INVITATION: Rethinking Schools 40th Anniversary Celebration, Monday October 5th, Workers Defense Project at 5:30 PM CST

 Friends:

For forty years, Rethinking Schools has been so much more than a publication. It has been a source of courage, imagination, intellectual nourishment, and community for educators committed to creating schools worthy of our children and our democracy. Again and again, its pages have reminded us that teaching is never simply about transmitting knowledge; it is also about helping young people understand their world, recognize their own dignity and histories, and imagine how that world might be made more just. It is a joy to celebrate this remarkable legacy—and especially meaningful to do so at a moment when the principled, justice-centered work of Rethinking Schools is needed as urgently as ever. 

If you're in Austin on Monday evening, do consider attending this celebration at 5:30 PM at the Workers Defense Project per Larry Miller's invitation below. As you can see, curriculum writer Courtney Wai will speak on her important work in South Texas connecting WW II internment camps and Chicana/Chicano  civil rights based in Crystal City. Sounds awesome already.

-Angela Valenzuela

Rethinking Schools is dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism. This work is more important than ever, given the attacks educators and students are facing. 

Rethinking Schools

In honor of our 40th anniversary, please join us to celebrate and to learn how local educators are using Rethinking Schools in their work.

We are gathering on Monday October 5th at the offices of the Workers Defense Project (5604 Manor Rd, Austin, TX 78723) at 5:30 PM CST.

Sponsors:

Angela Valenzuela: Professor, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, UT

Anne Lewis: Independent Filmmaker, UT-Austin Professor of Practice, TSEU-CWA 6186 Executive Board Member 

Andrew Gonzalez: Former AISD Social Studies Teacher, Current Austin ISD Trustee, PhD Student at the University of Texas at Austin

Jesse S Gainer: Professor, Curriculum and Instruction, TSU

Nancy Valdez-Gainer: Professor (TSU), Director of The Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award

Courtney Wai: Teacher, Prentiss Charney Fellow, Education and Public Programs Manager, Densho

Ellen Bravo: Author and Activist

Larry Miller: Retired Teacher, Editor of Rethinking Schools

The program will include a short history of the work of Rethinking Schools (RS). Andrew Gonzalez, a Trustee of AISD will talk about his use of Rethinking Schools in the classroom as a social studies teacher. Nancy Valdez-Gainer and Jess Gainer will speak about their experience in a study group based on one of RS’s most popular books, Teaching For Black Lives. Courtney Wai will talk about her work in South Texas, creating curriculum connecting a World War 2 internment camp and the Chicano civil rights movement based in Crystal City, Texas.

Please RSVP to Larry Miller at Larry@rethinkingschools.org

 

Subscriptions: Annual Magazine Subscription - Rethinking Schools 

Donations:  Donate to Rethinking Schools 40th Anniversary

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies by Christopher Carmona, Ph.D. Our Lady of the Lake University May, 2026

Friends, I’m honored to share this powerful guest column by Dr. Christopher Carmona on the history, sacrifice, and continued struggle behind Mexican American and Ethnic Studies in Texas, as well as nationally. —Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies

by 

Christopher Carmona, Ph.D.

Our Lady of the Lake University

San Antonio

May, 2026

Can you imagine what it was like to stand up for what you believed was right? To be taught that your people were important enough to be taught? Can you imagine men with badges and guns and tear gas ready to hurt you? To be beaten with batons, to starve yourself so that maybe the university will sit down and listen to you? Can you imagine that you fought so hard to be seen in the history of these United States only to have your children and grandchildren stripped of that knowledge?

You are lucky enough to be in this college, don’t rock the boat. Just keep your head down, go to class, and get your degree. It doesn’t matter that your people are being shot down in the streets, too poor to buy new shoes, or too scared to walk on the same sidewalk as a white man. 

Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies programs are unique in American higher education in one undeniable way: they are the only academic disciplines whose very existence was extracted through sacrifice. These programs were not invited into the academy. They were demanded into it, and the demanding came at a cost measured in arrests, hunger strikes, and blood.

It is long past time for universities and policymakers to reckon with that history, and with the continuing failure to fund what communities bled to build.

Born of Struggle, Not Invitation

The founding of Centers for Mexican American Studies across the nation is not a footnote in higher education history. It is a chronicle of sustained resistance against institutions that consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the discipline until students and communities forced their hand.

