Dr. Andrés Tijerina Nominated "2023 Texan of the Year" because 10th Graders in Texas can now learn the history of Mexican Americans

Friends:

So happy to acknowledge that my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Andrés Tijerina was nominated for the Dallas News "Texan of the Year 2023" award. I like the story that the newspaper editors wrote about him below. While he did not ultimately prevail, it is such an incredible honor nonetheless to get ranked among of list of luminaries like "Yellowstone" creator Taylor Sheridan, Pulitzer prize-winning author, Lawrence Wright, the storied former Texas Prairie View A&M President Dr. Ruth J. Simmons, and others—all of whom lost out to the Atty. General Ken Paxton whistleblowers.

It's wonderful that this piece nevertheless mentions Dr. Tijerina's, as well as my husband's, Dr. Emilio Zamora, co-edited anthology for 10th graders titled,“The History of Mexican Americans in Texas: A History of Tradition and Struggle." The other authors that contributed to this anthology are Texas A&M University College Station Associate Professor of History Sonia Hernández; Texas A & M -San Antonio History Professor Amy Porter; and University of Houston History Professor Guadalupe San Miguel. Early critical reviews are already suggesting that this is going to be a blockbuster! Super exciting!

This is not just a personal, but also a community, achievement as it is very much integral to the advances of the Texas Mexican American and Ethnic Studies Movement before the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) about which I have blogged significantly. 

Specifically, in 2018, our struggle resulted in policy that allows for elective courses in the areas of both Mexican American Studies and African American Studies to be taught in Texas public schools. The text is in its last stages and is due to come out in 2024. 

I very much believe that, among other factors like changing demographics and the Black Lives Matter movement, so much of the backlash in Texas politics that we are witnessing today (against CRT, DEI, book bans, etc.) is an artifact of our success. After all, this is exactly what played out years earlier in Arizona when Mexican American Studies was banned in the Tucson Unified School District which actually motivated us back in 2013 to be strategic and take action before the SBOE. We KNEW back then that the backlash was headed our way. It all connects.

I know first-hand how this has been a slow and patient process. Hats off to both Andrés and Emilio for going the distance. So proud of you both.

Andrés, you're still our Texan of the Year! Felicidades! Congratulations! It was fun breaking the news of your nomination to you.

Despite all the politics, it's still a bit stunning that this is the first book of its kind to find a home in Texas public schools. It will be of course available for folks everywhere once completed. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Tijerina, A. & Zamora, E. (in press). The History of Mexican Americans in Texas: A History of Tradition and Struggle. Kendall Hunt Publishers.

10th graders in Texas can now learn the history of Mexican Americans
Andrés Tijerina is a finalist for 2023 Texan of the Year.


Andrés Tijerina, a Texas historian, is the co-author of a textbook on the History of Mexican Americans. Tijerina also won the Tejano Book Prize in 2023.

By Dallas Morning News Editorial

2:00 AM on Dec 25, 2023'

Andrés Tijerina still remembers a Texas where Latino kids were not allowed in swimming pools, barber shops or theaters. When he was a child in West Texas, attending school and learning English meant defiance.

He was a cotton picker who managed to earn a doctoral degree in history in the ‘70s at the University of Texas in Austin. Even then, he was not allowed to write a dissertation on Mexican American history. He wrote it anyway, labeling it “American history.”

This defiance has allowed Tijerina, 79, to be a historian with a never-ending curiosity, but with the added value that he has lived through this Texas history himself. His new book for 10th graders, “The History of Mexican Americans in Texas,” co-authored with Emilio Zamora, is expected to publish soon.

“You have a state that is absolutely based on the Mexican culture. And there has never been a history of that Mexican culture in Texas. This is the first book ever. And what’s more significant is that it is a textbook for all 10th graders in all school districts,” Tijerina told us.

After enduring discrimination during his youth, his college years were transformative. The first time he was seen as an equal was at Texas A&M University, he told us. He became a military cadet and later joined the Air Force during the Vietnam War.

