Friends, Happy to share both my introductory remarks and Dr. Emilio Zamora's luncheon lecture titled, "The Mexican Fight for Ethnic Studies in Texas: The Biography of a Cause" as this year's recipient of the "NACCS Scholar Award" at the annual meeting of the National Association for Chicanaand Chicano Studies on March 24, 2017.
The award is the top award for the organization and goes to those who best exemplify both stellar scholarship and activism—core values of the organization. So proud of Emilio for all that he has done and for all that he continues to do for a better, more just world. Heck, that's why I married him!
Enjoy!
Angela
National Association for Chicana
and Chicano Studies
Awards Luncheon
March 24, 2017
I’m Angela Valenzuela, Dr. Zamora’s
significant other.
 |
| Emilio, Angela, and Dr. June Pedraza, Irvine, CA |
Emilio has received seven best-book
awards, having received all the possible book awards in Texas in Mexican
American and Texas history.
Emilio just received La Estrella de
Tejas NACCS Tejas Foco Lifetime Achievement Award. He is deeply involved in the Austin
Community—organizations and politics.
Emilio is the chief content person for the co-constructed curriculum used
in the Austin AISD-sponsored Academia Cuauhtli, a partnership-based, cultural
and language revitalization project that administers a Saturday academy at the
Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center (ESB-MACC) in Austin, Texas. He is also a co-founder and member of the Raza
Roundtable, the only community Latino forum in Austin, and a member of Austin’s
Hispanic-Latino Quality of Life Advisory Commission (he tried to get off it,
but his colleagues begged him not to) and the Mayor’s Committee on
Institutional Racism. He has also served
three terms on the Board of the ESB-MACC.
Emilio is currently a Professor of
history at the University of Texas and holds the George W. Littlefield
Professorship in American history. He is
a member of the Board of the TSHA and is serving as the second Vice-President
of the organization (in line to become the President of TSHA in two years). Emilio is a lifetime Fellow in TSHA and a
lifetime member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
Emilio has been a member of NACCS
since its formation and is currently active with the K-12 Committee of the
Tejas NACCS Foco. He has also been
active in policies and politics associated with the Texas Legislature and the
Texas State Board of Education.
Emilio is also a person of great faith and of great
love of his children, grandson, and most especially his really amazing,
life-long partner…ME!
I’ll borrow from Martha Cotera who unfortunately
could not be with us and who sends her regards to all; she says that ours is a
love that has survived marriage.
In all seriousness, I admire Emilio
greatly for his love of community and for modeling precisely how one moves
effortlessly and seamlessly as a scholar from theory to action and back.
That is, his advocacy is not that of a parachutist or lone wolf that presents
itself in an episodic, calculating way. Rather it is substantive with a
deep, ongoing level of engagement as a trusted, beloved member of our
community.
I often think of his way of living
as epitomizing Reverend Martin Luther King’s notion of the Beloved
Community. This is a slow and patient process premised on deep, life-long
relationships that enable effective action, big and small, in a way that
fosters community development, presence, and voice through the affirming ethos
of spiritual uplift that naturally results and evolves. The proverbial
call in Mexican American Studies for “community engaged scholarship” is hardly
an abstraction in Dr. Zamora’s case, but rather a way of life.
Please join me in welcoming this
year’s recipient of the NACCS Scholar Award!
The Mexican Fight for Ethnic Studies in Texas:
The Biography of a Cause
Emilio Zamora, Ph.D.
Thank you Angela. I also wish to thank everyone who made
possible the award that the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies
is giving me today. I am honored and
humbled because of what you think about my work.
In the short time that I have, I wish
to talk about a recent and extraordinary victory that we won in Texas. The victory was the successful statewide
effort by the K-12 Committee of the NACCS Tejas Foco that convinced the Texas
State Board of Education to reject a technically flawed and culturally
offensive textbook to teach Mexican American Studies in our majority-minority
public school system. The victory was
not limited to the rejection of the racist text and the symbolic value that it
carries as an act of recovering, defending and affirming our knowledge.