It began in 1968. Throughout the country, racial justice and student activism were front and center, leading to a cascade of activism for ethnic studies programs, including Chicano studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, and American Indian studies. Building from this work, Chicana/o/x activists came together at the University of California, Santa Barbara and published El Plan de Santa Barbara, a document that united diverse activists from around the state and laid out a roadmap for Chicana/Chicano studies (Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, 1969). In response, UCSB created the first Chicano Studies Department in the UC system in 1970. California State University, Los Angeles had established a Mexican American studies program two years earlier, in 1968.

At California State University, Northridge, the price was higher. From 1967 to 1971, Los Angeles police arrested 400 students and faculty members across six major demonstrations. Eventually chaos ensued, fights erupted, and arrests were made, yet this didn’t stop students from being heard. The following morning, 2,000 students gathered in front of the Administration Building, causing the university president to declare a state of emergency. The activism ultimately established the creation of both the Afro-American and Chicano Studies departments (Acuña, 2011).

At UT Austin, Mexican American student activists in the 1960s agitated for the creation of an academic program that reflected their lives, experiences, and ways of knowing. From their efforts, in 1970, UT created the Center for Mexican American Studies, with Américo Paredes named its first director. Yet it would take 44 more years, until 2014, for the university to grant it an independent undergraduate major (University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, 2024).

Perhaps the most dramatic confrontation came at UCLA. UCLA first established an interdisciplinary Chicano studies program in 1973. But the retrenchment in California’s social and budget policies during the 1980s and the recession of the early 1990s took a toll. By 1989, funding had dwindled significantly, and UCLA suspended new admissions to the program. On April 28, 1993, the chancellor announced the program would not receive departmental status. What followed was a sit-in, mass arrests, and ultimately a hunger strike. 

On May 25, a small group declared a water-only fast. A village of tents sprang up outside Murphy Hall. Four days in, one protestor collapsed requiring medical attention. The group persevered, and on June 7, more than 400 students, faculty, and community supporters celebrated the creation of the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies. The strike drew the support of state senators, state representatives, city officials, and the Mothers of East L.A., resulting in one of the largest student and community mobilizations in UCLA’s history. Even then, full departmental status was not granted until 2005 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 1993; UCLA Newsroom, 2021).

source: UCLA Magazine

In Arizona, a thriving program was simply legislated out of existence. The Tucson school district’s Mexican American studies program grew to 48 course offerings and became the largest ethnic studies program in any school district in the nation, directly increasing graduation rates and grades across all classes (Cabrera et al., 2014). In 2010, state lawmakers passed a law that dismantled the program and banned a range of related books from classes statewide.

The pattern is consistent across decades and geography: communities bleed to establish these programs, and institutions continuously find ways to cut, consolidate, or erase them.

Community Anchors Running on Empty

These Centers are not simply academic units; they are community infrastructure, and they function as such every single day. The Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin was intended toconnect students to the Austin community through outreach and public events, building on its legacy of collective action. At UT Arlington, CMAS was established by the Texas Legislature as the university's focal point for interdisciplinary education, research, publication, and public outreach relating to Mexican Americans, and serves as a bridge between UTA and the Latino community in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. 

Before it was shut down, Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, CMAS collaborated with faculty, student affiliates, and community organizations to produce events, training, and programs that promote a deeper understanding of Mexican American culture and supported the K-12 to higher education pipeline and first-generation college student success. The University of Arizona's MAS department works collaboratively with community organizations to address issues and produce knowledge benefiting historically marginalized communities, and engages public policy on criminal justice, immigration, and systemic inequity.

These Centers do more community work per dollar than nearly any other academic unit on campus. Yet they have operated for decades on the edge of survival.

A UT Austin graduate described his undergraduate experience as "frustrating," noting that there "seemed to be such battles for funding for the Center for Mexican American Studies, and that was disillusioning." That battle never ended. In early 2026, UT Austin announced the consolidation of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, along with African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies, into a single new department. "It's important to realize that in joining these communities together, especially by force, you're creating a system in which they have to fight, sometimes with each other, for funding, and that is ridiculous and unfair," said one scholar at the national rally held in protest on UT's own campus. At the University of North Texas, facing a $45 million budget shortfall, the university cut its Mexican American Studies minor, along with Africana Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Asian Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

The fallback position of college and university administrations has always been the same: Chicano/a Studies simply isn't needed, and there is simply no funding. It has been a struggle and a test of wills for Chicano/a Studies to survive.

The Students Are There. The Resources Are Not.

What makes this institutional abandonment most indefensible is that student demand is not in question. The data are unambiguous.

