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.
Friends, Happy Friday! I'm happy to share this interview of Dr. Lilliana Saldaña and Vanessa Sandoval from a podcast named "Visions of Education." Scroll down to the bottom to get classroom resources. I loved hearing the excitement in their voices as they told both the story and their story. I have said previously elsewhere that we do not yet have the historiography of when what we know today as the field of "Mexican American Studies (MAS)" got started. The historical record, I predict, will show that albeit under other names, MAS has probably existed as long as we have lived as a people in Texas after the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). And it has existed as a way to combat and cope with systemic forms of oppression to which Dr. Saldaña and Vanessa give voice. I just read this just-published April 26, 2019 article that appears in the Journal of Latinos and Education titled, “No Había Bilingual Education:” Stories of Negotiation, Educación, y Sacrificios from South Texas Escuelitas by Enrique David Degollado,Randy Clinton Bell, & Cinthia S. Salinas from the Universityof Texas at Austin.
I am on David's and Randy's doctoral dissertation committees and David defends his doctoral dissertation soon. Dr. Salinas is a colleague of mine in the College of Education at UT.
Great work, everybody! We are making progress! I will quote my good friend Tony Baez who expresses with wisdom, "The best curriculum is written in times of struggle."
Pa 'lante! Onward! Sí se puede! Yes we can! Angela Valenzuela
In Episode 113, Michael and Dan talk with Dr. Lilliana Saldaña and Vanessa Sandoval about their (and the larger efforts) to create a Mexican American Studies course approved by the Texas State Board of Education.
Here are flyers and images from the MAS Teachers’ Academy and the movement that Dr. Saldaña and Vanessa shared with us!
Stolen Education film. Dan talked about Stolen Education which documents the untold story of Mexican-American school children who challenged discrimination in Texas schools in the 1950’s and changed the face of education in the Southwest.
Biographies
Vanessa Sandoval is a UTSA undergraduate and a first generation student with a concentration in Education and Human Development. Her research interest focuses on cross- disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings of K-12 schooling experiences for Mexican American students, especially as these relate to curriculum.
Lilliana Patricia Saldaña is a Chicana activist scholar raised in San Antonio’s Southside. Saldaña attended Boston University where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English and International Relations, with a concentration in Latin American Studies and a minor in Journalism in 1998. Shortly after completing her studies, Saldaña worked at a dual-language school in San Antonio’s Westside and earned a master’s degree in Bicultural-Bilingual Studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2002. During her undergraduate and graduate studies, she was involved in numerous campus-activist projects and worked in community settings, synthesizing her passion for research and social change. As a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Saldaña worked with Latina/o families to establish Nuestro Mundo, the first dual-language school in the city, and Formando Lazos, community development project with Latina immigrant mothers. She earned a doctoral degree in Human Development and Family Studies, with a minor in Chicana/o families, schools, and communities, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010. Her dissertation—“¡De mi barrio no me voy!: The identity and consciousness of Mexican American teachers at a dual-language school—examines the life histories of Raza teachers and the ways in which they transform, negotiate and reproduce the culture of schooling in San Antonio, Texas.
Happy to share this excellent interview of presidential candidate Julian Castro in The New Yorker. We so need a president who can lead intelligently on immigration. I like this answer to a question about what immigration policy should be.
Well, at the core of it is that we should treat people with compassion and not cruelty, and stop treating people like criminals and instead treat border-crossing like we used to, which is a civil violation. Reduce the backlog of people who are waiting for some sort of adjudication in our immigration legal process. You know, somebody deserves a hearing; they get their hearing, whether they’re claiming asylum or they’re here undocumented, and we can make decisions. So people are not waiting years and years in limbo in the United States, that we create a pathway to citizenship for people who are undocumented who are here, the ten to eleven million people, not only Dreamers but also their parents and other undocumented individuals who have not committed a serious crime. Also, that we take a long-term, smart view.
He advocates for significant structural changes, too. Read on.
In
a crowded Democratic field, the former Housing and Urban Development
Secretary Julián Castro is trying to set himself apart by focussing on
the President’s signature issue.
Photograph by Scott Eisen / Bloomberg / Getty
In a crowded 2020 Democratic field,
the former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro is
looking for a way to set himself apart. One way he’s tried to do that is
by taking on the issue of immigration—a favorite topic of President Trump’s and one that’s important to his base. In a wide-ranging conversation with David Remnick,
for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Castro lays out his plan: to repeal the
law that makes it a federal crime to enter the country without
documentation, and to reform the federal agencies that enforce
immigration policy. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Listen:David Remnick interviews Julián Castro on The New Yorker Radio Hour. David Remnick:
I have to start with this: There are nineteen candidates out there,
twenty, something like that. And already we’re seeing poll numbers. It’s
just unavoidable. And I’ve got to say—what are the poll numbers
showing? The white guys are doing great. Bernie Sanders, Mayor Pete,
even Beto O’Rourke is getting some traction. And yet, as many women as
are in the race, and people of color, they’re not gaining traction,
particularly in New Hampshire, in Iowa, in those first states. Does that
worry you? Julián Castro: It
doesn’t worry me yet, because we still have about forty-two weeks until
the Iowa caucus. But who’s counting, right? Except for those of us who
are running, we still have a long time in this race. And right now, when
I get out there to these early states, or just get out in front of
crowds, you can tell, especially in places like Iowa. I equate right now
over there to, like, the first couple of weeks of shopping for classes
in a college semester. You can tell that people are doing their
homework. These folks that caucus are of a different breed to begin
with, right? They’re not your everyday sort of casual voter. They’re
people that truly pay attention to politics and public service. So I’ve
taken note of that reality right now, of who’s ahead, of course.
