"Why Decolonization Matters," by Margaret Kimberley—Sept. 14, 2022, Alternet

 In total agreement that we should not only take an unblinking look at monarchy and state violence, but that we should simultaneously disavow the seductive idea that we, as Americans, "should also be interested in the royals," as expressed herein by Margaret Kimberley. We are simply not to admire enslavers or colonizers. Kimberley further expresses the following:

"Decolonization is hard work and serious business. It requires a rejection of what passes for news and conventional wisdom. Of course, its meaning can be changed at an opportune moment, as recently happened when the neo-conservative fantasy of breaking up Russia was reimagined as decolonization. That sort of trickery is proof that political education is key."

I'm learning right now, for example, that Britain is devising ways to deport/export desperate refugees who turn up on their shores to Rwanda. For example, read this June 29, 2022 piece titled, Uproar Over Britain’s Rwanda Asylum Plan Overlooks Nagging Issues in Illegal Migration, as well as this Aug. 15, 2022 Reuters piece titled, "UK pushes ahead with Rwanda migrant scheme as small boats keep coming, together with this Sept. 7, 2022 Council on Foreign Relations piece titled, "What is the UK's plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and how many could go?"

Doesn't look like this agenda has quite played out yet in Britain, but if Venezuelan refugees getting shipped off to the island of Martha's Vineyard by Ron deSantis pops into your head, that's an appropriate comparison. The Brits are not to be emulated in this regard. Asylum seekers have rights, too.

Civics education, including political education and Ethnic and Women and Gender Studies are definitely key to discerning when fascism is knocking at your door.

-Angela Valenzuela

#DecolonizationMatters #decolonize

Why Decolonization Matters

The word decolonization should not be treated as trendy slang. It describes an important political and psychological process.

Alternet, Counter Punch, Tom Paine and Buzzflash.

MARGARET KIMBERLEY

SEP 14, 2022

The word decolonization should not be treated as trendy slang. It describes an important political and psychological process. Media and state attempts at indoctrination show just how important it is.

It is vital to free ourselves from belief in the systems of white supremacy and imperialism that are inculcated in the educational system and are affirmed and amplified by the media and establishment opinion. The recent death of Queen Elizabeth II puts the need for political and psychological liberation in high relief. We are encouraged to admire an anachronistic monarchy, and are exhorted to join in mourning an individual and a system that have caused great harm to Black and other oppressed people around the world.

It is important to point out that British prime ministers are heads of government while the monarch is head of state. Elizabeth bore responsibility for every UK government action during her 70-year-long reign. The concentration camps and torture in Kenya during the independence struggle were her responsibility. So was the U.S. backed decision to undermine the commonwealth nation of Australia, and dispatch Gough Whitlam , the elected prime minister, who strayed too far from the imperialist consensus. The Windrush scandal which deprived Caribbean immigrants of their rights happened under her reign, as did Britain's invasion of Iraq and support for the destruction of Libya.

From childhood we are taught that invaders of other nations, enslavers, and colonizers are worthy of respect and admiration. 

Yet anyone who questions the monarchy’s role as part of the western axis of domination is rarely given access to media, making it difficult to be free of propaganda that is used to elicit fealty to monarchs, presidents and the people and institutions who empower them. 

From childhood we are taught that invaders of other nations, enslavers, and colonizers are worthy of respect and admiration. Centuries of criminality are passed off as benign and we are admonished to remember that the criminals in question were “products of their time” and are to be thought of with fond reverence.

The corporate media didn’t begin lionizing the queen of England just this week. Her private life and that of her ancestors are the stuff of endless histories that permeate popular culture. Eras in British history are directly identified with past monarchs and called Elizabethan or Victorian or Edwardian. The idea that Americans should also be interested in the royals is the result of heavy-handed indoctrination.

This columnist was the recipient of a Eurocentric education, beginning with an emphasis on European history in high school. College continued this unstated belief in the superiority of the people being studied, that is to say white people who either were from the ruling classes or worked to further their interests. History lessons were full of emphasis on the blood lines of monarchs, and stories of which king or queen did what to whom were staples of the curriculum. It is a somewhat interesting factoid that the monarchs of Great Britain, Russia and Germany in the early 10th century were all related but that information doesn’t reveal anything about the causes of World War I. The lede was buried under historical fluff but teachers and professors don’t announce that they are brainwashing students.

I was taught nothing of Belgian King Leopold’s personal theft of the Congo’s resources or of the killing of some 15 million people there.

Of course that is why the very deliberate confusion continues. The narrative that the U.S. and Britain have a “special relationship” is based on manufactured sentimentality rather than the fact that the founding state acts in concert with its settler colony. The indoctrination process can be like a sledgehammer, as it will be for the next few days, but can also be more subtle. None of my teachers said that the deaths of white people were worse than the deaths of people of color, but the only time I heard the word genocide in a classroom was if the Nazi killings of Jewish people were discussed. 

I was taught nothing of Belgian King Leopold’s personal theft of the Congo’s resources or of the killing of some 15 million people there. Nor was the word genocide used to describe the trans-Atlantic slave trade or chattel slavery as practiced throughout the Americas or the deaths by invasion, slaughter, and disease of indigenous people which also took place in this hemisphere. The elevation of one group as the sole victims of genocide and the erasure of others as not being worthy of the designation sends a subtle message that seeps into the mind and is imprinted in memory.

Decolonization is hard work and serious business. It requires a rejection of what passes for news and conventional wisdom. Of course, its meaning can be changed at an opportune moment, as recently happened when the neo-conservative fantasy of breaking up Russia was reimagined as decolonization. That sort of trickery is proof that political education is key.

