Juneteenth, Fort Worth, and the Sacred Work of Black and Brown Coalition, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., June 19, 2026

Juneteenth, Fort Worth, and the Sacred Work of Black and Brown Coalition

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 19, 2026

At today's National LULAC Convention in Fort Worth, Reverend Haynes offered a timely and powerful reminder on Juneteenth: “You don’t have a civil rights movement without a Black and Brown coalition” (Haynes, 2026). “Black and Brown” is, of course, an imperfect shorthand—one that cannot possibly contain the vast diversity of our peoples, histories, languages, cultures, and ancestral journeys

Yet it also names something real and necessary: our sheer numbers, our shared stakes, and our collective power when we refuse division. His words landed with prophetic force because they named what our histories have long taught us: our struggles for freedom, dignity, education, labor rights, voting rights, and democracy have never been separate. They have always been intertwined.

I am not exaggerating when I say that every invited visit I have ever made to speak in Fort Worth has been connected, intentionally, to the work of Black and Brown peace, unity, and coalition. Important leadership has been taking root there for many years. That is why Reverend Haynes’ words felt so resonant. Fort Worth is not merely a backdrop. It is a site of memory, organizing, and possibility.

Juneteenth itself reminds us of this deeper truth additionally underscored by Reverend Haynes. It commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation (National Park Service, n.d.; National Museum of African American History and Culture, n.d.). 

Dr. Opal Lee

And how poetic that in Fort Worth, we also honor Dr. Opal Lee, the beloved “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” whose lifelong advocacy helped make Juneteenth a federal holiday. In 2016, at the age of 89, Lee began walking from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., to build support for national recognition of Juneteenth. 

Her 2.5-mile walks in major cities throughout the U.S. symbolized the two and a half years that Black Texans remained enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation (National Juneteenth Museum, n.d.; National Museum of African American History and Culture, n.d.). Juneteenth became a national holiday, signed into law by President Joe Biden on June 17, 2021.

God bless Opal Lee! 

The power of one, no less. 

The power of mission and calling.

Reverend Haynes’ message was clear: in a nation “conceived in liberty,” the unfinished work of freedom belongs to all of us (Haynes, 2026). 

It is both prophetic and poetic that LULAC would gather on Juneteenth in Fort Worth, a city so closely connected to Dr. Opal Lee’s historic witness. This day calls us not only to commemorate emancipation, but to resist every effort to divide Black and Brown communities from one another.

His reminder that we do not have a civil rights movement without Black and Brown coalition speaks directly to the work many of us are trying to sustain across Texas. In Austin, Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe and I formed Black Brown Dialogues on Policy to deepen precisely this kind of relationship—one grounded in trust, shared struggle, policy analysis, legislative advocacy, and youth leadership. Black Brown Dialogues on Policy has brought together academics, students, community members, advocates, and lawmakers to confront anti-DEI policy, defend ethnic studies, and build solidarity across communities (Black Brown Dialogues on Policy, n.d.).

Through this work, we have mentored many young people into a vision of public life rooted not in division, but in solidarity, study, strategy, and service. That matters because coalition is not merely a response to crisis. It is how we practice democracy. It is how we build the relationships necessary to defend one another when the institutions around us falter.

This is the spirit of Juneteenth, too. It is not only a day of remembrance, but a call to solidarity. It asks us to honor freedom by defending it together. It asks us to remember Dr. Opal Lee’s Fort Worth-rooted witness and to continue building the bridges that others would prefer to see broken.

Our coalitions are not optional. They are the seedbed of democracy. From civil rights to educational equity, from voting rights to the defense of public institutions, Black and Brown unity remains one of the most powerful antidotes to authoritarianism, erasure, and fear.

So today, I honor Reverend Haynes’ words, Dr. Opal Lee’s legacy, National and Texas LULAC, Fort Worth—as well as Dallas, by the way—that boasts a long history of coalition work, and the youth we are mentoring into this struggle. 

Juneteenth is a celebration, yes—but it is also a summons. It reminds us that delayed freedom is still unfinished freedom, and that none of us gets free alone.

Thanks to Dr. Ana Coca for sharing Rev. Haynes' speech.

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

Happy Juneteenth! ¡Feliz Juneteenth!