Research shows that Ethnic Studies coursework benefits students through better school attendance, higher standardized test scores, higher GPAs, higher graduation rates, and even a reduction in interpersonal prejudice. A peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that assignment to Ethnic Studies substantially increased high school graduation, attendance, and the probability of enrolling in college (Dee & Penner, 2017). A longitudinal University of Michigan study involving 459 ninth-grade students, the majority Mexican or Mexican American, attending high-poverty schools, found that students enrolled in Ethnic Studies experience significant growth in critical reflection, which is linked to academic success, civic engagement, improved well-being, and support for equity-promoting policies (Cabrera et al., 2014).

In Texas, a 2024 youth-led research project found that students not enrolled in MAS courses wanted to learn more and enroll, but because school districts aren’t required to offer them, students may miss out on all the benefits (Valenzuela, 2023). In El Paso, only five schools across the two largest districts offer MAS, and teachers are sounding alarms that students are being cut off from their own history. Surveys of schools offering the MAS course found that a significant number could not run the class because no teacher could be found to teach it, or because students didn’t enroll due to lack of awareness or scheduling conflicts. Educators piece together curriculum without textbooks, relying on crowdsourced materials and digital resources.

Meanwhile, the majority of Mexican American and Ethnic Studies programs, most established after the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, are dramatically underfunded and understaffed, with many having one or no core tenure-track faculty. Nationally, only 5% of four-year institutions offer an Ethnic Studies major, figures researchers have called alarming given decades of Latino enrollment growth and demographic change across the Southwest.

A Choice, Not a Coincidence

Centers for Mexican American Studies were built on sacrifice: walkouts, riots, arrests, hunger strikes, and decades of community organizing. They were won fight by fight, campus by campus. Today they serve as the connective tissue between universities and the communities that bled to create them, preserving oral histories, training educators, conducting policy research, mentoring first-generation students, and anchoring cultural identity for millions of Americans.

The question is not whether students want this education. They do, and the research proves it. The question is not whether these Centers serve communities. They do, visibly and measurably. The question is whether the institutions entrusted with public education will finally make the choice to fund what has always been funded last, if at all.

Fifty years of hunger strikes, arrests, and advocacy should be enough to earn more than a footnote in a budget that gets cut the moment the economy tightens. The discipline that required the most sacrifice to establish has received the least institutional investment to sustain.

The Pattern Repeats: What Is Happening at UC Berkeley

The story of Ethnic Studies under siege is not only a Texas story or a historical one. It is unfolding right now on one of the most storied campuses in the country. In September 2025, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons disclosed the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration as part of a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus, without notifying those affected until weeks after the disclosure had already occurred. Among those named was renowned Jewish feminist scholar Judith Butler, whose family lost members in the Holocaust. As Dr. César A. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a first-year student there, has written: the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement chose federal favor over the safety of its own community (Cruz, 2026).

That same year, Berkeley indefinitely closed the Multicultural Community Center, a student-built, student-run hub of multiracial organizing located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, won by students in 1999 after a hunger strike. When the administration eventually announced it would reopen the center, political art reflecting the movements that created it had been stripped from the walls. Administrators justified the erasure by saying they wanted to make the space “more welcoming,” using the same language used to neutralize Ethnic Studies programs across the country. As doctoral student Sarah Halabe noted plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students” (Cruz, 2026).

Then, in April 2026, Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies department announced it would not renew two lecturer positions for the coming academic year, citing “financial deficits,” eliminating ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department. Lecturer Diana Negrín discovered her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself; neither the department nor the dean’s office had told her. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, put it starkly: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department” (Cruz, 2026). Meanwhile, construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex on campus unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person, on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. The university had funding for a five-court sand facility, but not for the lecturers who teach the history of the very communities whose bones were found in the ground beneath it.

Source: Department of Mexican American and 
Latino Studies

Berkeley is not an outlier. It is a mirror. What is happening there: the disclosure of student names to federal investigators, the gutting of a student-won multicultural center, the defunding of Ethnic Studies under cover of budget language. It is the same pattern this op-ed traces across decades of Texas and national history. 

The tactics change; the goal does not. Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed” (Cruz, 2026). That sentence could have been spoken by a lecturer at UT Austin, Cal State Northridge, or UCLA in any decade since 1968. When the institutions that claim to champion free inquiry are the first to comply with repression, it is community, not administration, that must hold the line.

