This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, Ethnic Studies at state and national levels. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin.
The anti-sanctuary cities bill, SB4, got out of the Texas House last night with a 93-54 vote. Truly disgusting. Here is a bill that makes it illegal for cities to be sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants and that will racially profile Latinos and Latinas, and that will further persecute people living in our country who are here not to cause trouble, but to work and contribute to our state and nation.
In a state that is already prejudicial and exclusionary on so many levels, for thoroughly documented people, arguing that this will have no collateral effects on the Latino community writ large is untenable and disingenuous.
This is not just a terribly sad day for Texas, but this is an unGodly spirit that threatens the whole. Accordingly, I encourage you to read this June 10, 2011, blog post by the Rev. Larry Payne titled, "An UnGodly Spirit Threatens the Welfare of the Whole: A Call to all good people of conscience, church and spiritual leaders in Texas" that makes this very claim from an earlier legislative session when Rick Perry was our governor. And then consider calling Governor Greg Abbott, asking him to veto this legislation when it gets to his desk.
Our racist legislators are akin to the "evil judges of
Sodom and Gomorrah who developed policies against the outcasts and
strangers in their midst despite an abundance of food and resources." A closing quote from Payne's piece that I, again, strongly encourage you to read:
If we as God’s people are called to care for the outcast and the
stranger among us, how much more are we called to not perpetuate harm or
cruelty to them?
Accordingly, in Ephesians 6:12, the Apostle Paul offers:
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places.
My friends and all people of good faith who see the injustice in this law, do what the Reverend Payne did, and call out this injustice and the evil, dehumanizing motivations of our leadership—not just in Texas, but in the highest halls of state and national power.
State Rep. Eddie Lucio III, D-Brownsville, speaks on the House floor.
Updated: 2:10 a.m. Thursday, April 27, 2017 |
Posted: 6:42 p.m. Wednesday, April 26, 2017
After more than 16 hours of debate, the Texas House at about 3
a.m. Thursday voted 93-54 to give initial approval to the bill to ban
so-called sanctuary cities, the common term for jurisdictions that
decline to assist federal immigration enforcement.
Along the way,
lawmakers cried, fought and traded horses on the Texas House floor, and
the bill was amended to be more in line with the goals of hard-line
conservatives.
Calling it the defining showdown of this legislative session for
their constituents and wearing black in protest, outnumbered Democrats
had lined up scores of amendments and planned to fight Senate Bill 4
late into the night.
But almost all of their amendments were
defeated, and tea party-aligned Republicans countered by introducing
measures that would make the bill stricter, restoring some elements that
were stripped out by a House committee after being approved by the
Senate.
One by Rep. Matt Schaefer, R-Tyler, prohibits local law
enforcement agencies from discouraging their officers from inquiring
about the immigration status of people who have been detained, a broad
category including routine traffic stops. The bill previously limited
that provision to cases in which the person has already been arrested.
Schaefer’s
amendment, approved in an 81-64 vote, drew intense criticism from
Democrats, who say it will lead to racial discrimination against
Latinos.
They bargained for more than four hours over a deal that
never materialized to cut off debate early and abandon dozens of their
planned amendments in exchange for the House forgoing some of the more
conservative proposals, like Schaefer’s.
The Senate has already approved a version of the bill, which was
authored by Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, and was listed by Gov. Greg
Abbott as one of his “emergency items” for this legislative session.
The
bill would impose stiff financial penalties on jurisdictions deemed to
be sanctuary cities and allow local officials to be charged with a crime
for implementing sanctuary policies. It targets police agencies that
discourage their officers from inquiring about subjects’ immigration
status in certain circumstances and county jails that decline to honor
federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests to extend the
detention of inmates suspected of being unauthorized immigrants.
Travis
County Sheriff Sally Hernandez has become a flashpoint in the debate
over sanctuary cities after she adopted a policy in January limiting the
county’s cooperation with those so-called detainer requests, which are
meant to give immigration officers time to take inmates into federal
custody for possible deportation proceedings.
Testy exchanges House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, began Wednesday’s debate
with a call for civility and decorum during what promised to be an
emotional day. It took about two hours for decorum to fall apart during
an exchange between Dallas Reps. Jason Villalba, a Republican backing
the bill, and Rafael Anchia, a Democrat leading the opposition.
After
Anchia pressed Villalba on crime rates among immigrant communities and
other statistics, the Democrat suggested his GOP colleagues were
pursuing the bill because of emotion and prejudice, not a real policy
need.
“Oh my gosh, you don’t act based on data? You act on
emotion?” Anchia, who chairs the Mexican American Legislative Caucus,
said sarcastically. “And hate is a pretty good emotion, isn’t it?”
Villalba
responded by noting previous episodes in which Anchia has said
GOP-driven legislation on immigration is fueled by racism.
“You
have stood on the front mic and impugned the good representatives, the
men and women of this body, about how you feel they’re racist,” he said.
After the dust cleared, Anchia, who was proposing a symbolic
amendment that would gut the bill, said, “What is this about? It’s not
about ICE detainers. It’s not really about crime data. It’s really about
the emotions that Jason spoke to and it’s whether we’re going to place
those emotions in statute today.”
The amendment was defeated in a 90-52 vote.
Almost
every amendment and procedural maneuver proposed by Democrats was
defeated by a similar tally. A rare exception was an amendment by Rep.
