic comments on social media and off-color jokes Pulido has made during his career. So far, the charges don’t seem to be sticking.

If Pulido is victorious — of course, the election is still six months away — he’ll likely ride a blue wave sweeping the nation, including South Texas. Countless quinceañeras may be key, but he won’t need a lucky number 7 miraculously transformed into a 9.

When Faith Becomes Power: The Long History Behind Today’s Religious Politics of Controlling Culture in Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 When Faith Becomes Power: The Long History Behind Today’s Religious Politics of Controlling 

Culture in Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 3, 2026

Before you read further, take a few minutes to watch this chilling snapshot of Texas history narrated by Drew McCoy on his Youtube channel, "Genetically Modified Skeptic." What it documents is not just “interesting history.” It is a chilling and largely buried account of state-sanctioned and vigilante violence in Texas—targeting German immigrants whose only real crime was thinking differently.

Many of these settlers were freethinkers, abolitionists, and skeptics of organized religion. For that, they were surveilled, harassed, and in some cases murdered. Their communities were policed not just for political loyalty, but for ideological and religious conformity. This is Texas history—but not the version that makes it into textbooks.

We should be asking why.

Because what this video reveals is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

There’s a moment in the video where the past collapses into the present. What initially appears to be a critique of religion opens into something far more consequential: a genealogy of power. This is not simply about belief systems. It is about how dominant religious ideologies—particularly forms of conservative Protestantism—have historically aligned themselves with political authority to discipline populations, define belonging, and consolidate control over public life.

What begins as theology becomes governance. And what cannot be controlled becomes a threat—in this case, German “freethinkers,” white people stripped of belonging—exposed as not white enough when they refused ideological conformity.

At its core, the video underscores a critical truth: the modern religious right—also known today as “Christian nationalists”—did not emerge out of nowhere. It is the product of long-term, strategic organizing rooted in earlier histories of exclusion, enforcement, and at times, outright violence. From the suppression of dissenting religious communities to contemporary campaigns around “family values,” education, and national identity, the throughline is clear—power is maintained by controlling culture.

And culture is controlled, in large part, through education.

If that sounds abstract, consider what is happening right now in Texas.

At the K–12 level, battles over the State Board of Education’s social studies TEKS standards have become proxy wars over history itself—what counts as legitimate knowledge, whose stories are centered, and which truths are softened, distorted, or erased. The same impulse that once targeted German freethinkers now operates through curricular gatekeeping—policing how young people come to understand democracy, race, religion, and dissent.

At the university level, the struggle over Ethnic Studies—and more recently, the passage and implementation of SB 17 and SB 37—extends this project. Programs, scholarship, and entire fields that interrogate power, colonialism, and racial hierarchy are cast as threats to the state. Faculty governance is restructured. Academic freedom is narrowed. Knowledge itself is disciplined.

The tactics are strikingly familiar:

The manufacturing of moral panic.

 The targeting of educators, intellectuals, and marginalized communities.

The insistence that dominant norms are under siege.

These are not new strategies. They are recycled technologies of power.
And they work.

This is why the video matters now. Because the battles we are witnessing across Texas—over curriculum, DEI, academic freedom, and even the right to teach truthful histories—are not isolated skirmishes. They are the latest expression of a much longer project: the regulation of knowledge in the service of ideology.

In this light, policies like SB 17 and SB 37 do not stand alone. They are part of a broader architecture of governance that seeks to narrow what can be known, said, and taught. This is not simply policy—it is the institutionalization of a worldview.

A worldview that has always required enemies.

What Drew McCoy ultimately offers is not just historical recovery, but a warning. Movements built over generations do not disappear when challenged. They adapt. They rebrand. They relocate their battles—from churches to school boards, from pulpits to legislatures, from doctrine to policy.

And they continue.

So the question is not whether this history is relevant.

It is whether we are willing to confront what it reveals about the present.

Because once you recognize the pattern—the suppression of dissent, the policing of thought, the fusion of faith and state power—it becomes impossible to dismiss what is happening now as accidental or benign.

This is not new.

It is simply returning in a different form.

If this history troubles you, it should. And it should move you—not just to reflection, but to action. The next battleground is already set. The Texas State Board of Education will meet June 22–26, 2026, where proposed, deeply reactionary social studies standards will be debated—standards that will shape what millions of Texas students are allowed to know about their own history. 

Show up. Testify. Bear witness. Refuse the erasure. And stay connected to those organizing on the ground by following Social Studies Advocate on Instagram. The struggle over knowledge is not abstract. It is happening now—and it requires all of us.

Leaving MAGA Is Not a Moment—It’s a Process

Leaving MAGA Is Not a Moment—It’s a Process

I was genuinely heartened to learn about Leaving MAGA, an organization born not out of abstraction, but out of lived experience. That matters. Too often, our public conversations flatten people into categories—“us” and “them”—as if political identity were fixed, as if growth were impossible. What distinguishes this effort is its refusal to do that kind of work. It is rooted instead in empathy, in the recognition that people arrive where they are through complex pathways shaped by history, media, community, and lived realities.

There is something deeply important about the fact that this space does not traffic in shame. It does not judge people for having been part of something; rather, it understands that belonging is a powerful force. For many, movements like MAGA offered clarity, recognition, even a sense of purpose in a world that often feels unstable and unequal. If we are serious about addressing the conditions that produce political division, we have to be willing to engage that reality honestly—not dismissively.