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

LULAC Council 4721, District VII

Education Committee Chair, Texas LULAC

References

Black Brown Dialogues on Policy. (n.d.). Virtual town hall: DEI and ethnic studies policy in the 88th session of the Texas State Legislature. https://youtu.be/xEi3Rtc0QQ0?si=eYxJeGqbnUQg3Xf1

Haynes, F. D., III. (2026, June 19). Remarks at the National LULAC Convention [Speech]. National LULAC Convention, Fort Worth, TX.

Jackson, A. (2021, June 17). Why 94-year-old activist Opal Lee marched to make Juneteenth a national holiday,Variety. https://variety.com/2021/politics/features/activist-opal-lee-juneteenth-holiday-1234998507/

National Juneteenth Museum. (n.d.). Dr. Opal Lee: The grandmother of Juneteenth. https://nationaljuneteenthmuseum.org/ms-opal-lee

National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Our American story: Juneteenth, Smithsonian Institution. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/our-american-story-juneteenth

National Park Service. (n.d.). Juneteenth National Independence Day. U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/npscelebrates/juneteenth.htm

Civil Rights, Reversed: When “Equality” Masks Inequality, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 Civil Rights, Reversed: When “Equality” Masks Inequality

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 28, 2026

There is a through line connecting two arguments that, at first glance, may appear distinct but are in fact deeply aligned. One, advanced by Christopher Rufo, calls for a “colorblind” reinterpretation of civil rights law—one that would prohibit any consideration of race, even for remedial purposes. The other, emerging from more radical libertarian circles, goes further: it claims that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 itself is an illegitimate infringement on freedom of association and suggests it should be dismantled altogether. 

What links these positions is not merely their skepticism of race-conscious policy, but a shared project of narrowing—if not undoing—the legal architecture of civil rights itself. For a revealing articulation of this trajectory, see Ross Douthat’s interview with Rufo in The New York Times (Douthat, 2025).

Taken together, these positions mark not a debate over policy nuance, but a coordinated redefinition of civil rights. One narrows its meaning to the point of inversion. The other seeks its outright elimination. Both rest on the same premise: that efforts to address inequality are themselves the problem.

Let us begin with the “colorblind” argument. Its appeal lies in its simplicity: no advantages or disadvantages based on ancestry; no consideration of race in admissions, hiring, or public policy. Equality, in this view, is achieved by ignoring history and the politics of difference altogether.

Digital graphic by Angela Valenzuela

But this formulation depends on a false premise—that we are operating on a level playing field. We are not. 

What this argument ultimately masks is not neutrality, but grievance politics reframed as principle. Under the banner of “colorblind equality,” what is being advanced is a narrative of injury—that white Americans, and particularly those aligned with dominant institutional power, are now the true victims of discrimination. This is not a legal argument so much as a political one. It converts historically grounded efforts at remedy into perceived acts of injustice, recasting inclusion as exclusion and equity as unfairness. 

Digital graphic by Angela Valenzuela

In doing so, it mobilizes resentment while disavowing it, presenting grievance as constitutional fidelity. But grievance politics, however carefully dressed in the language of rights, does not resolve inequality—it obscures it. And in the current Texas context, it provides the affective fuel for policies like anti-DEI Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 where the rhetoric of neutrality legitimates the restructuring of institutions in ways that ultimately consolidate, rather than challenge, existing hierarchies.

The United States did not arrive at inequality by accident. It was produced through centuries of law and policy: enslavement, segregation, exclusion from housing and employment, and systematic disinvestment. The Jim Crow laws were not merely social customs; they were legal regimes that structured access to opportunity. The Civil Rights Act was enacted precisely to dismantle those regimes and, crucially, to enable remedies where their effects persisted.

To collapse race-conscious remedies into “racial favoritism,” as Rufo does, is to erase this history. It is to treat corrective measures as equivalent to the harms they were designed to address. This is not legal reasoning; it is what I would call policy theater—a reframing of institutional retrenchment as moral clarity.

We see the consequences of this reframing most clearly in Texas.

With SB 17, the state has effectively banned DEI initiatives across public universities, invoking the language of neutrality while triggering widespread anticipatory compliance. Programs have been dismantled, trainings canceled, and academic units reorganized in ways that extend well beyond the statute’s text. At the University of Texas at Austin, the consolidation of departments focused on race, ethnicity, and gender signals not simply administrative efficiency, but a reorientation of institutional priorities.