Eddie Lucio III, D-Brownsville, that got the blessing of Senate Bill 4’s
House sponsor, Fort Worth Republican Rep. Charlie Geren, and was
approved overwhelmingly.
The amendment changes the process by
which a city or county can be deemed a sanctuary city under the law,
leading to financial penalties and the potential removal from office of
local officials who implemented the sanctuary policy. Previously, the
bill charged the Texas attorney general’s office with deciding which
jurisdictions had run afoul of the law. Lucio’s amendment requires the
attorney general to get court approval before green-lighting sanctions
against a sanctuary city.
Impassioned pleas Earlier in the day, Democrats made impassioned pleas to their GOP
colleagues to abandon the legislation, including Rep. Ana Hernandez,
D-Houston, who came to the U.S. illegally before obtaining citizenship
and running for office.
“I know firsthand the impact that (Senate
Bill 4) will have on many families … mothers that will be afraid to go
to the grocery store,” she said. “I know how this bill will punish
immigrants and push them into the shadows.”
Rep. Victoria Neave,
D-Dallas, who is on a four-day fast to protest the bill, read profane
social media messages she has received since beginning her fast.
“This
is the sort of hate that our Latino community is already hearing,”
Neave said. “Look into your hearts to realize the impact that this is
going to have.”
Geren, however, said the bill wasn’t
discriminatory because it targeted criminals, not members of a
particular racial or ethnic group.
“This bill has no effect on illegal immigrants if they have not committed a crime or hanging out with someone who has,” he said.
We all need to be talking about Ethnic Studies as it concerns what kind of future we would like to build and what kind of legacy we would like to leave for our children and grand children—indeed, for society, as a whole, for generations to come.
We might think of Ethnic Studies as part and parcel to a renewed commitment as individuals, parents, organizations, and communities, working in a spirit of partnership, to re-imagine public education as a public good to which we are all not only entitled in a democracy, but genuinely honored and privileged to be able to play a part, however large or small, in this unfolding narrative of the struggle for substantive curricular inclusion and respect.
Educate yourselves, my friends, on Ethnic Studies, beginning with a close reading of the research. You can find a couple of important studies linked to the blog.
They help make the compelling case for why we need Ethnic Studies.
I have family members that have immigrated from Mexico who are highly skilled,
but who have nevertheless been exploited within their firms. The
biggest beneficiaries of this are indeed the exploitative, outsourcing companies.
Read on... -Angela
The H-1B program provides temporary, nonimmigrant U.S. work
visas for college-educated workers and fashion models from abroad. While
no one can deny the importance of attracting skilled, talented workers
to the United States, the reality is that the biggest beneficiaries of
the H-1B program are outsourcing companies that have hijacked the
system—using between one-third to one-half of the visas—to replace
thousands of U.S. workers with much-lower-paid H-1B workers while also
sending tech jobs abroad.1
In addition, these outsourcing companies rarely provide H-1B employees
with a path to permanent residence and citizenship. Outsourcing
companies, however, are not the only abusers of the system: The vast
majority of employers that hire H-1B workers pay them wages below the
local average for the occupation.
We need to reform the H-1B program to make it:
Fairer to U.S. workers, who should have the first opportunity to apply for jobs in the United States
Fairer to H-1B workers, who deserve fair pay for their work
according to U.S. wage standards and who should not have to fear
retaliation and exploitation by employers
Major flaws in the H-1B program
U.S. employers don’t have to recruit U.S. workers before hiring H-1B workers. Employers
and corporate lobby groups claim that they use the H-1B primarily to
bring in the “best and brightest” workers from abroad to fill labor
shortages in science, technology, engineering, and math fields (STEM).
But despite this widely held belief, the contrary is true:
Employers are not required to recruit U.S. workers or prove they are experiencing a labor shortage before hiring H-1B workers.
“H-1B-dependent” employers (those filling 15 percent or more of
their U.S. jobs with H-1B workers) are required to recruit U.S. workers
first, but they get around the requirement with a cheap and easy
loophole: they can hire an H-1B worker who holds a master’s degree or
pay the H-1B worker an annual salary of over $60,000. For comparison,
$60,000 is $21,000 lower than the national median wage for all workers employed in computer occupations ($81,430).2
U.S. employers can legally underpay H-1B workers. Corporate
lobbyists and other H-1B proponents claim that H-1B workers cannot be
paid less than U.S. workers because employers must pay H-1B workers no
less than the “prevailing wage.” That is true in theory but:
Employers have the option of paying the prevailing Level 1
“entry-level” wage or Level 2 wage, both of which are well below the
average wage (Level 3) that local employers pay workers in similar jobs.
While the wage level is supposed to correspond to the H-1B worker’s
education and experience, in practice the employer gets to choose the
wage level and the government doesn’t check unless a lawsuit or a
complaint is filed by a worker.