Our political education must take place within revolutionary educational structures. If it doesn’t, we will believe that World War II started in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. It actually began in 1937 when Japan attacked China. What ought to be a simple and commonly known fact is lost because white supremacy centers the European experience. When we learn new information and unlearn falsehoods, the process of decolonizing begins. At that point no one has to direct us to ignore royal weddings or funerals or unveilings of Barack and Michelle Obama’s new portraits. We know the truth and free ourselves from believing in state propaganda.

Decolonized people know that the prestigious universities they are told to admire receive funds from the Defense Department and the military industrial complex. They know that think tanks that are treated as oracles not to be questioned are also an extension of the state. Corporate media are also compromised. The publisher of the Washington Post played a key role in Operation Mockingbird , the CIA’s plan to control the media. Of course the current owner, Jeff Bezos, has CIA contracts through Amazon so little has changed. The decolonized know that the media act as scribes for police departments as much as they do for the state department.

Most importantly, radical and independent media, like Black Agenda Report and LA Progressive, are a must for anyone who wants to free their thinking. BAR is one of the few publications, even left publications, which seriously analyzed the NATO attack on Libya, or the coups against the people of Haiti, or the U.S. role that began the current crisis in Ukraine. Reading BAR on a regular basis is an antidote to mental colonization.

So beware when a narrative is spun 24 hours per day, seven days per week. In all likelihood it is one that must be opposed, and in the best decolonized fashion possible.

BY

 MARGARET KIMBERLEY

Margaret Kimberley is a New York-based writer and activist for peace and justice issues. Ms. Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. She has been a columnist for Black Agenda Report since its inception, and was for four years the weekly columnist for Black Commentator. She also provides original work on Patreon. Her work has also appeared in the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Defender, and on web sites 

"Becoming Mexican American," by Ricardo Romo, Ph.D.

Such a beautiful reflection on what it meant to become "Mexican American" in San Antonio by former University of Texas San Antonio President Ricardo Romo.  It demonstrates a shift in understanding of "Mexican," as a national-origin  identifier to one of "Mexican American," as an ethnic identifier. It is a process. For first-generation immigrants, theirs is an experience of understanding what "Mexicanidad" (or Mexican-ness) means in a U.S. context. In short, although the same term, "Mexican" or "Mexicana/o" gets used, but they mean different things.

Dr. Romo's mention that "Mexican" was a term that entered from outside the lexicon of his community attests to not only the fact that people were primarily Spanish speaking but also that this term was imposed. This brought to mind a statement made by a newly-arrived Mexican student who expressed being troubled about having come to the U.S. to "learn" that "Mexican" is a dirty word.

I shared with her and the rest of the class that there is a long history to this and that the term—even as it represents a source of pride—is nevertheless inflected by vexed Anglo-Mexican relations in the Southwest. 

One sees, for example, people avoiding it altogether, opting for "Hispanic," "Latino," or "Latinx," because the word, "Mexican"—especially when accompanied by pejorative adjectives like "dumb," "greasy," or "dirty"—was intended as a slur. What may further reside at the subterranean, civilizational level, is a negation of Mexico itself, compounded by the fact that the term is of Indigenous origins. That is, the "Mexica" (pronounced me-SHEE-ca) are the Aztec, Nahuatl-speaking people whose very existence threatens the Eurocentric myths of both countries. 

-Angela Valenzuela 

Becoming Mexican American

By Ricardo Romo, Ph.D. | Nov. 1, 2020

The United States seemed far away to the families living in the farming communities of Union, Sabinas, and Agujita in northern Coahuila during the early 1900s. Those wishing to make a new life in the United States had to make a 80 mile trip to Eagle Pass, Texas.

There were no automobiles in any of the surrounding Mexican communities and the railroad tracks had not yet reached the rural areas. Coming to the United States meant walking or riding the entire distance in a horse carriage. Prior to the Mexican Revolution, most of the small farmers from these communities considered this to be too dramatic a step.

Francisco “Pancho” Saenz bought his business in 1937--at the height of the Great Depression. Francisco Saenz [on the right]: Auto Parts store on El Paso Street. 1940s. [Romo Family Photo]

Mexicans came to the United States because profound “push” forces dominated their daily lives. The “push” factors of the early 20th century were a result of civil unrest, war, and political oppression in Mexico. A long and harsh dictatorship in Mexico eventually led to a revolution, which resulted in the exodus of thousands of Mexican between the years 1910-1930. In the 1920s thousands from the Central states of Mexico also left because of religious persecution.

I often wondered why my grandparents came to the United States. My conversations with them revealed the obvious: like many other migrants of that time in Mexico, they left a homeland plagued by violence and with hopes of finding work elsewhere. It is not all that clear that they were seeking a new life elsewhere or in pursuit of the American Dream. They were undecided initially about their future. Unlike the immigrants from Europe and Asia,

Mexicans were close enough to the homeland that if work did not materialize or became unsteady, they were prepared to return. Many actually came to the United States thinking they would earn money and then return to Mexico after the armed conflict ended to buy a small property or start a business.

Maria Saenz Romo, sister of Francisco Saenz, and well known Midwife. Photo taken at her El Paso Street home only five houses away from Kerr Hill Auto Parts. [R.Romo family photos]

My four grandparents were born in Mexico. Two came from the Sabinas region of the northern state of Coahuila. Both of my parents grew up in the Westside of San Antonio, a Mexican barrio where everyone, it seemed, had a connection to Mexico. No one had a television, so our only music and news came from two local Spanish language radio stations.