Tijerina retired from Austin Community College in 2018, but his inquisitiveness about Texas and the Mexican American culture has not receded. In 2022, he published Beasley’s Vaqueros: The Memoirs, Art, and Poems of Ricardo M. Beasley, after 15 years of compiling illustrations by Beasley, a vaquero who drew some of the few known images of actual vaqueros, or Mexican cowboys. For this book, he was awarded the Tejano Book Prize in 2023.

“I’ve seen all the movies and paintings of the Anglo-American cowboys [like] John Wayne. I never saw anything of a Latino, who were the original vaqueros.”

Not only is he still writing history books, but Tijerina is also busy as an expert witness in some lawsuits. Whenever there is a case of discrimination against Latinos, in voting rights or education, he sometimes is tapped to write a report. He is compiling some of this information for an eventual book as well.

The Texas he was born in has changed a lot. Tijerina still recalls how Jim Crow was hard on Latinos and how many got lynched without due process. “Today you can actually get arrested for killing a Latino,” he said.

Another thing that has changed since his West Texas days is how Mexican culture is now omnipresent, and he points to the recent World Series as an example. “They’re singing the song about baseball, buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks. But they’re all eating tacos and nachos and salsa. … Well, that’s a big change.”

For continuing to explain our history for the next generations, Andrés Tijerina is a finalist for Texan of the Year.

We are announcing our Texan of the Year finalists in a countdown to naming the 2023 honoree on Sunday, Dec. 31. You can follow all of the finalists as they are published at dallasnews.com/opinion/texanoftheyear.

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com

Tejanos through Time by Emilio Zamora & Andrés Tijerina (Eds.) Texas State Historical Association

Help yourself to this FREE eBook out of the Texas State Historical Association edited by Emilio Zamora and Andrés Tijerina titled, "Tejanos through Time," downloadable from this link once you sign on.  The eBook includes selected articles generated by the Handbook of Tejano History Project that will appear in the Handbook of Texas.  The Handbook of Texas is an electronic encyclopedia that gets 1 million visits a month and is the leading resource on Texas and as a consequence, Tejano history. 

Here is the volume's introduction:



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Ditors’ Preface

 

Texas has a special place in history and in the minds of people throughout the world. Texas also has the distinction of having been a province of colonial Spain, a state in the Republic of Mexico, and an independent country before it became a part of the United States. Once the war between Mexico and the United States ended and Texas joined the American union, its history followed a distinct course of socio-economic incorporation, modernization, and identification with the American South and Southwest. Tejanos, descendants of the indigenous and colonial inhabitants of Texas, have been an integral part of Texas history as this eBook amply demonstrates.

No one would have imagined in 1952, the year that the Handbook of Texas was first published, that the Texas State Historical Association would expand its major reference source on the history of Texas with new entries on Tejanos. Nor would the founders of the Handbook have anticipated the extraordinary and relatively recent growth of Tejano history with notable and even award-winning works that contribute to the stature of the field and explain the growing number of entries that grace the pages of the Handbook. We would be remiss if we did not also credit the enlightened and path breaking spirit among the community-oriented, critically conscious, social justice Mexican American luminaries emerging in the late 1960s. This has given impetus and inspiration to what has become an enduring commitment to historical recovery and restoration projects of which the Handbook of Tejano History and this eBook are now a significant part. They meet up with the legacy agenda to extend voice, presence, and power for underrepresented, misrepresented and disjointed parts of our diverse communities’ histories and stories both within and outside the academy.

The Association recognized Tejano history as an emergent and promising field of study worthy of attention during the development of the six-volume New Handbook of Texas, which lasted from 1982 to 1996. In 1988 TSHA leadership secured funding from the Texas Committee for the Humanities to hire several staff researchers, including Cynthia Orozco, Teresa Palomo Acosta, María-Cristina García, and others. From 1988 to 1996, these writers worked with a number of advisory editors, including Arnoldo de León, Jesús F. de la Teja, Robert S. Weddle, Donald E. Chipman, and Paul D. Lack, to expand the Handbook’s content on Mexican American history. In doing so, the Handbook improved its claim of representativeness as it grew into the largest and most accessed encyclopedia on Texas history.