We also demonstrated our ability to
come together in the thousands and to affirm our ability and desire to promote
social justice. We understand that the
attempt to get a racist text adopted by the State Board may have sought to
elicit such a response to gauge the ability of intellectuals to connect with our
communities. It really doesn’t matter
that the opposition is watching us. What
matters is that the strength in our organization and organizing fortifies us
and prepares us for future fights.
I’ll start by saying that victories
in our business of creating knowledge and promoting a better world do no often receive
enough attention. We should acknowledge
the victories when they occur even if we only use the occasion to credit persons
and organizations who contributed and to lift up dejected spirits. I want to talk about our victory for an added
reason. I believe that NACCS is granting
me the Scholar Award in large part because I participated in the Reject the
Text campaign that produced the victory for us.
I also want to recognize that the
effort involved thousands of people and that the victory—occurring as it did,
soon after the announcement of the election of President Donald Trump—served as
an important reminder that we can win and that we can rise up and
above the significant challenges that we often face.
I also want reiterate our special
responsibility as socially committed persons who work and study at colleges and
universities, a responsibility that is noted in our foundational Plan de Santa
Barbara and that people like our esteemed Professors Rodolfo Acuña and Juan
Gómez-Quiñones that have for so long reminded us.
We must remain bound to our communities, knowing that we can break
through the academic strictures of language, method and conceptualizations when
working with and on behalf of communities in struggle for dignity and equal
rights.
Before I
talk about this victory, however, I should note some the challenges that we
face in Texas, including:
· The malicious
anti-immigrant rhetoric, the unmerciful deportation raids and detention centers;
· An
antiquated school finance system;
· Voucher
proposals intending to weaken our public school system;
· Successful
legislative initiatives to limit minority voting;
· Grinding
poverty and persistent inequality;
· Embarrassingly
poor Democratic Party leadership; and
· A
form of Republican—mostly White—rule that takes as much pleasure in espousing
conservative views as in preempting and disrupting our cause for dignity and
equal rights.
We also enjoy good and promising fortunes in Texas:
· We
continue to grow demographically and our voter turn-out rates are increasing;
· Our
political representation has improved;
· Mexican
Americans have made significant inroads in the numbers of principals and superintendents
in Texas school districts;
· Increasing
numbers of Latinas/os are graduating from high schools, colleges and
universities;
· The number
of Mexican organizations and their collaborative ties have grown; and
· The
NACCS Tejas Foco (Chapter) has assumed a major statewide leadership role in the
area of educational reform.
In the
last three years, the K-12 Committee of the Texas NACCS Foco has been involved
in:
· The
establishment of at least three new Chicana/o Studies programs in Texas colleges
and universities;
· The
adoption of Ethnic Studies in the curriculum in well over twenty-four school
districts;
· The approval
by the Austin ISD of a pathway project in Ethnic Studies from the fifth grade to
university studies;
· Two statewide
Mexican American Studies summits and three annual conferences; and
· A
legislative bill on Ethnic Studies.
I now turn to our special recent victory that speaks to one of
NACCS’s singular concerns, the mis-education and under-education of our public
school youth.
Our effort involved numerous organizations, the most of
important of which was our NACCS Tejas Foco and its K-12 Committee. The allies included MALDEF, the Texas Freedom
Network, the Mexican American School Board Association, the Texas Association
of Chicanos in Higher Education, LULAC, the American G.I. Forum and many more. At the heart of the cause were faculty, staff
and students from Texas colleges and universities—like the community colleges
of San Antonio, UTSA, UT-RGV, South Texas College, Austin Community College, UT
Austin, the University of Houston (central and downtown), community colleges in
Houston and the many other colleges and universities from throughout the state. Popular support also involved tens of
thousands of signatures in an electronic petition, hundreds of participants in
our rallies and press conferences, many letters of support from groups such as
the leading Mexican American school superintendents from throughout the state, about
15 Mexican American legislators who spoke in our rallies and in the State Board
hearings and approximately two-hundred students, faculty, teachers, parents and
others who testified in our favor during two all-day hearings.