Mexican barrios like ours and those in other U.S. cities were often called “Little Mexico.” In Dallas, for example, so many Mexican moved into the “Little Jerusalem,” a Jewish neighborhood, that after 1910 it soon became known as “Little Mexico.” But there was nothing little about our barrio in San Antonio, which the US Census estimated as the second largest Mexican American community in the United States after Los Angeles in 1960. Those from outside our barrio called us Mexican, and we referred to ourselves as “La Raza.”

There is much about what I saw and learned in my early years in San Antonio that reveals the extent of our Mexicanism. I grew up surrounded by a large extended family, and they influenced much of my early understanding of Latino culture and society. My “Tio Pancho” was one such influencer.

Kerr Hill Auto Parts owned by Francisco Saenz. 1940s. [R. Romo Family photos]

My uncle, [Tio] Francisco “Pancho” Saenz, came to the United States at the age of 18 with his sister, Maria Romo, and his brother in law, Benito Romo, from the Sabinas region of Coahuila. The three immigrated in 1913 crossing into the United States at the Eagle Pass international border.

Tio Pancho initially worked as a farm laborer, but found a job in a garage as a young man when the family moved to San Antonio. With his savings, Tio Pancho bought his own garage and auto parts store in 1937. Tio Pancho was a frequent “guest DJ” with KCOR. On the radio he told stories about serving in the Mexican Revolution, catching huge fish in the Gulf of Mexico, and knowing the latest juicy stories about Mexican movie stars and popular singers.

Tio Pancho--”El Gavilan Pescador,” loved fishing and hunting and enjoyed telling his fishing stories on the local Spanish-language radio. [R.Romo family photos]

“Tio Pancho” was a popular fellow in our Westside barrio. From the mid 1930s to the time of his death in 1965, he had one of the few Mexican-owned auto parts sales and repair shops in the city. He had radio time on the only Mexican station in town. His sister Maria was one of the most respected midwives in the barrio. His brother Cruz owned a popular night club “El Gaucho” across the street from Tio Pancho’s auto shop on El Paso Street and his younger brother Martin owned several fried chicken drive-inns.

If my grandmother and her brothers believed in the American Dream, they didn’t say. If the American Dream meant being financially successful, creating their own businesses, buying a home, and raising children who attended school, they more than lived this dream.

Although they gave up on returning to Mexico, they never gave up on their idea that family was the Mexican way. My grandmother and her two brothers helped bring my great grandmother, Estefana Cardenas, to the United States. She lived next door to her son’s auto parts store, five houses from her daughter’s home, and across the street from her younger son’s night club.

Today, the auto parts store, Kerr Hill Auto Parts, continues in its 83rd year with the help of Tio Pancho’s son Frank, his wife Vicki, and their son Frankie, They moved the store one block south to Guadalupe Street where they have a larger lot for the garage and auto repair business. These are tough times for small family businesses, and the fourth generation has no interest in keeping the business active after the son, wife and grandson of Tio Pancho retire.

Frank Saenz, Jr., [center] son of Francisco Saenz, with cousins Robert Romo, left— and Ricardo Romo [R] . [R.Romo family photos 2015]

Tio Pancho’s family story is one of many from this Westside barrio. This family did not have strong long-term ties to Mexico, but managed to bring some Mexicanism to San Antonio via their radio experience and interaction with other Mexican customers and family members. All continued to speak Spanish, and Maria Romo, the midwife, learned very little English as nearly all of her clients spoke Spanish.

Tio Pancho’s family contributed to the Mexican American experience, as did thousands of other first generation Mexicanos in the United States. They passed on Mexican values of strong family ties, a respect for hard work and entrepreneurship, an appreciation for being bilingual in Spanish and English, and the importance of higher education.

STEM diversity and student Latina/o resilience: A reflection, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Friends and Colleagues:

For those of us in higher education—in Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), in particular—this special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, edited by Drs. Gonzalez and Fernandez, is high-quality, informative, and policy-relevant. In this piece that I share below, I read and reflected upon every contribution to this volume that I found to be quite troubling on so many levels, as a whole.  They raise the key question of what "servingness" in being an HSI actually means. 

If you are at a university, check to see if your library carries this journal so that you can have access to the different contributions listed here in the journal's Table of Contents. Certainly, every HSI or emerging HSI should read this, as well as STEM programs in high schools, colleges, and universities nationwide.

Particularly for Latinas in STEM, there is far too little of this research that examines HSIs from a qualitative and critical policy perspective to both ascertain and interrogate struggles experienced within university classrooms and departments. 

What actually "works" for Latinx youth must be considered if we are ever to move the needle on their representation in STEM classrooms and careers.  Thanks, in particular, to University of Houston Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Assistant Professor, Elsa Gonzalez, Ph.D, for extending this wonderful opportunity and challenge of summarizing this important volume.

-Angela Valenzuela

Published in QSE Special Issue

Gonzalez, E. & Fernandez, F. (2020). “Understanding Latina/o Resilience,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Volume 33, Issue 8 (2020)

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 2020, VOL. 33, NO. 8, 898-904

https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2020.1786188

STEM diversity and student Latina/o resilience: A Reflection

by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

This reflection explores the contributions to this special issue in order to derive an over-arching sense on the many difficulties that Latinas attending universities designated as Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) face in STEM fields where their abilities are not only questioned, but they also get marginalized, deprived of opportunities that are customarily available to their white, male peers. Notwithstanding their “HSI” designation, their systemic isolation and exclusion in Eurocentric institutions, while challenging, are frequently offset either by familial or cultural resources that allow them to persist. A major point is that though Latina students’ resiliency is a noteworthy attribute and research finding, it would be less necessary if university classrooms and departments themselves were more inclusive, affirming, and asset-based spaces to begin with.