SB 37 builds on this foundation by weakening faculty governance and centralizing authority, reducing the capacity of academic communities to respond collectively to these changes. The result is not a neutral landscape, but a managed one—where the boundaries of permissible knowledge are increasingly shaped by political directives.

This is the paradox of the “colorblind” project: in the name of limiting the role of the state, it invites a different kind of state intervention—one that withdraws protections while actively restructuring institutions.

Digital graphic by Angela Valenzuela

The libertarian argument takes this logic to its endpoint. If any government mandate for nondiscrimination is an infringement on liberty, then civil rights law itself must be dismantled. Businesses, employers, and institutions should be free to associate—or refuse to associate—on any basis, including race.

At first glance, this may appear as a principled defense of freedom. In reality, it rests on a deeply flawed understanding of both freedom and history.

Freedom of association has never been absolute, particularly in the public sphere. Once an entity opens itself to the public—whether a restaurant, a university, or an employer—it becomes part of a broader civic infrastructure. The rules that govern that space are not arbitrary constraints; they are conditions that make participation possible.

Without such protections, “freedom” becomes asymmetrical. Those with power retain the freedom to exclude, while those without it bear the consequences.

This is not a hypothetical concern. It is a historical fact.

Prior to the Civil Rights Act, discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and education was not episodic—it was systemic. Entire populations were excluded from the basic institutions of public life. To suggest that market forces alone would have corrected these injustices is to ignore the depth and durability of structural inequality.

Here, the libertarian argument converges with the “colorblind” one. Both assume that inequality is either no longer significant or irrelevant to the question of justice. Both prioritize formal neutrality over substantive fairness. And both, in doing so, risk entrenching the very inequalities they claim to transcend.

As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued, colorblind ideology functions by masking structural inequality, allowing it to persist under the guise of neutrality (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). And as Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us, civil rights law has always been contested terrain—expanded through struggle, and vulnerable to retrenchment (Crenshaw, 1988).

What we are witnessing now is a moment of such retrenchment.

The language of civil rights is being repurposed to constrain remedy. The concept of freedom is being narrowed to exclude considerations of equity. And the institutions tasked with fostering knowledge and opportunity are being reshaped accordingly.

The stakes are not abstract.

They are visible in classrooms where faculty hesitate to engage certain topics. In departments that are merged or dissolved. In students who find fewer spaces where their histories and experiences are taken seriously as objects of study. In a broader climate where the line between policy and politics grows increasingly difficult to discern.

The question before us is not whether we believe in equality. It is what kind of equality we are willing to defend.

Digital graphic by Angela Valenzuela

Is it an equality that ignores history, overlooks power, and quietly reproduces existing hierarchies? It is an equality that recognizes the unfinished work of democracy—one that understands that justice requires more than neutrality—one that requires attending to the conditions that make inequality endure?

In Texas, this question is no longer theoretical. It is legislative. It is institutional. And it is unfolding in real time.

The answer we choose will determine not only the future of civil rights law, but the meaning of freedom itself.

References

Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.

Crenshaw, K. (1988). Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law. Harvard Law Review, 101(7), 1331–1387.

Douthat, R. (2025, March 7). The anti-D.E.I. crusader who wants to dismantle the Department of Education. The New York Times.

Texas Culture Wars in Historical Context: What 'Minority Civil Rights and the Texas Legislature' Reveals, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Texas Culture Wars in Historical Context: What 'Minority Civil Rights and the Texas Legislature' Reveals

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 30, 2025

Download here [pdf]

Reading Minority Civil Rights and the Texas Legislature (2018), a 22-page historical pamphlet I picked up in a legislative office last session is like holding a mirror to the present. 

The document offers an unflinching account of how Texas—since its founding—has been shaped by racial hierarchy, exclusion, and the enduring efforts of Black, Mexican American, and other minoritized communities to claim the full rights of citizenship. I appreciate the honesty. However, what becomes abundantly clear is this: the culture wars roiling Texas today are not new. They are the latest iteration of a long struggle over whose history, humanity, and political power this state will recognize.

Texas was built as a slaveholding society, its early laws explicitly designed to secure racial domination. Black Texans were denied citizenship, movement, literacy, and basic protections. Tejanos (Spanish for 'Texan')—despite their leadership in the revolution and early Republic—were pushed to the margins once Anglos consolidated power. 

After the Civil War, Reconstruction gains were met with Black Codes, Jim Crow statutes, and violent backlash. Mexican Americans faced parallel systems of segregation (“Juan Crow”), discriminatory policing, and routine exclusion from juries, schools, and the vote.