Everybody pays attention to where they’re at. But I also can clearly see
that we have a long way to go between now and February 3, 2020, when
Iowa actually caucuses. But what do you make of the
phenomenon of the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a place that’s a lot
smaller than San Antonio, making such inroads? Or somebody like Beto
O’Rourke, who did not succeed in winning statewide election, in Texas,
as electrifying as that race was, also gaining ground and magazine
covers and all the rest? Do you say to yourself, Something’s wrong,
something’s rotten in the state of Denmark?
Well, what I
say is two things. No. 1, you know, I’ll give them credit for being—like
a lot of the candidates are—very talented. There are a lot of great and
talented candidates. I also will say that the Democratic Party right
now is sort of going through this soul-searching about what the best way
to defeat Donald Trump is. And there is some thinking that, you know,
you might have a white male candidate that could be the best
representative for Democrats in 2020 to take Donald Trump on, especially
in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or, you know, one of these Midwestern
states.
What I believe, though, is that, No. 1, in fact, there are
a number of candidates that I believe could turn Michigan, Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania, that we lost, collectively, by less than eighty thousand
votes, back to the Democratic column—including me. So why
is it now the time for you? Why is it the time for Julián Castro to be
President of the United States? How do you propose to distinguish
yourself from the rest of the field? And it’s a large field, and we’re
in a volatile time.
Well, several ways. No. 1, I’m one of
the few candidates in this race with executive experience and a track
record of getting things done. I was not only the mayor of the
seventh-largest city in the country, very diverse city, a growing city
in Texas, where I had to work with both Democrats and Republicans, but I
also served as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and
managed a forty-billion-dollar budget, eight thousand employees,
fifty-four field offices across the country. And so I didn’t just go
deep in one city; I also had the chance to see what communities across
the country, big and small, are doing, how they’re grappling with
poverty, with issues of education, obviously, housing—everything
connected to that. Secondly, I represent a new generation of leadership,
and, even if I weren’t running this time, what I hear out there very
clearly is that people are ready for a new generation of leadership. I’m
forty-four, and, to be candid with you, I never thought that I would be
the fourth-youngest person running in this race. But here we are. But I
and a few other people represent that new generation of leadership.
And
then, third, I’m going out there and I’m articulating, in a positive,
compelling, and strong way, a vision for the future of the country, to
be the smartest, the healthiest, the fairest, and the most prosperous
nation on earth. And people are responding to that. But my fear in saying that what distinguishes you early on is not a matter of
ethnicity so much as a matter of emphasis—the emphasis on the
immigration issue. Why do you choose that? Why is that the singular
issue, and how is that the issue, to not only be fair and to have a
different expression of politics in the United States but one to beat
Donald Trump?
There are different reasons that I’ve
chosen to focus early on and rolled out as my first policy plan on
immigration. No. 1, that’s close to my heart. My family story is an
immigrant’s American Dream story. I grew up with a grandmother that had
come over from Mexico when she was seven, because her parents died, and
her nearest relatives brought her across the border to Eagle Pass,
Texas, into the west side of San Antonio. She worked as a maid, a cook,
and a babysitter. How did they get into San Antonio? What was their process of entering the United States at that time?
They
got their papers and—in fact, I didn’t even know—this is an interesting
story. I didn’t know whether my family with my grandmother had been
documented or undocumented until two days before I gave the D.N.C.
speech, in 2012. A genealogist in New Jersey did the research and
actually put up on the Internet, I think on Huffington Post, the images
of the paperwork from back then. So they came across in 1922, settled
there in San Antonio. She worked very hard. It was this classic American
Dream story. She never graduated from even elementary school, and
worked as a maid, a cook, and a babysitter, raised my mom as a single
parent. My mom became the first one to graduate from high school, go on
to college. My brother Joaquin and I were able to go to college, to law
school, to become the first in our family to become professionals, as
lawyers. And you’re the son of real activists, political activists.
Yeah.
So my mother and father were involved—mostly my mom, but my dad for a
little while—involved in the old Chicano movement, the Mexican-American
civil-rights movement of the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies,
and my mother was a hell-raiser when she was young. She had started off
in the Young Democrats and then was part of this committee for Barrio
Betterment that ran for city council and then part of the Raza Unida
Party—that was a third party that, at the time, said that neither the
Democrats nor Republicans are really sufficiently serving the needs of
the Mexican-American community in Texas and the Southwest. So they
formed their own party. And by the time my brother and I were growing
up, her activism was sort of tamping down, but we still grew up being
taken to rallies and speeches and different organizational meetings. And
so we grew up around this sense that participating in the democratic
process was a good thing. And I’m convinced that I wouldn’t be in
politics if I hadn’t grown up in that household. Well, as
you watch President Trump behave as he does on the question of
immigration, as you listen to his rhetoric on the question of
immigration, let me ask you this: Is Donald Trump a racist?