That is not a coincidence. It is a policy. And it is one we have the power to change.

Christopher Carmona focuses on government affairs, nonprofit strategy, and education policy. He has consulted on Texas ethnic studies legislation, co-authored official Texas State Board of Education reports on Mexican American Studies implementation and served as Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and Research at Our Lady of the Lake University. 

References

Cruz, César A. “What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back.” Medium.com, May 1, 2026. Republished by Angela Valenzuela, Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, May 5, 2026. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/05/what-cal-is-this-year-of-repression-at.html

Dr. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a UC Berkeley first-year student, chronicles a pattern of institutional capitulation at UC Berkeley during the 2025–26 academic year: the university’s disclosure of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to federal investigators; the indefinite closure and subsequent depoliticization of the student-built Multicultural Community Center; the nonrenewal of two Ethnic Studies lecturers citing budget deficits; and the discovery of Ohlone ancestral remains beneath a construction site for a new beach volleyball facility. Cruz frames these events as interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. The essay calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to organize collectively in defense of Ethnic Studies and the democratic mission of public higher education. Published on the blog of Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Professor of Education at UT Austin and a leading scholar of Mexican American education and equity policy.

Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. La Causa Publications, 1969.

Dee, Thomas S., and Emily K. Penner. "The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum." American Educational Research Journal 54.1 (2017): 127-166 [pdf].

Cabrera, Nolan L., Jeffrey F. Milem, Oiyan Pong, and Ronald W. Marx. “Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson.” American Educational Research Journal 51, no. 6 (2014): 1084–1118. (University of Michigan longitudinal study referenced in op-ed.)

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. State University of New York Press, 1999.

Valenzuela, Angela. “Struggles For/With/Through Ethnic Studies in Texas: Third Spaces as Anchors for Collective Action.” Teachers College Record 125, no. 3 (2023). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01614681231181793

Acuña, Rodolfo. The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe. Rutgers University Press, 2011. (Source for CSUN founding history and 1967–1971 campus activism.)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Hunger Strike for Chicano Studies Department Collection, 1993. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0b69p9s1

UCLA Newsroom. “Hail to the Hills: Starving for Justice.” UCLA Magazine, March 28, 2021. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/hunger-strike-chicana-chicano-studies

University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “About: History of MALS.” Liberal Arts, UT Austin, 2024. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/about/

Américo Paredes Distinguished Lecture featuring Dr. Emilio Zamora on Art, Memory, and Movement: A Conversation We Cannot Miss

Américo Paredes Distinguished Lecture featuring Dr. Emilio Zamora on Art, Memory, and Movement: A Conversation We Cannot Miss

“The young Chicano and Chicana artists who emerged in Austin during the 1970s were part of an unprecedented national flowering of creative expressions, galvanizing meanings, and rousing identities meant to serve their communities.” 

— Emilio Zamora

There are moments in our history when art does more than reflect the world—it helps make it. In Austin during the 1970s, Chicana and Chicano artists did exactly that. Through murals, prints, performances, and collective organizing, they gave visual and cultural form to a movement grounded in dignity, resistance, and community.

This Thursday, we have a special opportunity to revisit—and learn from—that powerful moment.

The Center for Mexican American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin invites us to a lecture by Professor Emeritus Emilio Zamora, titled, "The Emergence of the Chicano Art Movement in Austin, Texas." 

Drawing from history and the artists’ own voices, Dr. Zamora will walk us through the early days of this movement—when creative expression became a vehicle for confronting marginalization, imagining new futures, and asserting cultural and political presence.

This talk is part of the Américo Paredes Distinguished Lecture Series, which honors Américo Paredes—a towering figure in Mexican American Studies, a musician, scholar, and the founding director of CMAS in 1970. His leadership came at a pivotal time, when student activists demanded a university that recognized their histories, their communities, and their ways of knowing. This lecture continues that legacy.

There is something especially meaningful about gathering in this moment—when questions of representation, voice, and belonging remain as urgent as ever. The Chicano Art Movement was never only about aesthetics; it was about claiming space, telling truth, and building community through culture.

Join us:

📍 Texas Union, Santa Rita Room (UNB 3.502)
🗓 Thursday, April 16, 2026
🕓 4:00–6:00 PM
🎟 Open to all

I hope you can be there. I hear you need to get there early to get a good seat.😊

Neither Erase Nor Enshrine: Toward a Collective Memory Beyond César Chávez, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., April 9, 2026

Neither Erase Nor Enshrine: Toward a Collective Memory Beyond César Chávez

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
April 9, 2026

I offer this reflection with care—and with urgency. I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on this question—not in the abstract, but as a consequence of direct involvement. 