Yet the record also reminds us that resistance has always been part of the story—from Reconstruction legislators like Matthew Gaines and George Ruby, to Tejano lawmakers like Navarro and Seguin, to civil rights leaders such as Barbara Jordan, Héctor García, and the activists of LULAC, the NAACP, and the G.I. Forum. Each generation confronted efforts to roll back rights and narrow the definition of who counted as a “real” Texan.

Today’s culture wars follow this same pattern. Current battles—over teaching race and gender, restricting Ethnic Studies, banning books, suppressing voting rights, policing immigrants, and centralizing state authority over local communities—mirror earlier attempts to solidify racial power under the guise of “neutrality,” “order,” or “protecting children.” 

Just as past lawmakers used Black Codes, literacy tests, poll taxes, and segregation statutes to preserve social hierarchy, today’s leaders deploy curriculum bans, border militarization, and mid-decade redistricting efforts to limit democratic participation and narrow the public imagination.

What the historical record makes clear is that Texas has repeatedly oscillated between moments of democratic expansion and reactionary retrenchment. The culture war is simply the latest backlash against multiracial democracy—another attempt to redefine belonging by silencing the histories and communities whose presence destabilizes myths of Anglo exceptionalism.

But history also teaches us that backlash never has the final word. The same state that produced Jim Crow also produced Barbara Jordan. The same state that once denied Tejanos entry into the legislature now sees Latino lawmakers shaping statewide policy. Every wave of repression has been met by movements that expand freedom and insist on truth.

We are living through another such moment. What is being targeted is not only DEI, Ethnic Studies, or “divisive concepts,” but the capacity of Texans to understand their own history and to build a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. The historical record reveals a simple truth: when Texas suppresses knowledge, it is preparing to suppress rights. When it restricts whose stories may be told, it is deciding whose lives matter.

Understanding the deeper historical roots of Texas’ culture war does not diminish its urgency—but it does give us clarity: we have inherited a long, unfinished struggle to make Texas the democratic society it claims to be. And as past generations showed, progress comes not from silence or retreat, but from organized, principled resistance.

History is not repeating itself—it is calling upon all people of good conscience to finish the work.

Reference

Senate Publications and Printing. (2018). Minority Civil Rights and the Texas Legislature. https://www.lrl.texas.gov/scanned/SIRSI/MinorityCivilRightsandtheTexasLegislature.pdf

"Federal trial opens to determine whether Texas discriminated in redrawn redistricting maps," by Sameea Kamal | Texas Tribune | May 22, 2025

Friends:

Glad to see that this federal trial on gerrymandering is getting off the ground. For over half a century, federal courts have repeatedly found that Texas has discriminated against voters of color in its redistricting practices, and 2021 was no exception. 

In a word, this practice is termed "gerrymandering." Gerrymandering is the practice of redrawing electoral district lines to give an unfair advantage to a particular political party or group. Though often justified as a partisan tactic, it frequently undermines the voting power of racial and ethnic minorities—especially when district boundaries are deliberately drawn to fragment communities of color and weaken their collective voice at the ballot box.

.Here are the member statistics from the Legislative Reference Library at the Capitol that, interestingly, no longer disaggregate by race or ethnicity. How convenient for those in power, right?

These data also show that the average age of our representatives is between 50 and 59 years old and that women are significantly underrepresented in both chambers.

Although in the 2020 U.S. Census communities of color accounted for 95 percent of the state’s population growth—Latinos alone making up more than half—the Republican-controlled Legislature chose not to expand representation for these growing populations. Instead, it reinforced white political control, sidelining the very communities driving Texas’s demographic future.

It drew 23 majority-white congressional districts and just seven Latino-majority ones out of 38, flagrantly disregarding the state’s demographic reality. This is not simply partisan maneuvering; it is a modern form of racial gerrymandering designed to fracture Black and Latino voting power and insulate those in power from democratic accountability.

To claim that these maps were drawn “blind to race” is not just disingenuous—it’s dangerous. Texas had ample opportunity to draw additional Latino-majority districts in rapidly diversifying regions like Dallas-Fort Worth and Harris County but chose not to. 

The claim that partisan interests, not racial bias, were the basis for the maps ignores the deeply racialized nature of partisanship in Texas. Gerrymandering in this context is not just a political strategy—it is a structural assault on civil rights, one that perpetuates disparities in health, education, income, and political voice. This is discrimination by design, and it strikes at the heart of representative democracy.