The Tejano Handbook Project, the Association’s more recent and concerted effort to add to the Mexican American presence in the Handbook, began in 2014 when Drs. Emilio Zamora and Andrés Tijerina proposed the idea and secured the necessary financial support from the Tejano Monument, Inc. and the sponsorship of the Association. The Tejano Handbook Project held two workshops, one at the Association’s 2014 annual meeting in San Antonio, and another in June 2014 at the Texas General Land Office in Austin, to encourage new submissions and to ensure that the contributions abide by a well-defined process of writing and production, and meet the highest standards of excellence for an encyclopedia entry. The process involved solicitations for entries, followed by submissions that Zamora and Tijerina, the co-directors of the project, reviewed and subsequently referred to the Handbook’s editorial staff for fact checking, copy editing, and online posting. Mike Campbell, the Association’s Chief Historian, made the final decision on the entries.

By all accounts, the Tejano Handbook Project has been a resounding success. Prominent authors and new researchers, as well as faculty who assigned topics to their undergraduate and graduate students, responded with high-quality entries on historical figures, events, and themes. The overwhelming response made it necessary to extend the project into a second year, to the point that contributors have now exceeded by a hundred percent the original goal of 100 new entries to more than 200.

We can also measure the success of the Tejano Handbook Project by noting the significance of the new entries to both Tejano and Texas history. Emma Tenayuca, a major labor organizer from San Antonio, for instance, reminds us that we cannot speak about Texas history without acknowledging the important Tejano contributions to intellectual, working class, women’s, and labor rights history. Nor can we deny the extraordinary record of military service and battlefield sacrifice by servicemen like José de la Luz Sáenz in World War I and Frank Tejeda in Vietnam. Moreover, new entries on Spanish Texas, elected officials, community leaders, ethnic conflict, education, and influential organizations reflect the vitality and continued development of Tejano history. The article on the Tejano Monument is especially emblematic of the importance of Tejanos in Texas history. The statuary, located prominently on the south lawn of the Texas Capitol, commemorates their history as a charter community in Texas and serves as a landmark statement on the lasting and indelible influence of embodied memory in the Tejano community. Taken as a whole, the new entries re-figure the constitution of the Handbook of Texas and in so doing, extend the value and fair use of Texas history in our times.

The attention given to the Tejano Monument is also appropriate because its board had the foresight to advance historical knowledge by funding the current effort to increase the presence of Tejanos in the Handbook of Texas and other initiatives like the Tejano History Curriculum Project, an Austin enterprise that is broadening the social studies curriculum in our public schools. In both cases, Tejanos are demonstrating that despite historic difficulties, they can find comfort in the recurring observation heard at the 2012 unveiling of the Tejano Monument, “We are still here.”

The Association, with the approval of its board of directors, decided to mark the achievement of the Tejano Handbook Project by sharing a representative sample of the new entries generated by the project along with some previously published articles as a tribute to Tejano history, but also as a demonstration of our commitment to its development and use by researchers, teachers, students and the general public.   

As co-editors of this eBook, Tejanos Through Time: Selections from the Handbook of Tejano History, we especially wish to thank our contributing authors, the staff and board of directors of the TSHA, and the many persons who have labored long and hard to make Tejano history the important field of study and lived experience that it is. It has been an honor and a privilege for us to play a role in the enriching of our collective, narrative past and in continuing to expand the scope of the Texas State Historical Association and the Handbook of Texas.

                   

Emilio Zamora
C0-Editor
Professor, Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin

Andrés Tijerina
Co-Editor
Professor, Department of History
Austin Community College