Here’s what wage savings can look like for H-1B employers: The average software developer in the Silicon Valley
commands a salary of $147,000 per year, but an H-1B software developer
earning the Level 1 wage is paid $102,000. That’s a savings of $45,000
per H-1B worker per year for up to six years.3 The top 10 H1-B employers use the program for cheap, temporary labor rather than as a bridge to permanent immigration. The
H-1B visa is considered a “dual-intent” visa, which means that
employers have the option of sponsoring their H-1B workers for lawful
permanent resident (LPR) status, which can then lead to citizenship. But
the top 10 H-1B employers sponsor very few workers for LPR status. In
2014, Tata Consultancy Services, the top H-1B employer that year, hired
5,650 new H-1B workers but only filed for two permanent labor
certifications.4 H-1B workers are often exploited and often arrive in debt, and they are tied to their employers. The
H-1B visa itself is owned and controlled by the employer; an H-1B
worker who is fired or laid off for any reason becomes instantly
deportable. H-1B workers often pay large fees to labor recruiters, which
means that many arrive virtually indentured to their employer, fearing
retaliation and termination if they speak out about workplace abuses or
unpaid wages. And widespread abuses have been documented—even human
trafficking and severe financial bondage.5 Outsourcing companies are using the H-1B program to replace U.S. workers and send tech jobs abroad. The
top 10 employers of H-1B workers are not innovative high-tech firms
like Apple and Google. The biggest users of the H-1B visa are
outsourcing/offshoring companies that specialize in information
technology (IT). Typically, H-1B workers do computer and engineering
work at the office of the U.S. employer but are employed by the
offshoring company. The many reported cases of U.S. workers being laid
off and replaced by H-1B workers have all been facilitated by this
arrangement.6
In multiple incidents, the H-1B workers have been hired with annual
wages around $40,000 less than the workers they have replaced. Before
they are laid off, the U.S. workers are often forced to train their own
H-1B replacements as a condition of their severance packages; this is
euphemistically known as “knowledge transfer.” Major, profitable U.S.
employers like Disney and Toys “R” Us—as well as public employers and
institutions like the University of California and Southern California
Edison—have laid off thousands of U.S. workers who were forced to train
their own replacements. Eventually, many of these replacements and their
jobs were moved offshore.7
Simple reforms can fix the H-1B program and have been proposed in Congress
Require employers to recruit U.S. workers and offer jobs to any
equally or better qualified U.S. workers before hiring H-1B workers.
Require employers who cannot find qualified U.S. workers to pay the
H-1B workers they hire no less than the local average wage for the job
(i.e., eliminate H-1B prevailing wage Levels 1 and 2).
Provide the Labor Department with additional legal authority to
crack down on abuses and exploitation of U.S. and H-1B workers, and to
conduct random audits of H-1B employers.
Appropriate more funding to the Labor Department to hire additional
agents in the Wage and Hour Division and better scrutinize H-1B
applications.
Provide H-1B workers with additional protections against employer retaliation and workplace abuse.
Ban employers from hiring additional H-1B workers if they have violated any wage and hour, labor, or immigration laws.
Reform the H-1B lottery to prioritize higher-paying employers and non-H-1B-dependent employers.8
Quick facts on the H-1B program
An estimated 460,000 H-1B workers are employed in the United States.9
85,000+ new H-1B visas can be issued per year—65,000
plus 20,000 for workers who earned an advanced degree from a U.S.
university plus an unlimited number for employers such as universities
and nonprofit research organizations.
In 2015 there were 113,000 new H-1B workers and 162,000 H-1B workers extended their visas.10
H-1B visas are valid for up to six years (for two three-year terms).
Over half of H-1B visa holders work in IT or other computer occupations.11
H-1Bs also work in engineering, in medicine and health, and at universities.12
H-1B workers can be up to 40 percent cheaper to employ than Americans.13
4. Ron Hira, “The Impact of High-Skilled Immigration on U.S. Workers,”
Testimony before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the
National Interest, Judiciary Committee, Dirksen Senate Office Building,
February 25, 2016.
8.
Most of these reforms have been proposed in bipartisan legislation
sponsored by Senators Durbin and Grassley, which in previous sessions of
Congress was also sponsored or co-sponsored by Senators Bernie Sanders
and Sherrod Brown and former Senator Jeff Sessions. See, for example, “S.2266 – H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act of 2015,” Congress.gov.
Here is a powerful piece by Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodriguez in this month's Diverse Issues in Higher Education. He makes the strong case that Chicanos/as have been in a permanent state of insurrection. I might prefer the word "continuous," as opposed to "permanent." In any case, this is a worthwhile read. I like this quote from within:
"In effect, what is being said here is that the state of insurrection(s) by native peoples on this continent has never been quelled. The reason is because it cannot be quashed unless all lands are returned, etc. No one has the authority to end it. It is akin to when the Mexican government in the 1800s sued for peace with the Maya. The Maya famously proclaimed to their enemies: “Go away and then there will be peace.”
Of course, settlers won't simply "go away," but the mentality that reproduces imperial projects can and should. However, this calls for and indeed requires an opening of the mind to others' experiences, albeit with an epistemic humility and openness that help access this different, complex, and beautiful world. So this "insurrection" about which Dr. Rodriguez writes, in my view, is as much about the political as it is about the moral and the epistemic, meaning the value system (or systems) that attaches to ways of knowing and being in the world.
The antithesis—a monolingual, monochromatic, monocultural, ahistorical, commericalized, decontextualized, standardized view of the world—is tantamount to the death of the soul, of complex ways of knowing and being, that in their absence, render "insurrection," in Rodriguez' words, a necessary state of affairs.
http://tinyurl.com/7plvzkx
A contemporary of President Abraham Lincoln in the U.S., Mexico's greatest, most beloved president who also happened to be a full-blooded, Zapotec Indian, President Benito Juarez' time-honored, wisdom rings true not just for today, but for the ages:
“Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al
derecho ajeno es la paz.