The story began last summer when we heard that Momentum Books
had proposed to the Texas State Board of Education a textbook for adoption to
teach Mexican American Studies in the state’s public schools. We suspected a problem when we discovered
that the owner of the publishing house was Ms. Cynthia Dunbar, a former
conservative member of the State Board, an Assistant Law Professor at Jerry Falwell’s
Liberty University, a recent Trump delegate to the Republican Party Convention,
and a co-chair of Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. The selection of the book’s authors, Jaime
Riddle and Valarie Angle, also raised concerns.
Riddle posted a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Duke
University and a master’s in education from Regent University. Riddle’s reported claim to fame was her
selection as Amazon’s Top 1000 reviewers in 2013. Riddle is known to have stated that she has
focused on “exposing subtle anti-Western themes in popular children’s
literature,” that have a “particular emphasis on socialist, anti-modern, and
anti-American motifs” and “revisionist history.”
Angle
has a B.A. in early childhood education from the University of Central Florida,
Master’s in leadership studies from Hollins University and claims to be an
education specialist. She has taught and
served as an instructional coach, infant toddler development specialist,
principal at a Christian academy and a wellness advocate. Like Riddle, Angle does not claim training
and experience in Mexican-American studies.
Upon
reading portions of an electronic copy of the book that the State Board had
posted, we discovered that it was unabashedly and tauntingly racist in its
depiction of our communities, and it was full of errors of facts,
interpretation and omission. By the time
that the K-12 Committee had met during its state education summit in San
Antonio, we had decided that NACCS should review the book and recommend its
rejection by the State Board. This was a
daunting task given the highly involved process of thoroughly reviewing a book
and the expected difficulty of convincing a highly conservative State Board to
reject it.
We
had been busy working within our K-12 committee to build a statewide campaign
to develop Mexican American curriculum, sponsor professional development
workshops for teachers and building partnerships with local school
districts. Many of us dreaded a repeat
of early defeats when the State Board held its periodic hearings on reforming
the standard curriculum and disregarded our critiques of the mis-representation
and under-representation of Mexicans, Indigenous persons, Blacks and women. A group of us scholars in the NACCS Foco K-12
committee, nevertheless, accepted the challenge of demonstrating that the
proposed text was fraught with historical errors and racist interpretations of
Mexicans in history and contemporary society.
Our
group came together as an advisory committee to Mr. Ruben Cortez, one of three
Mexican American members of the State Board who also constituted the lone
progressive bloc in a board of fifteen elected members. Expecting yet another dismissal of
our concerns, our advisory committee conducted an initial review of the text. We found hundreds of factual, omission and
interpretation errors. Three members of
the review team—Chris Carmona, Trinidad Gonzales and myself—presented the
findings during an October hearing. The other members of the committee included
Juan Carmona, Rogelio Saenz, Guadalupe San Miguel, Angela Valenzuela, and Aimee
Villarreal.
In accordance with established book
adoption procedure, the publisher responded to our findings with a refusal to
accept our findings and even offered new text with their own proposed
revisions. I electronically convened a
second group of thirty-six scholars who found well over four-hundred new and
uncorrected errors in the second round of reviews. Carmona, Gonzalez and I presented the second
set of findings during the Board’s November public hearing. Our review team reported 407 errors in a
spreadsheet of 931 rows (see below for a copy of our second report to the State
Board of Education).
The most egregious errors were claims
that Mexicans were lazy and that we represent a political and cultural threat in
U.S. history especially during the early years of our current social
movement. An error that strained logic was
that Communists in Latin America have caused natural disasters, attributing
supernatural powers to a failed cause in Mexican American history. The most absurd and recurring statements were
that the publisher was not bound to say anything about Mexican Americans and
that we—the authorities on record—were mistaken in every instance that we
pointed out a factual, interpretation or omission error.
The authors never appeared during the
hearings to defend our critique as is typical in textbook adoption hearings, suggesting
that they had not written the text, but that a ghost team of writers that were
more familiar with Latin American and U.S. history prepared the disjointed
narrative. The fact that the text only
devoted approximately one-third of the text to Mexican Americans underscored this
possibility. The Board eventually voted
unanimously—15 to 0—to reject the text.