KEYWORDS

STEM, Latina/o, Resilience, Hispanic Serving Institutions

   

   From the lens of student resilience, the underlying question that ties this special issue together is how might a Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) enhance Latina/o/x students’ success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Success here involves their entrance into STEM fields; retaining them once they have been admitted; and graduating them upon completion. This would seem to be a vitally important question informing policy and practice given that as Rincón and colleagues (this volume) note, ‘the U.S. is witnessing a demographic shift towards a majority-minority populace where Latinxs are projected to account for 75 percent of the growth in the nation’s labor force’ (p. 2). This fact alone would seem to put serious pressure on HSIs, in particular, to meet our resilient students at least halfway.

   Their documented failure to do so, however, has serious labor market implications. For instance, we know that the number of students pursuing degrees in STEM fields falls short of the demand, and that this problem of supply is particularly acute for the Latinx student STEM population who in 2010 registered 8 percent of all degrees awarded in 2009 and 2010 (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). Before addressing ideas that will move the needle to increase the representation of Hispanics in STEM, I am compelled to critique the problematic departments and programs in which they find themselves, and the resiliency that preserves the students in response, which I read as two sides of the same coin. Expressed differently, resiliency would be less necessary as an attribute if classrooms, departments, and universities were more inclusive of, and less prejudicial toward, Latinx students.

   

Hispanic students’ resilience and uncaring institutions

As I read through these pages of how Latinx students fare in STEM fields in HSIs, it’s disheartening to read about the levels of exclusion, alienation, and isolation that so many students face, even as it is positive to read about the resources, strategies, and coping mechanisms, that students marshal as they seek career advancement in STEM fields. Tragically, For Latina females, the double-bind is particularly troubling with either their gender or their race calling into question their abilities in the form of subtle- and not-so-subtle forms of microaggressions as expressed in the students’ own words from one of the more poignant accounts (Contreras, this volume):

I feel like we get discriminated just because we are women, that's never been expressed with me, but I've heard them speak about other women and it's because they question women, they don't think that they’re as smart as them. (p.9)

I think they underestimate us a little bit sometimes…because we are women…their expectation is wrong, just because you are a man does not mean that you're correct all the time…because their intelligence is no better than mine. (p.9)

   Banda (this volume) interrogates the field of Engineering and concludes from her own research that Latinas’ intersectionality both as women and Latinas, translates into ‘intersecting, multiple and simultaneous forms of marginalization, isolation, and exclusion’ (p. 12). Banda’s research subjects report a glaring lack of diversity, with no faculty of color, especially Latina professors within sight. Classroom climate is also a major point of contention, characterized by sterile, transactional interactions with faculty, ‘weed out’ courses, and grading on a curve that reinscribe white, male dominance. In the words of one interviewee, such faculty are ‘uncaring, unwelcoming, unapproachable, and simply not teaching’ (p. 7). This hostile environment, unfortunately, spills over into a competitive relationship with peers, when jockeying for internships and employment opportunities.

   This finding of a lack of caring in HSI institutions is tragic. Most troubling of all is how Latinas’ intelligence gets questioned. In this vein, an interviewee in the Contreras (this volume) piece offers the following:

I know other people have bad connotations, how they view us. Like I know still here I kind of struggle, some people are like, ‘why?' They think I'm lesser than them.

   As Gonzalez, Ortega, Molina, and Lizalde (this volume) note, institutional dynamics within HSIs can induce feelings of doubt and distrust. In particular, gender dynamics in STEM classrooms frequently position Latinas as always having to prove themselves, coinciding with difficulties of making friends with peers as follows:

   

They (male peers) think a female doesn’t know what she is doing or that if a girl asks a question in class or trying to get a point across that it’s okay to interrupt. Someone will interrupt to answer the question because they genuinely want to help, but there are others who just want to talk over you and try to explain it better (p.7). (Contreras, this volume).

   In general, the picture that emerges across the studies with diverse, qualitative methodologies is the presence of an authoritarian, conservative, Ivory Tower curriculum and pedagogy that treats students as passive learners, on the one hand, and as attainable only via a competitive approach to knowledge acquisition with little to no concern about developing students’ identities as moral and social beings, much less as competent and culturally diverse. The cruel irony instead is that they find ‘themselves at odds with the Eurocentric middle-class values embedded within’ (p.19) (Rincon, Fernandez, & Duenas, this volume).

   Aside from students’ cultural capital discussed below, the kinds of things that ‘work’ to induce a sense of belonging include Latinx-themed organizations like sororities and centers for Mexican American Studies (e.g., Gonzalez, et al., this volume). What would be immeasurably helpful as they contemplate a career and future in STEM occupations are greater access to mentorship and internship opportunities, getting research opportunities in laboratories, and smaller departments where students are less anonymous and relations with faculty are more intimate by design (Banda, this volume).

   Reminiscent of Valenzuela’s (1999) case study research findings involving the experiences of Mexican-origin high school youth, an indifferent, uncaring posture of the faculty in STEM fields, particularly with respect to Latina females emerges as a major finding (Contreras, this volume). Rather than an asset-based, non-deficit, approach, students get customarily sorted into a hierarchy of so-called ‘ability’ that tends to relegate minoritized females and males to the bottom and white males to the top. It is therefore extremely troubling to read that Latinas who have beat the odds and gained a toehold in higher education STEM classes and departments, then have to battle through discursive practices and institutional cultures that discourage and invisibilize them (Banda, this volume).