No, I think he behaves like a racist. What’s your difference?
I don’t think there is a difference. So then you’re saying he is a racist.
Yeah, I believe that he has been racist. Sure. And
how do you go about defeating that? Because, I must tell you, he
behaves as if he is absolutely convinced that this kind of rhetoric of
division on immigration, this kind of behavior, this kind of policy
along our border is a winner for him. Maybe more than any other issue.
When
you asked why am I taking this on—of course, this is the first of many
policies that we’re going to roll out, but I wanted to go as straight to
what this President has considered his bread-and-butter issue. This is
how he stokes division. This is how he stokes fear and paranoia. This is
what he’s counting on, in terms of an issue to win a narrow Electoral
College victory in some of these states again. And so I’ve released a
People First immigration plan that represents a completely different
vision. You know, we can get into it and— Well, what’s at the core of it?
Well,
at the core of it is that we should treat people with compassion and
not cruelty, and stop treating people like criminals and instead treat
border-crossing like we used to, which is a civil violation. Reduce the
backlog of people who are waiting for some sort of adjudication in our
immigration legal process. You know, somebody deserves a hearing; they
get their hearing, whether they’re claiming asylum or they’re here
undocumented, and we can make decisions. So people are not waiting years
and years in limbo in the United States, that we create a pathway to
citizenship for people who are undocumented who are here, the ten to
eleven million people, not only Dreamers but also their parents and
other undocumented individuals who have not committed a serious crime.
Also, that we take a long-term, smart view. Why would a mom come here
with her six-year-old infant from Honduras or El Salvador or Guatemala?
In most cases, it’s because there’s tremendous danger over there. They
can’t find safety and they can’t find
opportunity. So I’ve proposed the equivalent of a twenty-first-century
Marshall Plan for Central America, so that we can help build up safety
and opportunity there, and then get the benefit of not having, like we
did last month, ninety-two thousand people show up at our southern
border. So what I’m hearing, then, is a real deëmphasis of the notion of enforcement.
Well,
we would still enforce; it would just be a civil violation, so somebody
would still have an immigration judicial process that they would go
through. But, for instance, I would end family detention. So people ask,
well, if you’re not detaining people in that way, how are you keeping
track of them? And the answer to that is that— You’ve got a backlog of eight hundred thousand people.
Yeah.
First of all, they’re already releasing a whole bunch of people into
the country that are not detained right now. In fact, there was a report
out of the San Antonio Express News, my home
newspaper, the other day that pointed out that several of those
detention facilities in south Texas that had families are only, like, a
quarter full right now.
So people would still be part of a
judicial process. In the Obama Administration, they piloted this program
called a family-monitoring program that essentially was intensive
case-worker monitoring of these families to get them to stay within the
system and actually report back for their court hearings. And it had a
ninety-nine-per-cent success rate of getting people to come back and
report for their hearings—which is what we want, right. You want people
to report for those hearings. My point being that we can accomplish this
without incarcerating people, and certainly without separating children
from their parents. Now, one of your proposals is to
repeal the law that makes illegal entry in the United States a federal
crime. Why do you see starting there as an essential first step?
Because
the mess that’s been created, the chaos that’s been created with family
separation, this cruelty. A lot of the backlog that we have, a lot of
the expense in the system has developed after 2004. Before 2004, we used
to—even though this law was on the books—we used to basically treat
this as a civil violation, a civil penalty. After 2004, we started using
incarceration more, and treating it as a crime. That’s what’s led to
this mess with family detention, with separation, with the backlog that
we have. So I believe that we can have a better system if we go back to
treating it as a civil violation, with enhanced monitoring of these
families so that they show up for their court dates. Now,
any number of political leaders, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a
congresswoman from the Bronx and Queens, wants to ban Immigration and
Customs Enforcement as an institution, feels it’s been so morally
compromised that it’s impossible to go on. I don’t hear that from you.
What do you want to do?
I want to break it up and
separate the enforcement part of it, put that back into mostly the
Department of Justice, and then have Homeland Security Investigations,
which is a separate unit of ICE, go on and do its investigations. About a year, year and a half ago, there were nineteen people who worked for ICE, employees, who said, Look this is not working. The setup of this department is not working. And I believe that ICE would be, that enforcement would be better served if we actually break ICE apart and separate Homeland Security Investigations from the other part of ICE. So
the institution is not fundamentally broken in such a way. There aren’t
so many violations and documented cases of mistreatment by ICE that you think it’s necessary to dissolve it?
Well,
I don’t think it’s necessary to do away with, or we should do away with
enforcement completely. But I do think that we should reconstitute it,
and that’s part of my plan. I don’t think that it should go on the way
that it’s been. I think that it needs to be changed, from the way that
agents are trained to administratively, where it’s located in the
federal government. If you get as far as a debate stage
with President Trump, I guarantee you that he’s going to say you’re for
open borders. Are you?