This was unprecedented and extraordinary in large part because the
majority of the conservative members of the State board exercised their
responsibility to youth as an ongoing principle in the deliberations alongside
with the smaller liberal group of three Mexican American members.
In hindsight, the victory was
predictable. The numerous factual errors
in the text and Dunbar’s obstinate behavior made it almost impossible for the State
Board to approve the text. The claims in
the text that Mexicans were political and cultural threats to U.S. society,
that they were prone to being lazy, and subject to radical thought from a
distant past in Mexico history made its adoption unacceptable. Added to this were our claims that a vote for
the text was an approval of the racist characterizations in the text, as well
as its wholesale dismissal of the vast literature on Mexican Americans produced
since the early 1970s and a blatant disregard for the voice of the expert
reviewers. In other words, we placed our
University-granting authority on the line. We were the experts, and they were not—and
the State Board listened to our claim.
Also, our claims carried the moral weight
of the large number of persons and organizations that supported our cause. It also helped that the Texas Freedom Network
and MALDEF assisted the K-12 Committee to coordinate the effort and bring the
necessary publicity to the Reject the Text campaign. Altogether, the campaign masterfully
organized the support of leading community organizations and promoted the fight
as a cause. It also struck a popular
chord of deep concern regarding the negative representation of our communities
in the public schools and a righteous sense of unity that accorded Mexican
American scholars great respect as the guardians of historical knowledge and
moral witnesses to truth.
Thank you for your attention. It has been an honor and a privilege to be a
part of the “Reject the Text” campaign, and to now report to you on our
extraordinary victory in Texas. We
continue the fight for Ethnic Studies, curriculum and social justice pedagogy
at state, local and district levels and celebrate our invigorating movement of
which NACCS has been a part in otherwise bleak and challenging times.
Muchas Gracias.
November 15, 2016
Mr. Rubén Cortez, Member
Texas State Board of Education
Austin, Texas
Dear Mr. Cortez,
We have
reviewed The Mexican American Heritage a second time and conclude that
the proposed textbook is fraught with errors, and continue to find it
unacceptable for use in our public schools. Our first review found a
significant number of errors in the textbook that led us to conclude that the
authors had not met the minimum professional standards to justify its use in
our Texas schools (See attached document submitted to Mr. Rubén Cortez: Ad Hoc
Committee Report on Proposed Social Studies Special Topic Textbook, Mexican
American Heritage, September 6, 2016).
Our second review assesses the responses by the publisher to our first
findings of errors.
The authors
prepared a “second edition” of the proposed textbook, but we were unable to
review it because neither the authors, publisher, nor the Texas Education
Agency notified us that someone had posted an electronic copy this month. We have conducted a cursory examination of
the “second edition” and found that the authors have included revisions in
response to our initial review as well as new additions to the text. Our preliminary early assessment is that the
“second edition” also contains numerous new and continuing errors.
Our second
review is based on two sets of responses by the authors to the initial findings
of errors that we reported to the State Board of Education on September 6,
2016. The authors submitted their responses in two spread sheets.
We have amended them with two new columns on the far right to allow for our
error assessments and comments (these will be made available to the Board
members in electronic form). The first spread sheet includes 716 rows of
responses from the authors; we found 319 errors. The second spread sheet includes 215
responses from the authors; we found 96 errors.
Their responses totaled 931 and our findings of errors reached 407 (a
48% error rate).
Twenty-six
junior and senior scholars specializing or focusing on Mexican American Studies
reviewed the responses (See names and institutional affiliation below). They represent various fields, including Anthropology,
Civil Rights, Education, Law, Mexican American Studies, Music, Political
Philosophy, Political Science, Politics, Religion, Research Methods, Rhetoric,
Sociology, Texas History (Spanish Borderlands, Mexican, Independent and Modern
periods), U.S. History (Education, Immigration, Mexican American, Mexico,
Labor, Women), and Women and Gender Studies.
Four of the scholars were graduate students (1 in American Studies and
four in History). They assisted me in
planning, coordinating, assessing and reporting the review work.