I served on the committee that met regularly to plan and ultimately establish the César Chávez statue that now stands prominently on the West Mall at the University of Texas at Austin. That process was deeply intentional: it was about recognition, visibility, and affirming a history too often pushed to the margins of public memory.

Today, that work is being revisited more broadly. Across cities and campuses, communities—especially within Mexican American and farmworker communities—are debating whether to remove street names, rename schools, and alter murals tied to César Chávez. 

While, to my knowledge, there is no current effort at the University of Texas at Austin to remove the Chávez statue, it is important to anticipate such debates and invite reflection on its presence and meaning within our own campus landscape.

César Chavez statue—UT-Austin

The terms of the debate are stark: preserve or erase, honor or condemn.

But this binary is not only intellectually insufficient—it is politically dangerous.

It flattens complexity at precisely the moment when complexity is most needed. And it unfolds within a broader context in which the machinery of erasure is already accelerating—across public education, libraries, and curriculum. In such a moment, we must be especially vigilant about what—and whose—histories are made to disappear.

The question before us is not simply what to do with monuments to César Chávez. The deeper question is who controls memory—and to what end. Because if we are not careful, the debate over Chávez will not remain about Chávez. 

It will become yet another opening through which the broader history of the Chicana and Chicano movement—and the farmworker struggle in particular—can be quietly, systematically erased.

We are living in the midst of an aggressive political project—aligned with Christian nationalist and right-wing agendas—that seeks to narrow what can be taught, remembered, and valued. From book bans to curricular restrictions to the policing of “controversial topics,” we are witnessing an effort not just to contest history, but to discipline it.

In this context, calls to simply “remove” Chávez risk being folded into a broader logic of disappearance—one that does not stop at individuals, but extends to movements, communities, and entire histories and epistemologies.

And yet, let us be equally clear: uncritical celebration is untenable.

To enshrine Chávez as beyond critique is to betray the very movement he helped lead. It replaces history with mythology. It silences those within the struggle—particularly women and rank-and-file workers—whose experiences complicate the narrative. It insulates power from accountability under the guise of reverence.

If we are serious about justice, then we must be equally serious about truth.

History has never required perfection to warrant remembrance. Figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—both enslavers—remain central to the national narrative, not because they were without contradiction, but because their historical significance is institutionally secured. Their legacies have not been erased; rather, they have been increasingly contextualized.

But Chávez’s legacy does not occupy the same protected terrain.

Unlike Washington or Jefferson, the history of the farmworker movement remains fragile—its presence in curriculum, public memory, and institutional recognition still contested. To collapse that movement into Chávez—and then to dismantle Chávez without preserving the movement—is to risk losing the very history that made possible labor rights, dignity, and collective struggle for generations of Mexican American and immigrant workers.

The farmworker movement was never the work of one man.

It was built through the labor and leadership of countless individuals—many of them women, undocumented workers, and community organizers whose names remain far less known, but whose contributions were indispensable. To engage Chávez critically should not narrow our historical lens; it should widen it.

And this is where the current debate must evolve. The choice is not between erasure and enshrinement. It is between a politics of disappearance and a politics of transformation.

In this moment, I do not support removing the Chávez statue.

Not because it is beyond critique—but because the conditions into which it would be removed are already structured by erasure. To take it down now, without a clear and collectively grounded plan for what replaces it, risks creating a vacuum into which the broader history of the farmworker movement may also vanish.

But neither should the statue remain as it is—unquestioned, uncontextualized, and singular.

Instead, we should treat this as a transitional moment.

We should keep the statue in place until we are prepared to replace it with a representation that more fully and accurately reflects the collective nature of the farmworker movement itself. 

There are exquisite representations to choose from. 

That future representation might take the form of a broader memorial—one that honors the movement as a whole, rather than centering a single figure. It could include the iconic imagery of the United Farm Workers, such as the Aztec eagle, a symbol of collective struggle, resilience, and self-determination.

Such a shift would not erase Chávez. It would situate him—properly—within a larger history.

It would move us away from hero worship and toward collective memory. Away from individualization and toward movement-building. Away from static commemoration and toward living history.

This is the work of recontextualization—not erasure.

It requires community engagement, especially with farmworker communities themselves. It requires curricular and institutional commitments to Ethnic Studies and labor history—fields that are themselves under threat. And it requires political clarity about the moment we are in.