What makes Leaving MAGA powerful is that it treats change as a process, not a performance. It recognizes that transformation rarely comes through confrontation alone, but through reflection, relationship, and the difficult work of asking new questions. In that sense, it offers something our broader political discourse too often lacks: a pathway grounded in dignity. And at a time when so much of our public life is organized around polarization and spectacle, that kind of work is not only rare—it is essential.

Here are some helpful links:

Youtube: Leaving Maga https://www.youtube.com/@LeavingMAGA

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LeavingMAGA

Website: leavingMAGA.org

-Angela Valenzuela

I was a devoted member of MAGA nation for seven years; it made me feel I was part of something important: a movement that was trying to save American democracy.

But starting in 2021, I realized I had been mistaken. It took me a full year to finally break away. During that time, I came to understand that MAGA is sustained by a series of myths that are intended to create perpetual feelings of desperation and panic.

Succumbing to these predatory myths does not mean you are unintelligent, weak, or lack good character and morals. I have a Bachelor’s degree; have been a working professional my entire life; am a family man; and consider myself a relatively honest and intelligent person. I think the same about you.

I understand the reasons you have for supporting MAGA. And I know many of us traveled different paths to get there. I gravitated to Donald Trump because I have always been suspicious of our two-party system, and I saw him as the right man at the right time.

I have a sense that some of you have quietly left MAGA already, or are increasingly regretful, confused and scared. All of this can be doubly upsetting, since some of your sincerely-held beliefs may have alienated you from friends and family. That certainly happened to me.

It’s perfectly OK to feel this way; leaving MAGA was a tumultuous roller coaster of a process for me. It may be one of the most difficult endeavors you embark upon. In the end, it brought me an inner peace, and a newfound clarity about what is happening in our beloved country.

I founded this organization, Leaving MAGA, because I wanted to create a safe, non-judgmental community for those who leave MAGA, as well as for those who are having doubts about, or remorse over, their devotion to Trump and MAGA.

Our Leaving MAGA community will celebrate how acknowledging mistakes empowers you and America.

It’s difficult for a democracy to function well when millions are estranged from those closest to them.

You do not deserve to have your anxieties about change exploited. You deserve to know the truth. And with Leaving MAGA, you don’t have to feel you would be alone if you leave the movement.

Leaving MAGA is possible. Recognizing that we were wrong, and acting on that knowledge, makes us all more invested in democracy and in the continued work of perfecting our union. Contact us here if you want to talk.

Sincerely, and humbly yours,

Rich

Undermining Our Future: Deportations, DACA, and Lost Potential, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Undermining Our Future: Deportations, DACA, and Lost Potential

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 2, 2026

In a February 26, 2026 piece authored by Bazail-Eimil in Politico, we learn that
Kristi Noem and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deported 86 DACA students despite longstanding protections, exposing a stark and troubling reality about the fragility of that promise. Sadly, by now, this number is certainly higher.

There is no other way to describe it: this is a betrayal. Young people brought to this country as children—many of whom have done everything asked of them—are now being detained and deported by the very system that once told them they could study, work, and build a future here.

These are not abstract policy decisions. They are lives disrupted. 

DACA recipients undergo repeated background checks, pursue education, and contribute to their communities. Yet they are now being swept up under shifting enforcement priorities, sometimes for minor or unproven infractions. I am aware that due to their assimilation in U.S. schools, many of them are not fully literate in the Spanish language—even if they can speak it—and, as a result, face uncertain futures in their parents' home countries. 

When our government callously discards a generation it helped raise and educate, it sends an unmistakable message: no amount of effort, achievement, or compliance is enough to guarantee belonging, and even those who play by the rules can be cast aside without warning.

Moreover, this is where the idea of “wasted talent"—a topic covered in the documentary I just posted—becomes painfully real. 

Many DACA recipients are students, professionals, and essential workers—individuals who have already invested in this country and are poised to give even more. Deporting them does not just harm them and their families personally, it strips the nation of skills, ambition, and potential that cannot easily be replaced. At a time when the U.S. depends on a strong, educated workforce, these actions undermine our own capacity to compete and thrive.

How does shooting ourselves in the foot like this make any sense?

They are exactly the kind of young people the U.S. claims to need—bilingual, educated, and ready to contribute in high-demand fields. Deporting them is not just a moral failure; it is a strategic one. It drains the country of human capital we have already helped develop, weakening our workforce at a time when global competition for talent is intensifying.

The consequences reach far beyond immigration policy. We are actively undermining our own future. A country that turns away its own investment in human potential is not just being short-sighted and dishonest about its expressed concerns regarding "return in investment" (ROI)—it is choosing decline. The loss is not abstract. It will be felt in classrooms, industries, and communities for years to come.

Policies that disproportionately target Latino communities and dismantle pathways like DACA echo a broader pattern that many see as rooted in white nationalist thinking about who deserves to be American. A country that embraces that logic is choosing division over shared prosperity, and risking a future diminished by its own decisions.

Reference

Bazail-Eimil, E. (2026, February 26). DHS admits it deported more than 80 DACA recipients, Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/26/dhs-daca-immigration-noem-dreamers-00801921


DHS admits it deported more than 80 DACA recipients
“Dreamers” who came to the U.S. as children are protected under U.S. law, so deportations of them are unusual.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in her letter to senators that Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals “comes with no right or entitlement to remain in the United States indefinitely.”
| Caitlin O'Hara/AP

By Eric Bazail-Eimil / 02/26/2026 04:05 PM EST