Our
assessment did not count errors if the authors accepted our findings and to one
extent or another agreed to revise the text according to our suggestions. We also discounted errors if the authors made
a convincing argument in favor of keeping the text as it appears in the
book. Moreover, we instructed our
reviewers not to assign an error when the authors refused to give added focus
on the Mexican American experience and failed to provide relevance explanations
when they introduced histories that in our estimation were distant from the
focus of the book. Nor did we note an
error the many times that the authors claimed that they were not obliged to
expand or otherwise revise the portions of the text dealing with the Mexican American
experience. Although it was difficult to
overlook the many times that the authors responded to our findings of error
with hard-headed, condescending and ridiculing responses, we overlooked
unprofessional behavior as well.
We mostly
instructed our reviewers to identify factual errors. We also asked them to report factual errors
if they believed that omission of important historical experiences or
incomplete or questionable interpretations also involved the exclusion of facts
that were critical for a clear and fair understanding of the subject at
hand. I reviewed the entire 931 rows and
applied a strict and impartial review standard to give credibility to our
assessment and integrity to the review process.
Aside from
the errors noted above, the reviewers discovered other irregularities during
the second review, including the following:
1. The
authors did not respond to a substantial number of errors reported to the board
by Independent Historian Martha Cotera (Austin, Texas), and University Professors
James E. Crisp (North Carolina State University), Jesus Francisco de la Teja
(Texas State University), John McKiernan Gonzalez (Texas State Universities),
Emilio Zamora (University of Texas at Austin), and Andrés Tijerina (Austin
Community College);
2. The
authors also failed to respond to a section in the Cortez document that pointed
to errors at the end-of-chapter activity questions and in the captions to
images throughout the book;
3. They
disregarded our original finding of an obvious failure to consult current
scholarship in Mexican American, Mexican, Latin American and U.S. history, and
used less reliable and dated sources like online records, encyclopedia entries
and articles from popular venues;
4. They
continued to devote a relatively small portion of the narrative to Mexican
Americans (and the corresponding factual evidence) and an inordinate number of
pages to world, U.S., and Latin American history that had little if any
apparent relation to Mexican Americans;
5. We
had also asked that the authors give more coherence and focus by intermittently
providing relevance statements to justify the significant amount of attention
that they gave world, U.S., and Latin American history, but they essentially
declined our suggestion;
6. The
lack of attention to Mexican American history can be demonstrated in two ways:
the authors don’t use the term “Mexican-Americans” until page 146 (Chapter 5);
and many organizations, events and historical figures are absent and the
Mexican or Mexican American who do appear in the rest of the book do not
usually speak;
7. The
authors continued to disregard much of the vast scholarship on Mexican
Americans and its corresponding factual evidence that would have given them new
information and perspective;
8. The
authors often challenged our findings of errors by stating that they were not
obligated to address the historical and contemporary experience of Mexican
Americans on the grounds that they were required to prepare a social studies
resource and that the Texas State Board of Education never mandated a textbook
on Mexican Americans;
9. The
authors also disputed the conventional standard of peer review by claiming that
they are not "required" to provide any particular content beyond what
is already in the text;
10. The
authors consistently challenged our findings of errors, but would often add
revisions that essentially admitted parts of the errors, leading us to
speculate whether anyone could trust that they would ever heed the assessments
by professional scholars specializing on Mexican American history and related
fields;
11. They often failed to
identify the source of the proposed change in both spread sheets;
12. The first spread sheet
often attributed the “suggested” corrections to the publisher without
explanations;
13. The first spread sheet at
times attributed the “suggested” corrections to a "Public," but
failed to explain who this public is, what concerns they raised and how their
suggested correction responds to the public;
14.