   These finding remind me of my own case study research of Seguin High School (pseudonym) in the early- to mid-1990s in a Houston high school where faculty were indifferent to students who expressed a desire for authentically caring relationships and a desire for fairness and visibility in STEM programs. In addition, and congruent with Noddings (2015) theory of care, university faculty exhibit aesthetic, or superficial, caring. The minoritized students’ experiences captured throughout similarly point to an objectifying experience where ‘education’ is done to—as opposed to—with, them. It’s interesting to consider that while Seguín was a segregated inner-city high school where ‘serving’ Hispanics was not an expressed goal, it differs little from the colleges and universities covered in this special issue where doing so was ostensibly important to the mission.

   While not openly stated, we know that this is a system that accords their white peers a sustained message that their position in the academic hierarchy is natural and superior based on seemingly ‘objective’ measures of merit. As per STEM fields themselves, how does society benefit from an over-representation of white students in STEM and higher education, as a whole, while the latter enjoy, on a daily basis, a false sense of entitlement? And to what extent is our country’s admissions processes in STEM fields—HSI or not—an artifact of just how well our elite, culturally-capital-based prescreening devices align to what Feagin (2013) calls the ‘white racial frame?’. By this, Feagin refers to four centuries of stereotyping, bigotry, and white supremacist ideology that is deeply embedded in the very fabric of our dominant U.S. institutions?

   Against this backdrop of systemic oppression characterized by sexist, classist, and racist grading polices, biased practices, and politics of exclusion that lead to a severe under-representation of Latinx females and males (Lopez, Valdez, Pacheco, Honey & Jones, this volume), it is truly remarkable that any Latinx student finds their way into STEM departments and persist once there. Here is where resilience and community cultural wealth (CCW) come into play (Yosso, 2005).

   

Community cultural wealth

Yosso’s (2005) widely-cited CCW framework emerges across several pieces as a theoretical perspective that helps to account for a multiplicity of resources (i.e., Gonzalez, et al.; Contreras; Rincón; López et al., & Palomino, this volume). Lopez and colleagues outline these forms of capital as ‘aspirational, familial, linguistic, navigational, resistant, social, and spiritual’. I focus on two of the contexts presented in this volume because they put flesh on the bones of the broad outlines of these different forms of capital and how they work to promote a sense of belonging and well-being.

   The first involves an intergenerational collective comprised of 6 individuals at an HSI called, ‘Las Comadres (LC)’ research team. It is comprised of all-female faculty, administrators, and one engineering undergraduate student who was a mentee and research assistant to a larger research project pertinent to a Latina mentoring program at the University. Using a Chicana Feminist epistemology they turned their lens inwardly to document their own stories, positionalities, and experiences within higher education to assess the impact of the LC on them. Emergent themes that surfaced were a sense of power and efficacy, evident in the concept of ‘navigational capital,’ together with the motivating value of being a part of the LC collective. In contrast to the more general finds of student isolation and exclusion in the other contributions to this special issue, this was the most contrasting narrative. What made the difference was the presence of a Latina faculty member who brought a Chicana Feminist epistemology to what they termed a ‘sacred space,’ that involved the group’s reading of critical texts that together with regular discussions that generated data for analysis, strengthened their bonds and promoted trust and respect. In this space, for example, the sole professor’s sharing of how she was able to navigate the vicissitudes of higher education institutions, exposed the team to intimate, first-hand knowledge that brought depth to their discussions while simultaneously fostering resilience for everyone in the collective. Lopez and colleagues cite Garcia (2016, 2019) whose research on HSIs examines ‘servingness,’ and the importance of authentic, as opposed to superficial, forms of responsiveness to Latinx students (also see Fernandez and Burnett, this volume, for their critique of the HSI accreditation process).

   The second example consists of Rincon et al.’s study of 16 Latinx students attending four Northeastern universities in a novel, comparative analysis along the lines of first-generation and continuing generation students. Whereas first-generation students are the first in their families to go to college, continuing-generation students have one or more parents who have done so. The researcher further distinguishes between Latinx students’ with CCW and those with traditional forms of capital characterized as ‘traditional,’ along Bourdieuian lines where the wealth of the latter is more in line with that of the former. Since generally speaking, continuing-generation students also have traditional capital, the study sought to compare them to their CCW, first-generation counterparts with the expectation that navigating higher education STEM fields would be less complicated for them given their synchronous relationship to the academy. Conversely, the divergent form of capital held by first-generation students relative to that espoused by the academy raised the question of the role of their form of capital given their non-synchronous connection to the academy.

   The researchers found that continuing generational students with traditional forms of Eurocentric capital had found ways to navigate between institutional values like individualism and CCW values like the value of family from their parents that allowed them to more easily navigate higher education STEM fields, in particular. In contrast, first-generation students faced more difficulties in navigating higher education STEM fields because of the divergence between CCW and Eurocentric, middle-class values. At least one student found the experience to be so conflicting that he decided to pull out of a STEM student organization that he found to be too competitive, thus opting out of a pathway for students intending to pursue advanced STEM degrees. Similarly, another student who sought to give back to his community decided not to pursue a career as a STEM professor because the very community whose lives he wanted to touch were not located in STEM college classrooms and as a consequence, less useful to his community.