I’m not. And nobody is talking
about open borders. We have six hundred and fifty-four miles of fencing,
we have thousands of personnel, we have guns, we have boats, we have
planes, we have helicopters, we have security cameras all over the
border. I’m talking about a system where people still are subject to
deportation. So nobody’s talking about open borders. But the thing is,
David, is, you know, it doesn’t matter if I have a plan, or another
Democrat has a plan; he’s going to say we’re all for open borders, just
like they’re gonna call a socialist—it doesn’t matter if you proposed
that we literally move to a socialist system or that some people get a
relief on student loans, they’re going to say that it’s socialism. Part
of the reason that I’ve proposed this immigration plan and that it’s so
bold is because, No. 1, I don’t buy into the B.S. narrative that the
people who are coming to the southern border represent a
national-security threat.
Secondly, because— What does it represent?
Desperation
and the beauty of this country, that people still see this country as a
place of opportunity and safety. And that is beautiful, in its own way.
You know, my brother has this wonderful line that I wish I’d thought
of, my brother Joaquin, who’s in Congress, that says that there’s
something a lot worse than the day when so many people want to come to
this country, which is the day that nobody wants to come to this
country. And people around the world want to come to the United States.
We need an orderly way to sort that out. What we don’t need is the kind
of cruelty that this Administration has engaged in. But the other reason
that I put forward this bold immigration plan is I’m not afraid. I’m
not afraid of the President on this issue. He’s counting on that he can
stoke up enough fear and paranoia, and enough people to get a small,
narrow Electoral College victory.
I am counting on that the people
who want to be sensible about this and compassionate are white and
black and Latino and Asian-American and people from different
backgrounds. I was in McAllen, Texas, on the border, on Father’s Day of
last year, with a group of activists to protest this family-separation
policy. And, as depressing and dismaying as it was to be at this Ursula
processing center, where they were separating children from their
families, it was uplifting to see that the activists that were there
were white and black and of all different backgrounds, not only Latino.
And it reminded me that we share common values and beliefs. And one of
those is to treat people with basic respect. I’m betting, fundamentally,
that, in that head-to-head, we can win with that. Jonathan Blitzer, who writes about immigration for The New Yorker,
recently did a series of pieces from Honduras, Guatemala, et cetera,
and said that one of the biggest reasons for people heading toward our
border is the effect of climate change in Central America, that the
agricultural economy there is getting obliterated by shifts in the
environment, in weather patterns. You call for a Marshall Plan for
Central America, and we very often hear calls for Marshall Plans, for
whatever crises there are in the world, but I don’t hear a huge emphasis
on the environment in your view. So where are you on that? Are you for a
Green New Deal?
I am. I like the concept of a Green New
Deal, but let me relate it back to, very briefly, this immigration plan.
I actually, in my immigration plan, I say that we should set aside
slots for refugees who are fleeing from climate change specifically,
which would be new in our country. Environmental refugees.
Yeah.
That’s right. That is new. I think it’s bold. You know, some policy
wonks have suggested that, and it’s a great idea. I believe in the Green
New Deal. Fundamentally, what we recognize is that we don’t have to
choose between protecting our planet and growing our economy and
creating jobs and opportunity. I mean, in my neck of the woods of Texas,
we see that, with the solar-energy industry, the wind-energy industry,
other renewables—there is a new energy economy out there that is at the
nexus of both reducing carbon emissions and protecting the planet, and
also creating good jobs for people as the economy changes. You
support Medicare for All. How do you plan to go about achieving that,
paying for it, making it a reality in a Congress that’s deeply split?
So,
I support everybody having access to Medicare. But if somebody wants to
have a private health-insurance plan, then I believe that that’s O.K.
also. But what I don’t believe is that anybody in the country should
ever go without the health care that they need, not just health
insurance but actually health care and medication, because they don’t
have means. And during the course of the campaign we’re going to put
forward, basically, how we would pay for that, because I do think that
the American people deserve to know that. How would we do it? Well, No.
1, I believe that, on January 20, 2021, at 12 or 1 p.m., we’re going to have a Democratic President, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate. You’re hoping that, or you believe that it’s going to happen?
Oh,
I believe that’s going to happen. I believe that 2020 is gonna be a
watershed election, that a lot of the frustration with the direction
this President has been taking the country, that 2018 was the starter
and that, 2020, you’re going to see the full effect of an America that
does not believe we should have another four years of this President. So
you aren’t anxious, you aren’t concerned that we’re underestimating
Donald Trump’s capacities as a politician, as a debater? And that the
Democratic Party, which has nineteen candidates, might end up finding a
way to undermine itself so that, when it comes to Election Day,
something unexpected may happen yet again?
Well, it’s
possible. You know, I’m not discounting that, but I believe that, first
of all, I believe that having this many candidates is actually going to
help the nominee, because you have to be that much better to prevail.
And there’s— After all, look what happened in the Republican Party.
Yeah,
I mean, but Trump obviously hit a chord, right, and resonated in a way
that was telling of what he was going to be able to do in the general
election. And same thing, I believe, for the—hopefully it’s me, but—the
nominee that emerges out of the Democratic primary, I think, you’re
going to be that much better and able to resonate with Americans.
So
it’s possible, but, you know, we know what the game is now, right?
We’re going to go and make sure that we patch up where we came close but
just barely fell short of: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. I also
believe that, if I’m the nominee, in addition to getting those states, I
can go get the eleven electoral votes of Arizona, the twenty-nine
electoral votes of Florida, and even the thirty-eight electoral votes in
my home state of Texas. You do believe that?