Among individuals, as among nations, respect
for the rights of others is peace.”
In
closing, a complex, multicultural vision of the world breathes life and justice into the stuff of social relations and in so doing, promotes world peace.
In Chicano Manifesto (1971), Armando Rendon made the radical claim that the United States and Mexico were technically still in a state of war (1846-1848) because the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was violated prior to even its signing, and that therefore, a state of war continues to this day.
Rendon’s claim was based on war having been waged against Mexico; half of its territories were illegally seized via war or threat of war during the 1830s through the 1850s; and several of the articles (Article VIII and XI) from the treaty were altered and one (Article X) was outright deleted. These articles had to do with land rights and the human rights of the peoples that remained in the former Mexican territories.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions
Here, I am not agreeing or disagreeing, but actually positing something even more radical: that people of Mexican descent (including Chicanos/as) that live in this country, live in a permanent state of dehumanization and thus also part of a permanent state of insurrection that has been ongoing since the days of Columbus, Cortez and Pizarro and other “conquistadors,” one that never ended, and technically, can never end. These (Indigenous) insurrections and rebellions went on long after the official wars of Independence ended in the 1800s that rejected the more than 300 years of colonialism.
Helpful information from the Pew Hispanic Center. It is important to the future of this country and of course, the well-being of the Latino population. -Angela
The U.S. Hispanic population reached 57 million in 2015, but a drop-off in immigration from Latin America and a declining birth rate among Hispanic women has curbed overall growth of the population and slowed the dispersion of Hispanics through the U.S.
From
the onset of the Great Recession in 2007 through 2014, the U.S.
Hispanic population had an annual average growth rate of 2.8%, compared
with an average 4.4% growth each year from 2000 to 2007. As a result, in
terms of growth rate, Hispanics – once the nation’s fastest-growing
population – have now slipped behind Asians, whose population grew at an
average annual rate of 3.4% between 2007 and 2014.
1Despite slowing growth rates, Latinos still accounted for more than half (54%) of total U.S. population growth from 2000 to 2014.
Hispanics drove at least half of overall population growth in 524
counties that had at least 1,000 Latinos in 2014. In these counties,
Hispanic population growth accounted for 54% or more of total growth.
The South accounted for 46% of these counties, compared with 24% in the
West, 18% in the Midwest and 12% in the Northeast.
2The dispersion of the Latino population across the U.S. has slowed since the onset of the Great Recession. In
2014, half of the nation’s counties had at least 1,000 Hispanics, a
4-percentage-point increase from 2007. But dispersion was more
widespread from 2000 to 2007, when this share increased from 38% to 46%
of all U.S. counties – an 8-percentage-point increase.
3In recent years, the fastest Latino population growth has tended to come in areas with a relatively small number of Latinos. Three counties in North Dakota had the fastest growth in Latino population from 2007 to 2014. During this time, North Dakota added thousands of workers
thanks to a boom in Bakken shale oil production. This Hispanic
population surge may be a shift away from the South, which had eight of
the 10 fastest-growing Hispanic county populations from 2000 to 2007.
Even so, the South remains the largest source of growth, accounting for
43% of U.S. Hispanic population growth from 2007 to 2014.
4The Hispanic population is not growing in every county of the United States.
The Latino population declined in 38 counties with at least 1,000
Latinos in 2014, and most of these declines were in Texas, Colorado and
New Mexico – states that have large and well-established Latino
populations. Many of these counties are located in non-metropolitan
areas. For example, in Texas, Culberson County’s Latino population
declined from 2007 to 2014 by 15% to 1,665, the largest drop in the
nation. Saguache County in Colorado had the second-fastest decline in
its Latino population during this period, dropping by 14% to 2,370.
5California continues to have the nation’s largest Latino population among states, but Texas has grown faster. In 2014, 15 million Hispanics lived in California,
a 37% increase from the 10.9 million Hispanics in 2000. Texas saw even
quicker growth, with its Hispanic population increasing 56%, from 6.7
million in 2000 to 10.4 million in 2014.
6More than half (53%) of the nation’s Hispanics lived in 15 metropolitan areas in 2014.
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim topped the list with 6 million Hispanics
in 2014, a majority of whom are U.S. born, as is the case in most of
these metro areas.
Immigrants made up the majority in two of the top 15: In Florida’s
Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, 61% of 2.6 million Hispanics were
foreign born in 2014, while in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria (which
includes the District of Columbia and parts of Virginia, Maryland and
West Virginia), 53% of 900,000 Hispanics are foreign born.
This Action Item, if passed—and we are certainly hopeful that it will—creates 11th and 12th grade, full-credit, Ethnic Studies Literature
Foundation (as opposed to "Enrichment" or elective) courses that will
count toward graduation and that can substitute for English III and
English IV for high school juniors and seniors throughout the state of Texas. The courses do not actually have a name yet, so I'm simply calling them "Ethnic Studies in Comparative Literary Perspective."
This happens, of course, on the heels of the successful #RejectTheText battle in the September and November, 2016, meetings of the SBOE which speaks to the powerful and important role of advocacy and a unified voice, together with persistence on a cause that promises to breathe life into our state curriculum that will benefit ALL of our youth.
