An unscholarly work helped push an academic Chicano movement

We're making a difference, my friends.  This is not only good for the Latino community, by the way, but for all children and youth.

-Angela

An unscholarly work helped push an academic Chicano movement

By Elaine Ayala

June 11, 2017

Mexican American Heritage

“Mexican American Heritage,” a controversial text rejected last year by the Texas Board of Education, failed on many levels but succeeded in getting Latino academics to respond in force. The racist, offensive text, riddled with errors and falling below any kind of recognizable academic standard, also galvanized the Mexican American Studies movement.

The MAS community of Texas, which gathered in San Antonio over the weekend, can thank the unknown Momentum Press that published it and the equally unknown, unqualified authors who wrote it.

Christopher Carmona, assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, described the fight over the book as “a wake-up call.” Angela Valenzuela, professor at the University of Texas-Austin, called it “a game changer.”

More than 200 educators gathered at the second annual Statewide Summit on Implementing Mexican American Studies in Texas Schools. Led by the National Association for Chicana & Chicano Studies’ Tejas Foco Committee on Mexican American Studies, it focused on pre-K through 12 curricula. The state group may have surpassed the national in its activity and organization.

Its goal is clear: to implement Mexican American Studies in Texas at all grade levels. On the most basic levels, they’re sharing information and collecting data, even on individual teachers fighting the good fight, sometimes alone. They’re encouraged by finding them, and they ask teachers to self-report online at MAStxeducation.com.

“It’s encouraging and exciting,” Carmona says, when they find evidence of progress. He points to the Donna Independent School District, which offers a Mexican American history class.

Valenzuela said El Paso ISD passed a policy on ethnic studies, though it remains to be implemented. Austin ISD followed suit and this fall will offer an ethnic studies class in six high schools. By fall 2018, all its high schools will offer the class.

In San Antonio, a community-based effort called MAS for the Masses continues to reach students. A local KIPP charter school and Southwest High School offer MAS dual credit classes in conjunction with Palo Alto College. And Stevens High School in Northside ISD offers a Mexican American literature class. UTSA offers summertime MAS teacher training.

San Antonio’s strength also can be counted in the support of the MAS conference. UTSA hosted it and its co-sponsors included PAC’s Center for Mexican American Studies, the advocacy group Somos MAS, the Comparative Mexican American Studies Program at Our Lady of the Lake University and San Antonio College’s Center for MAS.

Chicano scholars involved can’t help but feel energized every time they find an ally — a town that shows interest, a teacher who hunts down the resources to teach a class.

“There’s a teacher in Ben Bolt, a little town in the middle of nowhere, teaching Mexican American History I and II,” Carmona said. “We found her at one of the conferences.”

Lucero Saldaña at the KIPP Camino Academy on the city’s West Side used popular films to teach a Mexican American history elective to sixth- through eighth-graders. They’ve learned about events in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement; attended a youth conference; heard United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta speak; and attended the Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez marches.

Her counterpart taught a class on civil rights that included studying current political movements such as Black Lives Matter and the push to expand the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

“It has empowered students,” Saldaña said. “They’re finally seeing themselves in the curriculum, in media and in history.”

Curriculum, standards and textbooks are in development at various grade levels. Chicano academics critical of Momentum’s book will have to be just as critical of new efforts that go before the State Board of Education, which meets later this month.

They’re already concerned about rolling out ethnic studies statewide. “We don’t want coaches teaching it, or substitute teachers,” or the only teacher of color in a school, for that matter, Valenzuela said.

They’ve been at work for decades. They know the power of newfound knowledge on students, of being transformed by reading for the first time how one’s own ancestors played roles in making Texas and the United States. Such enlightenment can change a person. History is powerful.

“Mexican American Heritage,” a failed effort at Mexican American Studies, was powerful, too. It did its job of building an academic force that’s itself transformational.

eayala@express-news.net

Twitter: @ElaineAyala