   Negotiation proved to be a valuable tool for students for whom the STEM classroom was most divergent. Two students, for example, reported making use of opportunities to earn credit via volunteer service in their respective communities by reframing the expectation of such activities for students’ personal benefit, and more because its intrinsic value and meaning to them. A third student engaged in outreach activities to students who originate from communities like hers. This was less about building her resume, as the university expected, a more about doing her part to change an institutional culture that disparages her and people from her community. Rincón and colleagues (this volume) describe student agency to give back to the community as ‘moves’—or ‘movidas,’ we might suggest—that students have to make in order to cope with an alienating college experience. Movidas as expressed in Espinoza, Cotera and Blackwell (2018) analysis of Chicana feminist epistemology and agency during the Chicana and Chicano movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, is the point of departure for my remaining reflection.

Reflection

In the introductory chapter to Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era, authors Espinoza, Cotera, and Blackwell (2018) lay out a framework on how Chicana leaders were able to use their cultural capital and political networks to advance a progressive, feminist political agenda within the confines of a masculinist politics during the movimiento years. While referencing strategic and tactical moves, it connotes ‘the undercover, the dissident, the illicit’ (p. 2). Movidas are Chicanas’ tools for ‘destabilizing’ ‘normative practices and ideologies in as much as these practices and ideologies enact relations of subordination, inequality, or invisibilization’ (p. 3). Since the present account is very much about a continued subordination and denial of voice and identity, movidas for transformational change are what is currently needed.

   Several things appear obvious to me. Mediated in great part by the lack of diversity among STEM faculty, the Eurocentric, individualistic, ‘epistemic bubble’ that characterizes STEM fields needs to change (Nguyen, 2020). As things stand, the current forces of socialization within higher education STEM are concerning. I can’t help but wonder, for example, where the continuing-generation students’ traditional capital leaves off, and their likely unwitting unanimity with the epistemic bubble begins? How are we to ground such students from a CCW perspective when the individualistic lure of economic rewards and mobility is so seductive?

   That said, as much as we worry about how we as Latinx women and men fare in higher education institutions, my sense is that we should equally worry about higher education itself getting trapped in an ‘epistemic bubble,’ however elaborate or arcane, of its own making. We must ask ourselves what is not getting researched and what questions are not getting asked because of an utter lack of diversity in STEM fields within HSIs, or in higher education, as a whole? If the lives, histories, cultures, and internal diversity of Latinx peoples are systematically outside of science, it is plausible to conclude that neither a sufficiently broad nor representative coverage of topics of vital importance to Latinx people and people of color, generally, are getting addressed—at a time when Mexican people, in particular, are a target of racialized animus and state, anti-immigration policy (Anti-Defamation League, 2018).

   While I am heartened, in particular, by the very important role that parents play in helping students, their children, stay in school and pursue their ambitions (Palomino, this volume), we need to advocate for, and make us of, those parts of the higher education curriculum like Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, LGBTQ Studies to provide students with a critical analysis of institutions and how they have historically worked to perpetuate themselves while leaving students defenseless against their sexist, racist, and dehumanizing practices and policies. In such courses, students would be able to interrogate ways of knowing and being that relegate our communities to an afterthought. At their best, Ethnic Studies teaches students to learn about their own communities’ struggles with racial and social injustice, exposing them to historical and contemporary narratives and traditions of resilience and liberation.

   If including us as students in the hallowed halls of STEM—or for that matter, any other part of the university results in the social production of uncaring opportunists or narrow mobility seekers, why would any agenda for inclusion really matter if the voices we so desperately need today to stand up to the forces of neoliberalism and fascism are muted or coopted? I would hope that an enlightened version of STEM fields, classrooms, and careers would be thusly empowered. While all of the students featured within this volume are doing their best to stay centered in their values, what do we have yet to know and learn about those whose experiences took more conventional routes that align to the ‘white racial frame’ about which Feagin (2013) writes?

   If we understand curriculum at any level of the schooling system to equate to the reproduction of consciousness (Valenzuela, 2016), then an appropriate movida would be to connect the Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, and LGBTQ Studies to STEM curriculum and careers in substantive ways. We should advocate, accordingly, for these studies to be required parts of the curriculum. Our goal should further be to advocate for this curriculum in earlier grades so that younger students can learn about forms of agency that resulted in Latinx peoples creating institutions and political constituencies for change that provide roadmaps for individual and collective action. How might we begin to imagine fields like mathematics, science and engineering from a Chicana feminist, Indigenous, or decolonial standpoint? How might accreditation standards be substantively revised from a community-based, social justice lens?

   Latinas’ voices in this volume are loud and clear; they are resilient. They express a desire for fairness, respect, and an ethic of care. They seek to be recognized for their unique backgrounds and diversity, even as they simultaneously resist reinscribing systems that privilege maleness and whiteness. I feel deeply for these students. I see my story in theirs. Fortunately, I do sense that all will be well with them, but I lament that after 50 years of activism, our educational institutions have shown enormous durability in their penchant to discriminate and exclude. I want them to know their power and potential, their resilience, particularly the written an unwritten histories of women and men who came before them without whom not even the white-washed, STEM education that they are receiving would be possible.

   

   

Notes on contributor

Angela Valenzuela, PhD is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin.

References

Anti-Defamation League (2018). Mainstreaming hate: The Anti-immigrant movement in the U.S. https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/new-adl-study-details-how-extreme-anti-immigrant-hate-has-been-thrust-into-the

Espinoza, D., Cotera, M. E., & Blackwell, M. (Eds.). (2018). Chicana movidas: New narratives of activism and feminism in the movement era. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Feagin, J. R. (2013). The white racial frame: Centuries of racial framing and counter-framing. New York, NY: Routledge.