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Kaplan, A. (2021, October 26). Greg Abbott approves Texas redistricting that preserves GOP power, dilutes voters of color. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2021/10/26/greg-abbott-approves-texas-redistricting-that-preserves-power-dilutes-of-color/

Federal trial opens to determine whether Texas discriminated in redrawn redistricting maps

by Sameea Kamal | Texas Tribune | May 22, 2025


Maps based on the 2020 census designating districts within Texas for state and congressional 

offices are the focus of a discrimination case that is being heard in federal court. 

Credit: Ben Torres for The Texas Tribune

Do Texas’ district maps discriminate against some Black and Latino voters? That’s what advocates will allege in court Wednesday, while the state will argue that those communities can elect the candidates they want.

Some advocates will also argue in a set of cases four years in the making that the state intentionally discriminated — while the state will combat that claim.

A panel of three U.S. district judges in El Paso will hear the cases over the next month that allege the state violated federal law in its redistricting process — the once-a-decade redrawing of congressional and state district maps after every U.S. Census to ensure that all districts have approximately the same number of people.

The plaintiffs include the League of United Latin American Citizens, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Texas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They plan to argue that in 2021, the Republican-majority Legislature deliberately drew its congressional, state House and senate districts in a way that split up voters of color and diluted their political power.

The case has been delayed while the parties fought over what information legislative members are required to disclose.

Plaintiffs point to data around the racial makeup of the state and those of the districts in their arguments: though whites and Latinos made up nearly the same share of the population in Texas in 2020, the state drew 23 white-majority districts out of 38 total congressional districts, while Latino voters made up majorities in only seven. The remaining eight districts had no majority group.

According to the 2020 Census, Texas added 4 million residents in the prior decade and gained two congressional districts. Of the population growth, 95% was among communities of color, with more than half of the growth among the Latino community.

“The inflated number of majority-white districts does not reflect the Census data and does not allow for fair representation,” Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, an advocacy group supporting the plaintiffs in the congressional case, said at a news conference this week. “It is clear that Texas’ congressional map denies Latino voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect candidates of their choice, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.’”

If a court finds that to be true, it wouldn’t be the first time: in every decade since the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, Texas has been found by a federal court to have violated federal law by illegally discriminating against voters of color. The law prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race, color or those who belong to a language minority group.

After the 2010 redistricting cycle, for example – in a battle with similar arguments — federal judges ruled that Texas lawmakers intentionally discriminated against Hispanic and Black voters by unnecessarily crowding them into certain districts.

The allegations that the state violated the Voting Rights Act don’t require the plaintiffs to prove the state intended to discriminate — only that the effect of the maps does so. Some of the plaintiffs are bringing additional claims that the state violated the 14th Amendment by intentionally discriminating against them, which does require proving the state acted in bad faith.

Various groups have sued the state since 2021, even before the maps were ratified. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, El Paso Division ordered those groups to consolidate their cases into the one that begins Wednesday.

The groups allege the state could have drawn a Latino-majority district in the state senate and congressional districts that encompass Dallas-Fort Worth and Harris counties, but failed to do so.

In the House maps, plaintiffs allege the Legislature failed to create Latino-majority districts where there was opportunity to do so in those counties, as well in Central and West Texas, and Bexar, Denton/Wise and Brazoria counties.

The NAACP also alleges the state intentionally discriminated against Black voters in all three maps.

The state plans to defend the maps on the basis that partisan interests, not race, were the primary factor in drawing the maps.


“The Texas Legislature drew the maps blind to race,” the state’s pre-trial brief says. “The redistricting lawmakers did not mince words: they intended to design maps that advanced partisan interests and other traditional redistricting principles.”

The Republican-led Legislature drew the maps, while the advocates who brought the lawsuits are arguing on behalf of Black and Latino voters who historically have aligned with the Democratic party.

The state’s brief says the legislative record will show both Republican and Democratic lawmakers acknowledged the Legislature’s “partisan motivations for drawing districts” — although in pre-trial proceedings leading up to Wednesday, the Legislature’s chief map drawer, Houston Republican Sen. Joan Huffman, declined to share some of the reasoning behind the maps, citing “legislative privilege,” a protection afforded by the state constitution.