Hats off to SBOE Georgina Perez for her stellar leadership, as well as to the rest of the SBOE—especially SBOE Members Rubén Cortez and Marissa Perez—for their unflagging leadership and support. Erika Beltran (Dallas), also on the Committee on Instruction, gave voice to the significance of Ethnic Studies. While it made an important difference in her life, her exposure to it was negligible, not unlike how it generally is for our youth statewide today.
I very much encourage you to read this path breaking research, alongside the equally path breaking study by Thomas Dee and Emily Penner based on data gathered out of the San Francisco Unified School District's Ethnic Studies program that was recently published in the AERJ.
My testimony largely underscored how extant multicultural standards that I culled through various sources are precisely about the positive negotiation of difference in our diverse society and world, as well as to how these courses help prepare youth for college.
Kudos, as well, to the numerous students, scholars, parents, teachers, legislators, community leaders, and organizations that have weighed in over the years. In this vein, I invite you to read Dr. Emilio Zamora's recent post titled, The Mexican Fight for Ethnic Studies in Texas: The Biography of a Cause to which yesterday's testimony is another important addition. We're not there yet, but we're getting very close, thankfully. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words resonate today, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
A State Board of Education member has proposed integrating ethnic studies into high school English class.
The class would be optional but could fulfill the English 3 or 4 requirement.
In what could be the first step in integrating ethnic studies into
Texas high school curriculum, the State Board of Education is
considering a new English class that examines works of authors from
different ethnic backgrounds. Board member Georgina C. Pérez, D-El
Paso, has proposed a comparative literature class for juniors or
seniors that would include works by authors from diverse backgrounds.
SBOE Member Georgina Perez, Dr. Nolan Cabrera, and me
The optional course would fulfill students’ English 3 or 4
requirement and would follow established curriculum, so the board
wouldn’t have to take on the complicated and lengthy process of creating
new curriculum standards. “The definition of comparative
literature is not exclusive of one ethnic group or one cultural group,”
Pérez said. “It’s comparative literature of a variety of ethnicities and
cultures and historical periods, but the most important thing for a
successful comparative literature course is that it is responsive and
reflective of the students in the classroom as well as the community.” A
committee of the board started discussing Thursday the possibility of
creating a comparative ethnic studies literature course with hopes that
the full board would consider it as early as its June meeting. The
board in the past hasn’t been amenable to ethnic studies courses. In
2014, the board rejected a push to create an elective Mexican-American
studies course, fearing that it would teach divisiveness. The board
offered instead to approve textbooks for districts who want to offer
African-American studies, Native American studies and Asian-American
studies courses.
Three lawmakers have proposed bills this session that would allow
ethnic studies English and social studies elective courses to be taught
in middle and high school. The bills, sponsored by Democrats, haven’t
gained traction. Pérez said that more students would take ethnic
studies if it is offered as an English or history class rather than an
elective. She is hopeful that the course will win board approval because
it doesn’t require new curriculum standards and is inclusive. She
envisions the course as the first step to integrating more ethnic
studies into other core courses in lower grades. “This sounds like
something that even in the elementary years would be something to get
started … and start working the way up. I think that would be
excellent,” board member Sue Melton-Malone, R-Robinson, said during
Thursday’s meeting. According to a study by the University of
Arizona, Tucson students who took Mexican-American studies courses were
more likely to pass all state standardized tests, including math.
Students started performing better because they saw their cultural
background reflected positively in the material that they were learning,
Angela Valenzuela, a University of Texas education professor, told the
committee. “A positive social identity, a positive sense of self, a
positive sense of society, so it’s really these pro-social values that
are so important,” Valenzuela said. “What they did in Tucson is that
they really promoted a sense of ‘we-ness’ and not this othering of
people who are different.”
So inspiring and encouraging! Finally, here we have a Texas university that realizes that it is in a state that shares a close to 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
It's fun to know all the people in this story. There is no reason why more of our universities cannot move in this direction. Long overdue. Congratulations, felicidades, my friends!
The Edinburg campus of UTRGV, where 90 percent of the student body is Hispanic.Brad Doherty
UT-Rio Grande Valley looks to become the first 'bilingual, bicultural, biliterate' campus in the country.
by Daniel Blue Tyx
“The question of the day is: Are you
smart?” professor José Saldívar announced at the start of class. “Don’t
just give me a yes-or-no answer. Tell me why.” Seated in a sparkling
new classroom at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Edinburg
campus, with rolling chairs in the school colors — blue, green and burnt
orange — students inched closer together to debate the value of innate
ability versus hard work. Their conversations might have occurred in any
first-year seminar, but for one key difference: They took place in both
English and Spanish, often at the same time.
The bilingual course I visited is a pilot for an initiative known
around campus as B3 — “bilingual, bicultural, biliterate” — that aims to
transform the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) into the
United States’ first comprehensively bilingual public university. The
project’s goals, proponents say, are far-reaching: to not only produce
the bilingual professionals in high demand along the Texas-Mexico
border, but also to begin to redress a historical legacy of what queer
Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, a Valley native, calls “linguistic
terrorism” against border Spanish speakers denied the legitimacy of
their native tongue. As the initiative moves from rhetoric to reality,
though, UTRGV finds itself grappling with questions of identity: What
does it mean to be a bilingual and bicultural university?