This decision does not occur on neutral ground.

In another time, removal might function as accountability. But in this moment—when the state is already engaged in a broader project of historical narrowing—we must ask: What will be lost? And who benefits from that loss?

Rejecting erasure is not the same as defending harm. It is a refusal to allow critique to be weaponized against communities whose histories are already precarious.

The task before us is harder than choosing sides.

It requires us to hold contradiction—to recognize that Chávez can be both consequential and flawed, that movements are always larger than their most visible leaders, and that public memory is not fixed, but contested terrain.

But this is precisely the work of education.

If we do this right, the result is not silence, nor mythology, but a richer and more democratic public memory—one that tells the truth, honors collective struggle, and resists the forces that would prefer we forget.

Because the greatest danger is not that we will remember Chávez imperfectly.

It is that we will stop remembering the movement at all.

References

Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. (n.d.). George Washington and slavery. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/george-washington-and-slavery

Thomas Jefferson Foundation. (n.d.). Slavery at Monticello. https://www.monticello.org/slavery/introduction

Unkindest Cuts: University of Denver Projects Hit by Science and Higher Ed Grants Purge

Friends:

Great, if saddening, piece on deep cuts to higher education projects in Colorado. This is getting experienced nationwide, of course. I appreciate the foregrounding of faculty voices.

Faculty in this piece express deep alarm and frustration over the Trump administration’s defunding of federally supported research focused on diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and community-based justice. 

Scholars like Marie Berry and Tom Romero argue that these cuts are not just bureaucratic decisions but ideologically driven attacks that undermine the role of higher education in promoting democratic values and producing critical knowledge. Projects exploring women- and queer-led movements, Chicanx history, and social justice were abruptly halted, despite having been previously awarded prestigious grants by federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Despite these challenges, faculty remain resolute. They reaffirm the value of community-engaged scholarship and insist that such work will continue, even if it must now rely more heavily on local institutions and private philanthropy. As Romero notes, community knowledge has long preceded federal funding, and faculty are determined to preserve and amplify it. For many, this moment has only strengthened their commitment to using research, teaching, and public engagement as tools for advancing human rights and social justice.

All I can say is that I am pleased to see the faculty sound so resilient. Their students and communities need for them to be so. The struggle continues.

-Angela Valenzuela


Unkindest Cuts: DU Projects Hit by Science, Higher Ed Grants Purge
“Conducting research on DEI or women or LGBTQ communities is not some woke political agenda."
By Cassis Tingley
May 12, 2025



DPFF staff and students visit a mural by Emanuel Martinez at La Alma Lincoln Park Recreation Center, the birthplace of the Chicano Mural Movement in Denver. courtesy Tom. Romero

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Marie Berry
DU

When Marie Berry heard that she'd received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER grant in 2021, she says she was “stunned and thrilled.” Berry, who directs the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy at the University of Denver, had applied for the grant in 2020 amid the nationwide racial justice protests. The fraught political landscape made her proposal to research women- and queer-led social movements feel particularly timely.

“The fact that the NSF invested in it, to me, was a sign that our field recognized the urgency of understanding all of the ways people are working to protect human lives, democracy and our planet,” Berry says.

Awarded by then-President Joe Biden, the prestigious $486,000 grant was intended to fund a five-year program with the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative to research anti-authoritarian movements led by women and LGBTQ+ activists from around the world. It would also establish a certificate in Global Justice for graduate students at DU’s Korbel School of International Studies, facilitate student participation in an international research conference, and fund a post-doctorate program and salary for emerging scholar Alice Taylor.

That all ground to a halt in late April, when Berry received word that her award had been purged, along with more than a thousand other NSF-funded research projects. Totaling $739 million, the cuts targeted study in what Trump administration officials called “woke social, behavioral and economic sciences” with “dubious public value.”

Taylor calls the decision “devastating”; for Berry, it was infuriating.

“The part of this that is so astoundingly stupid is that the Trump administration has confused our attention to marginalized communities as a political agenda when it is actually a core part of building a robust and prosperous and secure future for the United States,” the professor says. “Conducting research on DEI or women or LGBTQ communities is not some woke political agenda. It is essential information that policymakers at all levels and in all fields require to make policy decisions that protect the well-being and life of all people in this country and around the world.”