The state also plans to argue that population growth was uneven, and that in some areas, such as El Paso County, declining population led to the reduction in the number of House districts where there was a Latino majority.

The governor’s office and attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comments on the case.

Though the Legislature passed the bills creating the maps in 2021, lawmakers that session were unable to ratify the maps due to a Democratic walkout over a separate bill related to election processes. The next Legislature in 2023 then ratified the maps.

In the meantime, two primary and two general elections have taken place under those maps.

That includes the primary election in 2022, after the Court sided with the state on allowing the map for Senate District 10 to be used. Plaintiffs tried to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, but they dismissed the appeal because it was filed too late.


For Jenkins, with the National Redistricting Foundation, the impacts of a map that potentially violates the law means less of a voice for some Texans.

“The long-term effects of depriving a community of a seat at the table can be seen in disparities in multiple aspects of life, such as higher poverty and unemployment rates, lower incomes and being underrepresented in public office,” she said at the briefing. “This case isn't just about the congressional map, it's about representation and living up to the fundamental ideal that should guide our democracy, that every individual has the right to exercise self determination at the ballot box.”

The Texas Bilingual Education Story: Celebrating our Legacy [video]

Friends, 

Re-posting this video and blog from 2019. History doesn't go stale after all. In contrast, it's very much alive and must be re-told to each generation so that we do not take for granted the sacrifices, wishes, desires, and accomplishments of our forbears to whom we owe so very much. 🙂

-Angela Valenzuela

Thanks to Dr. Rudy Rodriguez who reminds us that 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the original Federal ESEA Title VII legislation.  Texas A & M University Professor Carlos Blanton cites the importance of bilingual education to European-origin groups like Czechs, Germans, and Poles in Texas, dispelling the myth that bilingual education was or is only for Latinas/os in Texas.  

Dr. Rodriguez' email correspondence explains the importance of the original Federal ESEA Title VII legislation:

Why is this legislation important???  This federal act provided the impetus for the implementation of the original federally funded 76 bilingual programs in the U.S.  Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso were among the 17 original programs in Texas. It also led states such as Texas to repeal the English-only laws approved as early as 1918. 

In the 1976, the legislation was amended to include federal funds for teacher training, including the fellowships for master’s & doc study in bil ed- related specialty areas.  For more on the history of the legislation & Texas bilingual ed, click video link below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWbN_Y8aa5k Please distribute further to interested colleagues.  RudyR Rodriguez

Glad to see the late Senator Carlos Truán, the late Dr, George I. Sanchez,  the late Senator Ralph Yarborough, Maria Seidner, Dr. Guadalupe San Miguel, José Ángel Gutierrez,  Dr. Ángel Noé Gonzalez, Dr. Cuca Robledo Montecel, Dr. María Gonzalez Baker, among others, in the video, too. Crystal City also gets featured as a pivotal point in the bilingual education movement.  The Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) is another important institution that has been instrumental in leading the struggle for bilingual education.

You will also hear expressed support for culturally relevant curriculum, too—which is what we term, Ethnic Studies today.  Pride in one's heritage, as well as Spanish language maintenance is what the Mexican American community has sought after forever and a day.

Great video!  Thanks to Rudy Rodriguez for this important reminder of our embattled history for bilingual education.

-Angela Valenzuela

Happy Juneteenth! Excellent history lesson by Dr. Heather Cox Richardson

 June 18, 2023 (Sunday)

by Heather Cox-Richardson, Ph.D.

Tomorrow is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.

Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed there. On June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”

The order went on: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

While the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing enslavement except as punishment for a crime had passed through Congress on January 31, 1865, and Lincoln had signed it on February 1, the states were still in the process of ratifying it.

So Granger’s order referred not to the Thirteenth Amendment, but to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.

Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought for the United States and worked in the fields to grow cotton the government could sell. Those unable to leave their homes had hidden U.S. soldiers, while those who could leave indicated their hatred of the Confederacy and enslavement with their feet. They had demonstrated their equality and their importance to the postwar United States.

The next year, after the Thirteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing the coming of their freedom. By the following year, the federal government encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, eager to explain to Black citizens the voting rights that had been put in place by the Military Reconstruction Act in early March 1867, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation.

But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.

In summer 1865, as white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in the fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.

In 1865, Congress refused to readmit the Southern states under the Black Codes, and in 1866, congressmen wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.

The addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 remade the United States. But those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds.