“It’s about being much more aware of the language that is being
spoken, and making sure that the space is safe for my students,”
Saldívar told me after class in his office, which is decorated with an
oversized pennant from Stanford, his alma mater. Saldívar, who in the
fall of 2016 taught the first of what is expected to be dozens of
bilingual or Spanish courses, has plenty of common ground with his
students. Now in his late 30s, he grew up in the rural South Texas
community of Edcouch-Elsa; his parents were punished in school for
speaking Spanish and encouraged him to speak only English at home.
Language could play a role in helping students feel a sense of comfort
and belonging at the university, Saldívar said, but he wanted to impress
on me that what the students were talking about was as noteworthy as
how they chose to say it. “I think the American ethos is you pull
yourself up by your bootstraps in order to be successful,” he said. “And
that’s great. But I want my students to recognize the challenges and
the disparities. And when faced with those challenges, ask: ‘What do we
do?’ Because I want them to be able to handle that.”
For the class I visited at UTRGV’s Edinburg campus, students had read
an article by Juan Carrillo called “I Always Knew I Was Gifted: Latino
Males and the Mestiz@ Theory of Intelligences.” It led with an epigraph
from Anzaldúa: “Theorists-of-color are in the process of trying to
formulate ‘marginal’ theories that are partially outside and partially
inside the Western frame of reference (if that’s possible), theories
that overlap many ‘worlds.’”
The critical theory made for challenging reading for first-year
students in what has often been taught as a remedial course. Before
class, I’d heard several students grumbling bilingually about the
article’s length. Still, as I listened in on their conversations, I
observed that for several students in particular, the topic seemed to
have struck a chord. “They would only pay attention to the smart ones,
to the APs,” Julissa Lopez said of her high school teachers. “With the
people who spoke Spanish, they were simple. They talk to you like you’re
stupid. Like a baby.”
“¿En-ti-en-des lo que es-toy di-ci-en-do?” Sara Nuño
interjected, mimicking a teacher’s condescending tone. Moving back and
forth between Spanish and English, she explained that in high school,
she and her mother would line up at 5 a.m. to walk across the
international bridge from their home in Rio Bravo so she wouldn’t be
late for class in Pharr. “Yo, todas las mañanas, I would cross the border, since sixth, seventh grade, till senior year. Todas las mañanas, 5 a.m. El sacrificio que haces por venir aquí.”
Professor José Saldívar at the UTRGV campus in Edinburg. Brad Doherty
After class, Saldívar said that Sara was a shy student at first, but
that the bilingual aspect of the class helped her find her voice. “I
remember the first time she spoke, she was really hesitant, and she
tried speaking in English,” he said. “Then she said, ‘No, no, bueno, en español,’ and she just took off. Now, I can always count on Sara to talk in class.”
Another student, Ethan Treviño, said a scheduling glitch had randomly
placed him in the bilingual pilot section, even though he doesn’t speak
Spanish. While initially apprehensive, he’d come to see the placement
as an opportunity. “Going through high school, there were a lot of
people in my classes who mainly spoke Spanish,” he said. “I never got a
chance to hang out with them because of the language barrier. This class
is allowing me to learn what I couldn’t in high school. It wasn’t the
type of Spanish that we talk here; they wanted us to learn ‘proper,’
like what they’re speaking in Spain. It didn’t allow me to lose that
barrier here where I live.”
The bilingual initiative was born out of a messy divorce and a
shotgun marriage. In 2011, Texas Southmost College, a community college,
and the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) severed ties in a
dispute over unpaid rent, precipitating a fiscal crisis. At the behest
of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, then-UTB President
Juliet Garcia convened a planning committee. The blueprint they created,
known as UTB 2.0, included the bilingual program’s principles.
“Universities are always trying to identify what they’re going to be
uniquely good at,” Garcia told me. “We felt that we should embrace our
geography, embrace our unique positioning with the issues of language
and culture, and produce historians, teachers, physicians and engineers
who could do this work in at least two languages.”
Then-UT System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa, a Laredo native, was
enthusiastic but skeptical of the economics. “I don’t care how
optimistic we are — at the end of the day, a vision isn’t going to
become reality without a realistic business plan,” he said. Cigarroa
proposed merging UTB with the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA),
70 miles west in Edinburg. The creation of a new university allowed both
campuses to draw on the Permanent University Fund, a $17.5-billion fund
historically built on oil and gas. Acting quickly, the regents adopted a
set of guiding principles that drew heavily on UTB 2.0. The bilingual
program was principle number five.
“I saw that, and I just about fell out of my seat,” said Francisco
Guajardo, the executive director of the newly formed B3 Institute at
UTRGV. “I said, ‘What, are you serious?’ You know the makeup of regents —
they’re all appointed by very conservative governors. They were
probably thinking folklórico and mariachis.” His booming laugh filled
the dining room of the historic Echo Hotel, a few miles south of UTRGV’s
Edinburg campus, where we discussed the origins of B3 over breakfast
tacos.
Guajardo’s roots in the Valley run deep, and his interest in
bilingual and bicultural education is as personal as it is academic. He
was born in Reynosa, where — according to family lore — his grandfather,
a bulega (bootlegger), fled after killing a rival who snitched
on him to the Texas Rangers. In December 1968, when Guajardo was 4
years old, his family moved to Edcouch-Elsa. A month earlier, 140
Edcouch-Elsa High School students had walked out to protest
discrimination against Mexican Americans. Three years later, as a
first-grader, Guajardo became part of a pilot bilingual education class,
the first of its kind in the Valley. “I’m from around here,” he said.