The administration’s actions targeting the values of diversity, equity and inclusion were similarly frustrating for Tom Romero, who notes that “DEI” is not a legal term. Romero directs DU’s Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (in)Equality (IRISE) and its Documenting the Past, Fostering the Future (DPFF) project, which was also defunded.

“The civic nationalism of what it means to be an American and what makes the United States exceptional is its ability to accommodate and welcome so many different people from so many different backgrounds and with so many different perspectives,” Romero says. “I think that that's one of the big losses here, to the extent that, nationally, DEI has been made to be something that is anti-American.”

The NSF cuts are the latest in a string of attacks by the Trump administration on scholarship in the U.S. In January, Executive Order 14151 barred schools from using federal dollars to promote DEI on campus and ended funding for “DEI”-associated research programs like Romero’s. The administration has since tried to strong-arm universities into adopting oppressive restrictions on free speech, particularly around Palestinian rights, and revoked the visas of nearly 2,000 international students accused of threatening American foreign policy interests, some of which have since been reinstated.

Other Projects at DU
DPFF, which received a $150,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2022, was one of three research grants at DU eliminated by Trump's January order. The program aims to teach students about the history of the Chicano movement and the roles of young Chicanx activists in Denver by partnering with local community members to collect oral histories.

“The whole idea was to think of ways in which we could engage our students with the larger questions of social and political activism and political identity,” Romero says. “Oftentimes, these stories, their histories, don't appear in the documentary record, so flushing out and building that history is a central component of how we as Denverites or Coloradoans or residents get to engage with it in all of its complex ways.”

The project, which had already used about two-thirds of its funding, was slated to run from 2023 to 2026. The loss of the remaining third will mostly affect student engagement with community members through panels, interviews and advising, Romero says. Equipment and instruction for recording interviews will also be reduced; three student positions supporting the project’s media production and a docu-series planned for next year will be eliminated.

According to Esteban Gomez, who teaches DU courses on digital anthropology and El Movimiento’s Denver history as a part of the project, the cuts will pose a challenge to community engagement. On the education side, though, he's confident that students will continue to learn.

“There's feeling upset, but at the same time, there's a tremendous amount of resolve and resilience that a lot of the faculty has exhibited,” Gomez says. “Students love the material and they see the relevance in doing this work today. I think it's more important now to teach the material given the political environment in which we find ourselves.”

Looking to the Future
Also in its final year, most of Berry's award has been applied and her research completed. The human cost of the $88,000 cut, however, was significant. Taylor’s postdoctoral contract was terminated immediately; the salaries she and Berry earned from the grant are gone. The fourteen students currently taking Taylor’s Social Movements, Global Justice course for the Global Justice certificate risked not being able to graduate in June, while students in the first year of the program faced an uncertain future.
Berry had received the NSF’s PECASE award from Biden in January, which promised federal funding for the project for another five years. That, too, was eliminated.

“It completely wreaks havoc on the entire program that we've spent four years developing and building at the University of Denver,” Berry says. “The cutting of research grants is abhorrent enough. The cutting of research grants that also were designed to catalyze the leadership of emerging researchers in their fields by building corresponding infrastructure and programs to ensure the broader reach of that research is just disastrous.”

Berry has been able to pull together enough funding from DU, private donors and other programs at Korbel to keep the certificate and Taylor’s course going through the end of this semester and ensure that the current students can graduate, a fix that she calls “a bandaid on a massive, gaping wound.” The future is even more bleak, she says.

“This is about an undermining of the very apparatus of knowledge production that is responsible for helping the United States of America understand facts and science and history,” Berry notes. “What is essentially happening is a gutting of that infrastructure, and there's not going to be a substitute.”

Today, the federal government funds 40 percent of all basic research in the U.S., its smallest share in history. Since peaking at 72 percent in 1967, the portion of research funded by the federal government has steadily declined over the past several decades as businesses and, to a lesser extent, nonprofits and higher education have increased their research investments. In 2022, 27 percent of the federal government’s $43 million in basic research funding was supplied by the NSF, which currently supports more than 30,000 research projects with approximately $9 billion. The Trump administration is looking to slash that budget by more than half next year.

While Romero notes that the availability of federal funding had enabled him and his colleagues to “amplify” their research, he emphasizes that community-based knowledge has been around much longer than the federal dollars.

“Particularly when you're talking about research being done in ways that are designed to collaborate and connect with the community, they're done in ways that that knowledge is still going to continue to be produced,” Romero says. “I think what this moment has revealed is, in some cases, the challenge of relying too heavily on certain sources of funding.