On Friday, June 16, 2023, the Department of Justice—created in 1870 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment—released the report of its investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and the City of Minneapolis in the wake of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer. The 19-page document found systemic “conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” discriminating against Black and Native American people, people with behavioral health disabilities, and protesters. Those systemic problems in the MPD’s institutional culture enabled Floyd’s killing.

Minneapolis police performed 22% more searches, 27% more vehicle searches, and 24% more uses of force on Black people than on white residents behaving in similar ways. They conducted 23% more searches and used force 20% more on Indigenous Americans.

The Justice Department’s press release specified that the city and the police department “cooperated fully.” The two parties have “agreed in principle” to fix the problem with sweeping reforms based on community input, with an independent monitor rather than litigation.

While the Senate unanimously approved the measure creating the Juneteenth holiday last year, fourteen far-right Republicans voted against it, many of them complaining that such a holiday would be divisive.

How we remember our history matters.

[General Order No. 3, National Records and Archives Administration, public domain.]

Pro-DEI March in El Paso this weekend , April 22, 2023 at 10:30AM

So glad to see that folks in El Paso are marching for civil rights—specifically, in support of of diversity, equity and inclusion—this weekend, April 22, 2023. The event starts at 10:30AM beginning at the corner of Campbell & San Antonio, marching at 11AM to San Jacinto Plaza.

I'll actually be in El Paso this weekend, but giving a talk to LULAC at their district convention so I'm afraid I'll not make it. 

Texans everywhere need to be marching with their leadership, elected leaders, and corporate sector leaders in support of DEI.

Godspeed to everybody!

-Angela Valenzuela

 

Knowing Mexican American Civil Rights Movement history that, unfortunately, our textbooks do not include, remains vastly important if we are to fully understand the plight of Mexican Americans advocating for an equitable and just education and the broader implications of this struggle for us today.

Texas history—and the history of the Southwest, in general, where large numbers of students protested in the form of school walkouts, rallies, and community organizing led to much-needed policy changes the provide a model—among others like coalitional, judicial, and electoral politics together with legislative actions—for collective struggles today.

It's worth noting that Mexican American progress is inextricably linked to Latina and Latino progress, as a whole, as well as with that of all other groups of color. As a society, we ALL benefit from appeals to civil rights and are NEVER hurt by it. We only benefit when we live up to our highest ideals as a country.

Looking forward to seeing this play that features, in particular, the legendary Dr. Jose Angel Gutierrez' leadership, at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio soon. Go to this page for more information. Hurry up though since tickets are going fast.

-Angela Valenzuela

Fronteras: ‘Crystal City 1969’ play honors the real-life story of student 'heroes and sheroes' who fought for Latino civil rights

By Norma Martinez, 

Marian Navarro

In 1969, a Mexican American high school student in Crystal City wanted 

to join her school’s cheerleading squad.

She was automatically disqualified from applying. Only one Mexican 

American cheerleader was allowed and the squad had already met its 

yearly quota.

The incident became the catalyst that led to a historic school walkout. 

But it was more than about a cheerleader who didn’t get a spot on the 

team.

It was also about physical punishment students endured for speaking 

Spanish, and about how Mexican Americans were often discouraged 

from pursuing a college education.

The walkout was about discrimination and racism.

Dallas-based Cara Mía Theatre adapted the events of the walkout and 

turned it into the play, “Crystal City 1969.”

Playwrights David Lozano and Raul Treviño conducted interviews with former 

students, teachers, and law enforcement officials who lived through the 

walkout.

Lozano, executive artistic director of Cara Mía Theatre, said the movement 

was eye-opening for students.

“They were just discovering this reality and putting the pieces together 

because the world (and) what is essentially a quasi-Jim Crow culture (that) 

had become normalized,” he said. “But as young people, they were 

beginning to wake up to these differences and how they were treated.”

The Crystal City walkout was inspired by similar walkouts in Los Angeles, 

San Antonio, and the Rio Grande Valley.

Treviño, whose own uncle was a student leader of the walkout, said 

the play aims to ensure this event does not become a forgotten piece 

of history.

“It is a universal story. It's a timeless story. It’s David and Goliath,” he said. 

“You go back thousands of years and it's when young people are able to 

make a difference for their communities.”

The play is set to make its San Antonio debut at the Guadalupe Cultural 

Arts Center Jan. 19-22.

See showtimes and information here. Some shows may already 

be sold out.