Oh, I believe it. Yeah. Where
are you on the impeachment question? Your brother sits in the House of
Representatives. You’re close, however competitive, but you’re close.
There’s a big question now. Nancy Pelosi says, Let’s just continue
investigating, impeachment might be counterproductive. And then there
are people within the Democratic caucus who say, you know, what more
evidence of obstruction of justice do we need than what we find in the Mueller report? Where are you on this?
Well,
a lot of your listeners know, and folks who have read the reports about
the Mueller report, or perhaps read the whole Mueller report, he points
out ten instances that basically amount to obstruction of justice, and,
in footnotes in the text at the beginning, essentially says, Hey,
Congress, we couldn’t do this because, you know, we couldn’t indict him
because— You think he’s stamping up and down and saying, Impeach?
Yeah,
about as close as you can get to that. Now, I believe that the
predicate is there for impeachment, that the question is going to
become, once they have their hearings on the Hill, if they subpoena Bob
Mueller, they gather additional information, you’re still going to get
back to the ultimate question, which is, look, this guy, on these
different occasions, basically tried to obstruct justice. The fact that
he was Fredo and not Michael. You’re referring to the Corleones.
That’s right. Fredo meaning the dumb brother and not Michael.
The
fact that he was Fredo—nobody respected him enough to carry out his
orders, versus somebody whose orders may have been carried out, like
Richard Nixon. That does not absolve him of the fact that he tried to
break the law, tried to obstruct justice. And so they’re going to have
to make a decision about whether we’re going to uphold that rule of law
and hold him accountable. What are you hoping?
I hope they do.
You hope they impeach? You are for impeachment?
I hope they hold him accountable, yeah. Even
though the Senate—unless something very, very dramatic happens—even
though the Senate, which is Republican, would vote not to convict.
Well,
I believe, though, if they did that, that people would see you have the
weight of evidence on your side here. And this is something that
directly relates to the office, and so I believe that there’s enough
substance there to—even if, politically, it did not turn into a
full-blown impeachment, successful impeachment, a removal from
office—that there is enough substance there that enough of the American
people would say, I understand why you did that. So you
are for a Green New Deal. You are for Medicare for All. You want to
raise the minimum wage, many other economically based and considerable
reforms. Bernie Sanders is for the same thing. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
is for the same thing, with some detail differences. They call
themselves socialists. You do not. What is the meaning of the word
“socialism” in our current political environment as you understand it,
and what is the difference between a liberal capitalist, such as
yourself, and, say, Bernie Sanders?
Well, I mean,
speaking for myself, you know, I believe that we need a
twenty-first-century safety net. That today, what we see happening in
our economy, whether it’s the gig economy or what’s happening with
automation, essentially, you have more and more people that are becoming
self-employed. You have more of an independent-contractor model than
the traditional employer-employee relationship. Even within the
employee-employer relationship, pensions, and even 401(k)s now— Disappear.
Yeah.
Disappearing, not what they used to be. And so what’s clear is that we
need a stronger safety net to step in, and the government has a robust
role to play. Not the only role, but a robust role to play in that. With
health care, with things like childcare and pre-K, with higher
education, because jobs require more knowledge and more skill than ever
before. So, as I see it, this is all about trying to make sure that our
country and its economy can continue to prosper. We’re going to have, of
course, a capitalist economy, but it’s capitalism that is responsible
capitalism and fair capitalism. It’s not capitalism that runs roughshod
over vulnerable communities. Well, then, where do you differ with somebody like Bernie Sanders in that sense, whether it’s in terminology or in policy?
Well, I mean, I think I’ve pointed out some differences—for instance, his Medicare for All
plan would not include any private health insurance whatsoever, right,
and mine would. I still have to release, and I’m going to release my
plan on education and student loans and so forth, and I have no doubt
that there will be some differences. We also differ on some issues, for
instance, on immigration, right, at least from what I’ve gathered. You
know, Bernie and I have probably a difference of opinion on some of
those things.
So, whether it’s Bernie and me, or any of the other
candidates, I think what you’re going to find is that some people on
some of the issues are more to the left, and then, on other issues,
they’re a little bit more to the center. I don’t think that you have one
candidate that is uniformly on all of the issues the most to the left
or the most to the center. You know, very few of the
people responsible for the great recession of 2009 went to jail. Very,
very few. How would you bring accountability to Wall Street?
Well,
hopefully, that will not happen again, right? What we hope is that
we’re not going to experience what we did just over a decade ago— And yet a lot of commentators believe that, through deregulation, we’re headed that way, perhaps in a different form, yet again.
We
need to learn the lessons to insure that we don’t water down things
like Dodd-Frank, and we continue to appoint people who are going to be
scrupulous regulators. That’s one of the biggest frustrations I have
with this Administration, how they’ve acted with the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau, for instance, and tried turning it into a shell of
what it was. So we need smart regulation, strong regulation. We also
need to be willing to hold some of those executives accountable and
prosecute, which is what we did not see last time. You
were one of the few people, maybe among the first of these candidates,
to support a congressional bill to study reparations. What does
reparations mean in your mind? And what is the best way to go about
paying them? What are reparations?