“But I think the other piece here (is) that the research that is being done, the data that is being produced, the stories that are being told, they're that much better when you have the ability to tap into so many different resources,” he adds.

So far, DU has offered to backfill 10 percent of its faculty’s federal losses. The Mellon Foundation, a private philanthropy body, pledged $15 million in “emergency funding” to humanities councils across the U.S. But even with these short-term fixes, the vacuum left by federal withdrawal is undeniable. So is the resolve of the DU academics who've lost funding.

“We are all very much on the side of using knowledge as power and using training and networks as ways of demanding the human rights of all people,” Berry says. “We feel a very strong sense of purpose right now.”

Latino history gives teachers a great opportunity to address identity, diversity, language, civil rights, and U.S. history that reflects the Latino experience. Consider that a fourth of all public high school students are Latina/o, this warrants much more coverage beyond the ostensibly "pivotal" moment that Sonia Sotomayor's appointment to the Supreme Court represents, per an analysis of major history textbooks covered herein.

Of course, we know that curriculum equates to the reproduction of consciousness in ways that those in power resist. Hence, all the sad stories about book bans happening today when we already experienced a dearth of texts reflecting the experiences of people of color in U.S. society. 

My only concern with this piece is its failure to mention Mexican American Studies/Chicana/o Studies/Boricua/Dominican Studies as these not only represent legacy agendas dating back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, but these are what are actually currently taught in our nation's college classroom since those early years, as well.

That said, this should scream at us loudly about doing everything we can to get out the vote and get these fascist book banners—that further advocate for a triumphalist, white-washed version of history—out of office.

-Angela Valenzuela

Most U.S. Latino history is left out of high school textbooks, study finds

A vast majority of key topics are ignored or barely covered, including aspects of the Mexican-American War, the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico and racial segregation.

A picture of the USS Maine, which sank in Havana Harbor and was a catalyst for the Spanish-American War. AP file

May 17, 2023, 2:42 PM MDT

By Edwin Flores | NBC Latino

Most of the seminal events impacting U.S. Latino history are not a subject of study in high schools across the country, according to a new report by Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and UnidosUS, a national Latino advocacy and research organization.

The study found that 87% of key Latino topics were either not covered in U.S. history textbooks or were mentioned in just five or fewer sentences.

"Only 28 of 222 important topics were covered well, leaving out many aspects of the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal, the modern civil rights movement, Cold War politics, and legal developments shaping the Latino experience, such as the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and racial segregation," according to a release on the report.

Over a quarter of the nation's K-12 public school students are Latino.

Researchers analyzed five U.S. history textbooks used in seven states and one AP U.S. history book. The study looked at the overall depiction of the Latino experience throughout the centuries, the balance between discussions about inequality and the Latino contributions to the U.S., the use of language and the authenticity of images.

The topics with the greatest depth of content were American land purchases from Mexico and Latin American foreign policy — a 1.4 out of a maximum of three. But when it came to coverage of U.S. Latino "firsts" from 1821 to the present, the coverage was the "thinnest" — a .1 out of three.

The report also found that while the AP textbook and a couple of other textbooks contextualized the significance of certain concepts and their impact on the Latino experience — for example the role of nativism to examine how certain groups of people, including Latinos, were treated — other textbooks "were intellectually flat."

Additionally, the research revealed that Sonia Sotomayor's appointment as the Supreme Court's first Latina justice was the only event in the past 200 years that was noted in all the books as a pivotal Latino moment.

The report issued several recommendations, including that publishers develop textbooks "that fully expose students to the experiences of Latinos, incorporating rigorous content including both primary and secondary sources. At a minimum, publishers should commission independent reviews of their texts, measured against the seminal content."

The researchers also urged teachers, parents and community leaders to advocate for more inclusive curricula and materials, and to hold meetings with school officials and school boards.

 "As the country grows more diverse,” Viviana López Green, senior director of the racial equity initiative at UnidosUS, said in a statement, “it’s essential for our future workers, businesspeople, community leaders, and public officials to learn about the contributions and experiences of all Americans, including Latinos, the country’s largest racial/ethnic minority.” 

José Gregory, a U.S. history teacher in Atlanta and a consultant on the project, said in a statement that the "American Latino experience must be accurately depicted to our young people in the classroom if we want them to grow up in a society that recognizes and values the contributions made by people of color."  

Edwin Flores

Edwin Flores reports and produces for NBC Latino and is based in Anaheim, California.