Garcia, G. A. (2016). Complicating a Latina/o-serving identity at a Hispanic Serving Institution. The Review of Higher Education, 40(1), 117–143. Crossref

Garcia, G. A. (2019). Defining ‘servingness’ at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs): Practical implications for HSI leaders. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.

Nguyen, C. (2020). Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Episteme, 17(2), 141–121. Crossref

Noddings, N. (2015). The challenge to care in schools. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

U.S. Department of Education (2014). Hispanics and STEM. National Center for Education Statistics, IPEDS., Completions survey. Hispanics and STEM Fact Sheet (20). https://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/list/hispanic-initiative/stem-factsheet.pdf

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling:  US-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.

Valenzuela, A. (Ed.) (2016). Growing critically conscious teachers: A social justice curriculum for educators of Latino/a youth. Teachers College Press.

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.

The Pedagogical Failure Of Eurocentric Methodologies by Miguel A. De La Torre

I just came across social justice theologian Miguel A. De La Torre's blog. His thinking is provocative.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Pedagogical Failure Of Eurocentric Methodologies

Miguel A. De La Torre | May 4, 2017
Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies
Iliff School of Theology

Miguel A. De La Torre

I am convinced that all eurocentric philosophical thought and movements – yes all – are oppressive to those who come from colonized spaces. When I contemplate every philosophical contribution made by the so-called Age of Enlightenment, it becomes obvious that the French Revolution’s battle cry for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité was never meant for her future colonies in Vietnam or Algiers. Hegel’s entire endeavor for a historical truths rests on the presupposition of the superiority of the Europeans and the inferiority of non-whites. In his 1824 book, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, Northern Europe - specifically the German Spirit - is the Spirit of the new World whose aim becomes the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of Freedom, a Freedom which has as its own absolute form itself as its purport (341). Such a Freedom was never meant for the “inferior” in need of civilization and Christianization. Even the U.S. rhetorical end to our daily oath of “liberty and justice for all” was never meant to include those from African descent, nor their neighbors south of the border.

The “all” in eurocentric philosophical thought just meant whites, definitely not her colonies or those among the colonized who followed their stolen raw material and cheap labor to the center of Empires. Abstract philosophical thought must be constructed to reconcile the quest for liberty and equality among whites with their purposeful exclusion of those whom they colonized. The issue is not so much hypocrisy on the part of the colonizer spewing rhetoric about liberty; but rather, philosophically justifying oppression through freedom-based language. The move to the abstract serves the crucial purpose of obscuring the economic need of dispossessing and disenfranchising the colonized and their descendants. Universal eurocentric celestial concepts of rights blinds the oppressed to the concrete feet-on-the-ground reality of oppression at the hands of such freedom loving whites. 

Over 125 years ago, José Martí saw the danger of adopting a eurocentric worldview detrimental to the existential intellectual space occupied by the colonized. He called the oppressed of the world to create a new way of thinking based on our indigeneity. To make our wine out of bananas (“Nuestro vino de plátano”) means such a wine would naturally be sweet. But if we instead make our wine out of the fruits of Europe and it becomes sour (“y si es agrio”), then we are stuck with it (“es nuestro vino”). Eurocentric philosophical thought not only sours our wine but also our teaching. To build liberative edifices on eurocentric philosophical foundations reproduces the same consequences as pouring new wines into old skins. Even our beloved liberation theological movements have, more often than not, looked toward their oppressors for means of expression. How much richer would our liberative thinking have been if we looked to our own original thinkers like Martí rather than the European liberal thinkers of the time?

When those of us seeking a liberative pedagogical methodology rest upon eurocentric philosophical paradigms, we construct resistance on shifting sand, contributing to our own oppression. And worse, when we teach in our classrooms our resistance to eurocentric thought, regardless of how loud, fearless, and passionate we may be, we are undermining our students’ ability to bring about subsistent change. The difficult task before us who call ourselves liberative scholar-activists is how do we think new thoughts that are less a response, and more an indigenous radical worldview different from the normative philosophies which have historically justified our subservient place within society.

True, we must learn the Eurocentric canon if we hope to obtain PhDs and be considered learned, even though our white colleagues need not bother with the discourses occurring on their margins. But rather than looking at the esteemed eurocentric thinkers who have historically written philosophies to remove us from humanity and the fruits of liberation, what would happen if we possessed the dexterity to teach what the children of the colonizers legitimized and normalized as well as a different worldview based on lo cotidiano - the every day of those purposely written off Hegel’s metaphysical dialectical history. To teach from the margins disabuses the regurgitation of foreign and deadly philosophical paradigms in favor of those which resonates with the least of these. Not solely to understand the world – as important as this may be, but also for its transformation.

The Student Strike That Changed Higher Ed Forever

This powerful story (see video below) on the origins of Ethnic Studies should give us pause.  We are heirs to a political movement where people were willing to put their lives on the line for their education, for a curriculum that reflects our heritage a culturally diverse nation.  While still in need of greater acknowledgement and respect at the college level, we’ve still come a long way.  Texas and other states now have Ethnic Studies in the K-12 curriculum in state law.  It is my understanding that the State Board of Education issues rules on the new Mexican American Studies course in June and that it will be on the books in Fall, 2019.  Headway is also being made with respect to African American Studies, too, thankfully.  As I say repeatedly, “Someday, this will all just get called a ‘good education.’” 