In several cases, we had to do extensive cross-checking to
determine that their reference to an unidentified “public” that turned out to
be the Cortez document of September 6;
15. The extensive cross-checking challenge also involved instances in
the second spread sheet when the publisher and the authors did not offer vital
information like their response to our findings of error, and referred us to
the second spread sheet for their responses, often without the necessary
guidance to locate the corresponding information;
16. The
authors also made it very difficult for us by noting page numbers in the spread
sheets that did not correspond to the corresponding pages in the textbook;
17. The
authors occasionally refer to an “early edition” of the textbook when noting
that they had already responded to us in the first spread sheet, suggesting
that they may have been responding to our findings with the use of a draft of
the textbook that was not made available to us;
18. The
publisher submitted a new draft of the textbook in electronic form to the Texas
Education Agency in November 2016, too late for us to review for continuing
errors;
19. There
was no public notice that the Texas Education Agency or anyone else in an
official capacity would allow the publisher to submit an “early edition” so
late in the review process and in possible violation of established protocol
and procedural understandings among members of the public;
20. The
large number of errors in the text strongly suggests that the authors did not
have the necessary skills to prepare the textbook, especially the narrative on
the history of Mexican Americans; and
21. The
continuing errors, especially in Mexican American history, strongly suggest
that the authors—and whomsoever assisted them in formulating their
responses—failed in their second chance to guarantee a high-quality textbook.
We thank
you and the Board for the opportunity to review the proposed textbook. On previous occasions, we have noted that the
textbook had to rise to the level of professional standards that guarantee its
readers a scholarly based narrative of the highest quality. These standards also call for the kind of peer review process that the State Board
of Education requires. Our public
school youth deserve no less. They must
be able to understand and explain the complex individual and group experiences
of the past to prepare them for our modern and even more complex and
intellectually challenging world of today.
We must also provide them with a text that models the kind of behavior
that we wish to see in our young adults, including a fair, respectful, and
impartial examination and understanding of peoples and communities in our past
and present. In our considered opinion
as scholars specializing in multiple fields, we find that the textbook before
you does not meet these basic responsibilities and expectations.
I also wish to thank the senior and
junior scholars (listed below) who took the time in their busy schedules to assist
in reviewing the responses by the Momentum publisher and authors. As we stated in our earlier report, we are
not just scholars that abide by professional standards in our fields. We are also parents and educators who thank
you for your service and who take seriously our responsibility to provide youth
the best instructional material possible.
Sincerely,
Emilio
Zamora, Professor
Department
of History
University
of Texas at Austin, and
Lead Reviewer for the “Second Ad Hoc Committee Report on the
Proposed
Social Studies Special Topic Textbook: Mexican American
Heritage, For Mr. Ruben Cortez”
Reviewers
Dr. Carlos Blanton, History, Texas A&M University, College
Station
Dr. Roberto Calderón, History, University of North Texas
Dr. Yolanda Chavez-Leyva, History, University of Texas at El Paso
Dr. Christopher Carmona, Social Studies, Donna High School
Martha Cotera, Independent Scholar, Austin, Texas
Dr. James E. Crisp, History, North Carolina State
University
Dr. Jesus Francisco de la Teja, History, Texas State
University
Dr. John McKiernan Gonzalez, History, Texas State
University
Dr. Maritza de la Trinidad, Mexican American Studies, University
of Texas, Rio Grande Valley
Dr. Trinidad Gonzales, Mexican American Studies, South Texas
College
Dr. Sonia Hernández, History, Texas A&M University, College
Station
Dr. Emile Lester, Political Science and International Affairs,
University of Mary Washington
Dr. José María Herrera, Education, University of Texas at El Paso
Dr. Valerie Martínez, History, University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Laura Muñoz, History, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi
Dr. Raul Ramos, History, University of Houston
Dr. Virginia Marie Raymond, J.D.
Dr. Guadalupe San Miguel, History, University of Houston
Juan Tejeda, Music, Palo Alto College, San Antonio
Dr. Andres Tijerina, History, Austin Community College
Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Higher Education, College of Education,
University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Emilio Zamora, History, University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Jesus Jesse Zapata, History, Texas Southern University
Graduate Students Assisting Dr. Emilio Zamora
Lizeth Elizondo,
History, University of Texas at Austin
Alejandra Garza,
History, University of Texas at Austin
María E. Hammack,
History, University of Texas at Austin
Jaime Puente,
Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, University of Texas at Austin
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