“I’ve experienced a lot of these kinds of things around language and
culture, and around the valuing or the devaluing of both.”
I met Guajardo after he gave a community talk at the Museum of South
Texas History called “From Taming a Wild Tongue to Building a Bilingual
University.” The title borrowed from a chapter in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera
in which she remembers that as a student at Pan American University —
now UTRGV’s Edinburg campus — she was required to take speech classes to
“correct” her accent in English. She argues that “ethnic identity is
twin skin to linguistic identity — I am my language. Until I can take
pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.”
After the talk, a UTRGV professor stood up to inquire if B3 was a
top-down initiative. “It is,” Guajardo allowed. Before he could
elaborate, a Mexican-American man in his 60s came to his defense. “It
may be top down,” the man said, “but this is the percolating of
sentiment in the community to say, ‘We need to right the wrongs. We need
to be about having permission, unfettered, to raise our children
differently.’”
In 2015, Guajardo traveled with four faculty members to the
University of Ottawa, the largest bilingual university in North America.
“It’s a 150-year-old institution that is sitting on a bilingual zone as
a matter of public policy,” Guajardo said. “We see that. We think to
ourselves: ‘This is so inspiring. Could we do it in a place that tamed a
wild tongue?’” In the spring, the university will expand the bilingual
pilot from one to five sections. A few programs, including an MFA in
creative writing and an MBA, are already offered in Spanish or
bilingually. Soon, Guajardo hopes, UTRGV will be able to offer the
entire core curriculum bilingually, with more complete degree plans to
follow.
But becoming the nation’s first bilingual university will mean more
than just offering classes in both languages. It will also require a
dramatic shift in the way that the university, and the Valley as a
whole, thinks about matters of history and identity, in a place where a
century of systemic language and ethnic discrimination has too often
gone unacknowledged, and where even today bilingual education is viewed
primarily through a remedial lens.
In addition to directing the B3 Institute, Guajardo is at work on a
book of oral histories documenting the history of bilingual education in
the Valley. “Invariably, each of the elders will tell the story of how
they were punished, spanked, chastised, for speaking Spanish in school,”
he said. “It is no accident that this region is much more conservative
in terms of bilingual education, because of a historical trauma that
people experienced.
“This,” Guajardo said, “is a social change experiment.”
Francisco Guajardo speaks with two UTRGV alumni at a meeting in Edinburg about the bilingual program. Brad DohortyUTRGV’s newly drafted vision statement begins, “To be the
nation’s premier Hispanic-serving institution and a highly engaged
bilingual university.” The admissions page on the university’s website —
soon to be fully bilingual — prominently features the program as a
selling point. “It is a priority,” Provost Havidán Rodríguez told me
when we met on the Brownsville campus, which, unlike Edinburg’s, is
right on the border. (On my way to campus, I passed under a sign warning
me not to take firearms into Mexico, before exiting onto University
Boulevard.)
“This is not a marketing scheme. We’re putting in place the
organizational structure, the staff, the funding and the faculty that we
need to make this happen. I think that speaks louder than words,
right?”
Overt opposition of the kind you might expect elsewhere —
“English-only” rhetoric and the like — has been largely nonexistent in
the Valley. All of the students I met, from freshmen to graduate
students, from monolingual English speakers to recent immigrants from
Mexico, expressed an interest in taking the bilingual classes.
“Honestly, I’m not really concerned,” Rodríguez responded when I
inquired about student interest. “Students know this is important.”
The most insistent criticism has come from students and faculty who
think the university is not going far enough. As the university
considers starting a football team and scrambles to deal with the
fallout from a December decision by its accreditor to put the university
on probation — UTRGV says the violations are related to the contentious
separation from Texas Southmost College — skeptics worry that the
university may lack sufficient commitment to follow through on its
ambitious agenda.
Stephanie Alvarez, the founding director of the Center for Mexican
American Studies at UTRGV, has been one of the most vocal critics. We
spoke on a lime-green couch at the center, which Alvarez had a hand in
designing, asking that the planned cubicles be eschewed in favor of an
open lounge. Behind us, a group of students sat talking while they cut
out materials for a Day of the Dead altar project the center was
facilitating at area elementary schools.
For Alvarez, who in 2015 became the first faculty member in the
history of the University of Texas System to receive a prestigious U.S.
Professor of the Year Award from the Carnegie Foundation, the focus on
bilingualism obscures a lack of commitment to programs such as
Mexican-American studies that turn a critical eye on the history and
culture of the borderlands. “It’s easy to sell bilingual in some ways,”
Alvarez said. “Many, many people speak Spanish in the Valley. It’s not
threatening. Whereas [with] Mexican-American studies, you have to have
difficult conversations. You’re possibly producing new knowledge that
disrupts the dominant narrative, which for some people makes them very
uncomfortable.”
Growing up Cuban American in Miami during the Mariel boatlift, a time
of heightened anti-Cuban sentiment, “I really had no appreciation for
my culture,” Alvarez said. “I wanted to distance myself as much as
possible.” In high school, she didn’t read books. “Ever. The worst thing
you could ever tell me was that I would have to read.” She went to
college to play basketball and ended up a Spanish major by default,
since it required the fewest courses to graduate. Then, during her
senior year, she was required to take a Latin-American literature
course. The first entry in the anthology was a magical realist story by
Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré. For Alvarez, it was a moment of
academic awakening. “I realized that this was the first time I’d ever
read anything that I connected to,” she said.