To me, as I see it,
reparations would be something that is fairly specific to the
descendants of slaves, and it would also be an official apology from the
United States government for slavery. I’ve long believed that we should
consider reparations. Because, you know, as I see it, it’s one of those
moral debts. This original sin of the country that has not been paid,
and, to put it in more legal terms under the Constitution, we compensate
people if we take, if the government takes their property. So why
wouldn’t we compensate people who actually were considered property, and
sanctioned as property by the state? Some people say, Well, nobody
alive today was a slaveholder, and nobody alive today was a slave, and I
say, If the government takes your property today and then you pass away
tomorrow, your estate still has a claim for that taking. And this is an
issue that we have never addressed in the United States in the right
way. And I believe that the legislation that Congresswoman Sheila
Jackson Lee, out of Houston, has proposed, to set up a commission that
would study reparations, and then could make a recommendation to the
President on how to go forward, offers an opportunity that I would
analogize roughly to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South
Africa. Which is to say it’s not just about the result. It’s about the
process. And moral culpability.
That’s
right, and getting there, and it’s not only about the descendants of
slaves. It’s about all of us who are Americans. It’s about white
Americans. It’s about all of us who are Americans and who are living
still with the fruits of what slavery produced for this country, and
also the bankruptcies, so to speak, that it produced for this country. You’ve
spent time as a Cabinet member in the Obama Administration, and one of
your purviews was housing. And when Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his piece about reparations,
the vast majority of that piece was about housing inequities and the
very specific ways that—in Chicago in particular, but not only
Chicago—housing was arranged to create segregation inequality, separate
schooling, all the rest. Did your immersion in that kind of issue lead
you to a reconsideration of the notion of reparations?
Well,
it was just very informative, getting to see that firsthand, the legacy
of that. First of all, that article was such a blockbuster,
well-written article. I mean, he points out the role that the Federal
Housing Administration had in sanctioning, redlining, in making
discrimination worse in the housing market. It started in 1934, and was
part of the problem for many years.
A great example of the
progress that we have made is that, by the end of the Obama
Administration, about forty-five per cent of African-American first-time
homebuyers were able to afford a mortgage because they got an
F.H.A.-insured loan. So that’s an example of what we can do when we
actually move in the right direction and open up the doors of
opportunity to people. Now, I hate to skip from the
high-mindedness of policy and the rest to the grittiness of politics,
but I have to ask. It’s obvious that you’re not leading the
pack at the moment, but we’re many months away from these early
primaries and caucuses. What is your path to victory? Any candidate has
to have in his or her mind a way of seeing the field winnowing and you
emerging, as realistic as you are. What is that path?
Well,
look, there are important moments that are coming up in this campaign.
We have forty-two weeks until the Iowa caucus. We’re going to get to the
debates that start in late June, and there’ll be six debates for every
candidate. That’s going to be a tremendously important series of
debates.
I’m confident that when I’m up on that stage, as people
compare the candidates, that I’m going to fare well. I can tell already
when I’m getting to these early states that I’m getting traction with
audiences. So my path is, of course I’m going to focus a lot on these
early states, especially that first state, of Iowa. I believe that I can
do well in Iowa and then go and do well, especially in a state like
Nevada, which is the third state, and then, right after— New Hampshire doesn’t look good.
Well, it can. We’re going to spend a lot of time there, too. But I’ve gotten the strongest reaction in Nevada. And— Just
curious—for politicians, what does that mean, the strongest reaction?
You’re doing a lot of retail politics, you’re going into diners and all
kinds of small halls and people’s homes. What does that mean, a strong
reaction, as opposed to, uh-oh, I’m in trouble?
You can just tell by the reaction of the crowd, and, you know, anybody. I would imagine it’s not just in politics, right— What does bad feel like? Describe for me what it feels like.
Man,
there is a range of bad, right? A range of bad, from people walking out
of the room while you’re talking to not really paying attention. Does that happen, when you’re talking, that people are hitting the door?
Not very often, but sometimes. That’s gotta sting.
Well, sometimes you can tell that you’ve hit on an issue that somebody really disagrees with. Tell me an instance of that.
I’ve
noticed sometimes that I’m very blunt about this issue of police
brutality, and so I will talk about that we need to hold police
departments accountable. And that there needs to be a new day, when it
comes to the way that especially young black men are treated in this
country. And that’s sensitive?
Yeah, I
think I’ve noticed on two or three occasions that, you know, one or two
people right after that—well, sometimes I don’t know if it’s directly
related to that— but, you know, have basically had enough of what I’m
saying. They check out.
So be it. I mean, I
continue to do it because I believe what I’m talking about and the path
that we need to take as a nation. But, you know, the overwhelming
majority of folks that are there are there because they’re interested in
hearing from me, or from whichever candidate that they’re there to
listen to, and they have a positive reaction. I’m just saying that you
can tell. It’s almost like, you know, an entertainer who gets up in
front of audiences will talk about the reaction from a crowd, right. You
hear comedians talk about this all the time. There are nights that are
O.K. And there are nights that are great. And so forth. And so I can
tell, and it’s not uniform—sometimes I’ll be, whether it’s in New
Hampshire, South Carolina, or other states, and have a great reaction,
also. But on balance, in Iowa and Nevada, so far, I can tell that the
reaction is the strongest. Now, you’re of the generation
that the master figure—the mentor figure, better to say—in politics, the
example of how to do it, not only performatively but intellectually,
was Barack Obama. Have you talked to him about this?