-Angela Valenzuela

March 21, 2019   5:17 PM ET

KAREN GRIGSBY BATES

SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI

Today, ethnic studies is an accepted part of academia. Many if not most college students have taken a course or two. But 50 years ago, studying the history and culture of any people who were not white and Western was considered radical. Then came the longest student strike in U.S. history, at San Francisco State College, which changed everything.

The groundwork was laid for the strike a couple of years before, when black students organized to press for a black studies department and the admission of more black students.

One of those organizers, Jimmy Garrett, was older and had worked in the civil rights movement in the South. He met a student named Jerry Varnado at a Negro Students' Association meeting, and the two helped assemble various black groups on campus into the very first Black Student Union.

Organizing for change

The BSU began a two-pronged effort: to press the school to admit more black students and to persuade parents of black high-schoolers to send their kids to SF State (which is now San Francisco State University).

The administration responded with a promise to allocate a little more than 400 slots for black students one semester and a couple of hundred more the next.

When the Asian and Latinx students heard about that deal, they wanted similar treatment. But the administration told them they would need to ask the black students to share part of their allotment.

Varnado and Garrett said no. As Varnado remembers it, his view was: "We're not in a position to be giving away anything. Everybody got to carry they own weight up in here — you got to go into battle!"

The BSU leaders suggested the myriad ethnic groups join with each other and the BSU, so they could battle the administration together.

Jimmy Garrett (left) and Jerry Varnado helped organize the first Black Student Union in the country at San Francisco State.

Shereen Marisol Meraji/NPR

Strength in numbers

The new group called itself the Third World Liberation Front. It was "a vehicle to politicize students of color," says SFSU historian Jason Ferreira, who is writing a book on the strike. "Chicanos, Asian-Americans were dealing with the same issues the black students had been struggling with" a few years earlier.

The black consciousness the BSU members achieved began to percolate into students from other ethnicities, many of whom had conservative parents from immigrant backgrounds. For the students who were Latinx and Asian, assimilation had been the goal. "They were running around trying to be white ... looking in the mirror and wishing they looked different," Ferreira says.

At the same time, the anti-war movement had picked up steam. There were weekly demonstrations on many campuses protesting American involvement in Southeast Asia. The Black Panthers were protesting police brutality in the city's communities of color —it was a turbulent time.

One of the most prominent on-campus organizers at San Francisco State was George Murray, a popular graduate student who taught freshman English. Murray had a second job as the minister of education for the Black Panther Party. He was fiercely anti-Vietnam, and his politics got him suspended from campus in 1968. And that was it. "The strike kicked off," said Varnado.

On Nov. 6, 1968, members of the BSU and the Third World Liberation Front poured onto campus. Some 400 students gathered in front of the administration building to demand that Murray be reinstated. They stayed out of class and, every day, more students joined them.

Police were called in to contain the demonstrations and disperse the protesters. They sprayed mace and swung batons. The protests grew.

"This went on day after day," remembers Varnado, "everybody was under attack."

A new president takes charge

A few weeks after the strike began, SF State's president, Robert Smith, resigned. His replacement was S.I. Hayakawa, a jaunty, self-assured semantics professor, who would be remembered for his hard-line tactics and his signature headgear: a hand-knit, multicolored tam o'shanter.

Hayakawa had been born in Canada to Japanese parents. He became an American citizen after his family immigrated to the U.S., and in his early adult life he was a Democrat (his first vote was for Adlai Stevenson in 1956).

After the strike, he would become a Republican (and eventually, a U.S. senator).

Hayakawa became famous for climbing atop a sound truck and ripping the wires from loudspeakers the students were using to amplify their demands. He enjoyed the support of Gov. Ronald Reagan, who had waged his own battles with students at Berkeley over free speech, and the San Francisco police chief.

But accounts of students being beaten by uniformed cops started to circulate — and soon the students were joined by outraged faculty and members of some of the city's black communities.

Lisa Rae Gutierrez Guzman was arrested for striking at SFSU in 1968. She took a plea ended up spending her 19th birthday in jail.

Shereen Marisol Meraji/NPR

Student Laureen Chew was working in the library and remembers coming outside to one of the demonstrations. "I was at the fringe of this huge [crowd], hundreds of people" when, she says, mounted police appeared.

"Some people I know were getting hit by bayonets, with their heads bashed in, blood all over the place." Chew (who went on to teach Asian-American studies at SFSU) was arrested that day, and her biggest worry: what her mother would think.

Lisa Rae Gutierrez Guzman was also arrested that same day. "My dad had to pick me up with a bail bondsman," she recalls, chuckling. She still remembers the man's slogan: "Don't perish in jail, call Barrish for bail!" Guzman was charged with three misdemeanors and says she eventually spent 30 days in jail.

"And that was really traumatic because I spent my 19th birthday in jail."

Organizer Varnado spent a year in jail, but is philosophical: "Other people spent more."

Historian Ferreira says many people have no idea of the sacrifice these activists made: "People did time. Relationships were stressed to the point of crumbling. Word would come back to members of the Third World Liberation Front and the Black Student Union from the police saying, 'We have bullets with your name on it.' "

In the end, was it worth it?

The strike ended on March 20, 1969. The administration, in response to student demands, established a College of Ethnic Studies. The administration also agreed to accept virtually all students of color for the fall semester of 1969.

And the student strikers did have lasting effects: Eventually, the SF State's creation of a College of Ethnic Studies gave rise to similar departments around the country.