When Alvarez came to teach at UTPA in 2006, the only ethnic studies
degree plan was called Mexican-American Heritage, and it had graduated
just three students in 30 years. Eighteen credit hours were in Spanish
grammar, “indicating much of what Anzaldúa says about ‘linguistic
terrorism,’ but on the Spanish side, which was to ‘correct’ the
students’ Spanish,” Alvarez said. She joined an informal group of Latina
junior faculty members that began developing a revised curriculum that
would become the basis for Mexican-American studies at UTRGV.
Alvarez is particularly outraged that no other degree plan at the
university requires a Mexican-American studies course. “If you get a
degree in English, you never have to take a class in Mexican-American
literature,” Alvarez said. “It is an option. But it cannot be an option
if we are going to be a bicultural university. If you are going to be an
English teacher, 90-something percent of your students are going to be
Mexican American. Those teachers have no access to the literature that
represents their students.”
Stephanie Alvarez outside her office on the Edinburg campus. Brad Dohorty
Hiring is another issue. Alvarez pointed out that the
Mexican-American studies department has only two faculty members;
previous efforts at joint hires with other departments have gone
nowhere. “People always think there’s an urgency for, I don’t know, ‘I
desperately need a medievalist.’ But at this moment, at this university,
we desperately need someone who can do bilingual and bicultural. This
is what will make UTRGV stand out from any other university.”
Guajardo is acutely sensitive to the critiques voiced by Alvarez and
others. “Without the infusion of culturally appropriate, culturally
relevant approaches, I think that we don’t touch the spirit of the
region,” he said. At one point, he was interrupted by a phone call;
someone from the MBA program was looking for a course taught in Spanish
to fulfill a breadth requirement. He pitched a Mexican- American studies
class. “Stephanie would be great for the MBA students,” he told the
person on the other line. “She would turn [the business students] upside
down with all kinds of Chicano studies stuff that they would do well to
know.”
As for hiring and resources, Guajardo told me, “If I have an issue,
and this is a personal critique, it’s that I hoped the investment would
have been so much greater. It’s not because people don’t want it. In
fairness to my immediate supervisors, they’re trying, they’re working
it. But you know, it’s never enough. A lot of this is the faith that we
have in certain people.”
On November 2, the Day of the Dead, I joined a group of 15 UTRGV
students, faculty and community members at Gloria Anzaldúa’s gravesite
in the Valle de la Paz Cemetery in Hargill, the one-conveniencestore-
town north of Edinburg where she grew up in a family of migrant
farmworkers. Organized by the Center for Mexican American Studies, the
annual pilgrimage symbolically “returns” Anzaldúa to the Valley and her
alma mater, where her work, in spite of widespread acclaim elsewhere,
was largely unrecognized at the time of her death in 2004. Now in its
10th year, the event and others like it have catalyzed local interest,
and Anzaldúa’s writing, which moves fluidly between English and Spanish
and poetry and prose, is foundational to the bilingual program.
“If we don’t want to reproduce the ‘linguistic terrorism’ that
Anzaldúa experienced at Pan American University, then we need to embrace
initiatives like B3,” Lupe Flores, a graduate student in anthropology
and Mexican-American studies, told me. Flores first encountered Anzaldúa
in one of Stephanie Alvarez’s classes and organized the pilgrimage this
year. “Outside the university, we have this national climate that is
very ‘English-only,’ anti-Spanish, anti-immigrant — they kind of go hand
in hand,” he said. “I think this initiative has a lot of potential to
undo the racism and oppression that earlier generations had to
experience, and that a lot of us are still experiencing.”
On the tombstone, emblazoned on either side by bilingual passages from Anzaldúa’s work, participants placed ofrendas of sugary pan de muerto and magenta bougainvillea leaves. One student had brought a bundle of cenizo
(sage), which she lit and passed around with a conch shell underneath
to catch the ashes. For 15 minutes or so, everyone stood in silence,
except for the sounds of birdsong, dogs barking and a rooster crowing in
the distance.
Then, one by one, those gathered began to offer testimonios
describing how Anzaldúa’s work embracing the linguistic and cultural
richness of the borderlands had shaped their own lives. Flores spoke
about his grandmother, a Pentecostal Christian whose family has lived on
the same riverfront rancho for almost two centuries. Estranged
first by a language barrier and later because of his homosexuality,
Flores said that reading Anzaldúa had helped him reconnect with his
grandmother and the culture of the border more broadly. “Seeing my
grandmother think through her positions, I could see that even though
she’s this very religious, God-fearing woman, she has her own
borderlands, her own ways of articulating and accepting things,” he
said.
Toward the end of the ceremony, members of a student poetry
collective offered a choral reading of an excerpt from Anzaldúa’s work.
At the text’s instruction, they invited those gathered to turn their
gaze to the east, south, west and north, then to the underworld, and
lastly to the sky, as they read:
We are ready for change.
Let us link hands and hearts
together find a path through the dark woods
step through the doorways between worlds
leaving huellas for others to follow,
build bridges, cross them with grace,
and claim these puentes our
“home”
si se puede, que asi sea, so be it,
estamos listas, vámonos. Now let us shift.
contigo,
gloria