You
know, I talked to him the day before I announced. So I announced on
January 12th. I talked to him over the phone for twenty or twenty-five
minutes. What’d he say?
Well, he gave me
some good advice. I mean, basically, just said to be yourself. And
that’s great advice, because it’s clear that what people want is they
want to know who you are as a person, and the way that most pundits have
talked about that is this issue of authenticity, right? That with
Trump, for instance, even if people disagree with him, they think that
they’re getting the real deal in terms of who he is. Do
you find that hard to do? I know, to be perfectly frank with you, last
time we talked, you were in a different position. You weren’t a
candidate; you were a Cabinet member. You were much more circumscribed
in the way you talked. You were more careful. You had notes.
Yeah.
I hate it. That’s what I—maybe the only part of that job that I didn’t
like. I never liked having to speak for somebody else and not speak for
myself. You were very cautious.
I complained about it to myself and my immediate staff and my family the whole time. Because the biggest problem would be bad news that came out. You put a foot wrong.
Yeah. Because, you know, you’re not just speaking for yourself.
I
didn’t like this idea of having to censor what I was saying. What I
used to constantly tell the people right around me at the time is that I
enjoyed it when I was mayor or, you know, in politics before. And if I
said something that people got pissed off about, then so be it. It was
just me. You know, I’m speaking for myself. I didn’t like to have to
speak filtering for what I thought somebody else would or wouldn’t want
me to say. If you get that far, you’re about to face the
most unfiltered human being on the face of the earth, who’s willing to
say astonishing things on Twitter and at the podium—by any standard,
much less for President of the United States. Now, is that something to
be countered by almost excessive dignity, or do you meet it on the same
plane? How do you defeat that?
We’re going to defeat
Donald Trump by not trying to out-gutter Donald Trump. You’re never
going to out-gutter Donald Trump. Know I don’t think you should try.
What you should do is be the opposite of Donald Trump. And so there are
these four ways that I’m thinking about how to be the opposite of Donald
Trump, right. And they relate to themes that reappear in different
intensities in Presidential campaigns over the years.
So, for
instance, there’s unity versus division. He’s been the most divisive
President that we’ve had in a very long time. I think people, again, are
yearning for somebody that at least tries to bring the country
together. This was 2008, Barack Obama, all right, no red states and blue
states. Honesty versus dishonesty. He has shown, and this Muller report
reminds us, that this is one of the most corrupt Administrations that
we’ve had in a very long time.
I believe people are going to want
somebody that has demonstrated integrity and honesty in government, in
public service. This is 1976 and Jimmy Carter, and I’m not going to lie
to you. He very clearly is pitching for thirty-seven per cent of the
population that he considers his base. And this is about, basically,
opportunity for some. I believe people want a President for all
Americans. And so I’m out there talking about what we can do for every
single American. And then the fourth is the future versus the past. And
this is like Clinton in 1992. He wants to make the country, Trump wants
to make the country something again. You know, I don’t want to make the
country anything again. I want to make the country better than it ever
has been in the years to come, in the future. And this is one place
where I believe that that generational contrast will matter more. Now,
finally, it’s sadistic for reporters to ask you over and over again,
You know, you’re such and such in the polls—why aren’t you doing better?
As if, you know, that’s going to change the dynamic. But you must be
thinking about, How do I break out? How do I emerge? And it can’t be a
passive process. It can’t be just a question of a certain number of
candidates falling away from the process. What’s next for you, in these
coming months? How will you attempt to emerge as a candidate who’s in
the top tier?
Well, we’re going to have these moments
that are coming up. The debates are going to be critical. I’m confident
that I’m going to have some great moments there. You know how these
things work these days, as more people watch the clips on Twitter or
some other platform, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram, and I believe
that I’m going to do very well when we get to those debates. But also
I’m trying to build a strong, well-organized campaign on the ground that
gains momentum steadily. Have you got money to do it?
We
have enough. And our fund-raising has accelerated a lot, right. I was
toward the back of the pack in this first quarter. I think we know that
our fund-raising has accelerated tremendously since the second quarter
started. Well, you take Wall Street money.
I’m not. I haven’t. What about PAC money?
I can’t say categorically that nobody from Wall Street has given, but I’m not taking any PAC
money, whether it’s corporate or otherwise. I’m not taking any
federal-lobbyist money, so people can know that, you know, if I make a
decision as President, that that decision is going to be made in the
best interest of the American people and not because somebody gave me a
lot of money. Who’s your model as a President? When you
try to figure out how to be, how to present yourself, how to behave as a
candidate and potentially as a national leader, as a national figure,
who are your models?
I think different Presidents, in
different ways. Obviously, Barack Obama, as somebody who upheld the
dignity and esteem of the office, and did it with a lot of grace, and
also was an inspirational figure, somebody who set a wonderful vision
for what we can become. In terms of a President who had a great impact
on expanding opportunity in our country, I think of Lyndon Johnson, and
also somebody who was a mechanic who was able to
get things done in Congress. Now, you know, they were living in a
different era back then, of more collegiality. And sometimes it seems so
polarized today that it would be difficult, even with somebody of
President Johnson’s skill at moving legislation, to get the same things
done. But Lyndon Johnson, when it comes to producing these results,
whether it’s Medicare or the Fair Housing Act or other things that
continue to lift up vulnerable communities. F.D.R., for his sweeping
vision of what the country could be, and a stick-to-itiveness, to use
that word, of just driving at these these aims for the country and doing
it during a time that was very tumultuous for our country. So, you
know, I’d take my inspiration from different Presidents. Is there any book that you take any political inspiration from?
Well, there are a number of them, and, actually, I’m reading “The Road to Camelot,”
which is this book about the 1960 election. But I don’t know that I
would say that I’ve taken particular inspiration from one book. I’ve
read a number of them about Lyndon Johnson. I actually have read a
decent amount about Ronald Reagan over the years, even though I disagree
with his politics, just because I do think that he was an effective
communicator and showman for his time, and had an interesting story. Now,
if this narrative doesn’t end with a victory, sometimes younger
politicians run to run again, or they run for something else. You
decided not to run for statewide office. Is that a possibility in the
future?
I’m not even going to think about that right now. Let me give you the typical politician’s response, David. And I’ll do my typical roll of the eyes.
Fair
enough. Y’all can’t see this, but we’ll play the part. Yeah, I mean, I
believe that I can win. You know, I’m not the front-runner now, but I
wasn’t born a front-runner. I didn’t grow up a front-runner. I’m going
out there and doing what families across the country do, and what my
family did, which is to work hard, to scrap, to do everything that I can
do to be successful. And I believe that I can be. And, you know, the
voters are gonna decide starting next year.
The New Yorker offers a signature blend of news, culture, and the arts. It has been published since February 21, 1925.
Important read from the Texas Monthly, dated April 17, 2019. It is not at all good that those calling the shots on the state budget is not representative of Texas' diversity. Diversity and equity, or lack thereof, have consequences. -Angela
The senators who will help finalize the state budget—which affects 28 million Texans—are all white and Republican, and four of the five are from the Houston area.
by Carlos Sanchez | APR 17, 2019
The sole constitutional duty of the Texas Legislature is to pass a two-year budget. Once the House and the Senate pass their versions of a spending plan, a small group of budget negotiators from each chamber then gathers to come up with a final version to send to the governor. That task of resolving differences is one of the hardest and most important faced by lawmakers. And if the state budget is a moral document—one that tells the world what Texans, or at least the officials who represent us, believe is of value—then it’s also a task invested with great responsibility, particularly this session as lawmakers debate additional funding for public schools, teacher pay raises, and both tax relief and tax hikes.
On Wednesday, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick named five senators to the budget conference committee who will soon begin meeting with their House counterparts on the $250 billion state budget.
Patrick has never been known for his bipartisanship or inclusivity. But the five conferees are hardly representative of a diverse state, or even the not-very-diverse Senate. All are white, all are Republican and four of the five are from the greater Houston area, where Patrick lives.
Forget that Patrick didn’t appoint a single Democrat to the critical committee—anomission that may have not occurred since Reconstruction. What is more surprising is that not a single Hispanic or African American is on the panel. This is curious given that the vice chairman of the Senate Finance Committee—Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen—has served on five different conference committees in five different sessions and not only brings an ethnic diversity, but a geographic diversity as well. With the exception of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, not a single senator lives east of Interstate 35.
By contrast, House Speaker Bonnen appointed two Democrats—both Hispanic and hailing from different part of the state— to represent the House interests in conference.
Senator José Rodríguez, chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, told the Dallas Morning News that he was “very disappointed” by Patrick’s appointments. “After all, we’re twelve senators representing millions of people and we don’t have any voice on the major committee at the end of session,” he said.
Representative Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, also lamented the lack of diversity. “Texas is a diverse state and our government, at all levels, including committees, should reflect that diversity,” he said in a written statement.
Patrick, on the other hand, said he had “every confidence” in his chosen representatives to reflect “strong conservative principles” and his legislative priorities.
What began as a legislative session with a veneer of unity among Patrick, Governor Greg Abbott and Bonnen, has grown highly partisan on the Senate side in the last two weeks. Last week, the Senate passed a resolution declaring an emergency on the border in support of the Trump administration—a symbolic measure that caught Democrats off-guard. Then the Senate passed SB 17, which allows Texans with professional licenses, such as lawyers and accountants, to refuse service to people based on religious beliefs. And this week, the Senate passed SB 2, aiming to address rising property taxes, following a threat by Patrick to blow up decades of Senate tradition and decorum by exercising a “nuclear option” to circumvent a three-fifths majority required to consider any legislation.
This research brief, mentioned in the preceding blog post deserves to get highlighted. Specifically, it is a peer-reviewed, Texas Center for Education Policy research brief written by University of Texas at Austin Education Policy and Planning doctoral students, Chloe Sikes and Will Davies, titled, "Building Equity in Bilingual Education School Finance Reform in Texas: Context and Importance of the Problem." They successfully make the case for equitable bilingual education funding in Texas. Thanks for your excellent contribution for what should be reasoned debate in equitable school funding, particularly for our most vulnerable of youth. Dr. Angela Valenzuela
