Rodolfo F. Acuña: The purpose of Chicano Studies was “to liberate students through literacy”

Beautiful 2012 piece by Dr. Rudy Acuña. His powerful words on the purpose of Chicana and Chicano (or Mexican American) Studies still resonate. Liberation is simply not achievable without a vigorous life of the mind that a critical education provides. Expressed differently, literacy gets corrupted when it's about testing companies making tests, young people hopefully scoring highly on them, and even internalizing the results as saying something meaningful about them.

Once we relax these assumptions about students' test scores, we must ask not only why they have such a grip on both students' and educators' lives, but also what they say about students' education.

Dr. Acuña provides some key insights that link pedagogy to the practice of freedom.

-Angela Valenzuela

Rodolfo F. Acuña: The purpose of Chicano Studies was “to liberate students through literacy”

By Rodolfo F. Acuña

June 13, 2012 | LatinaLista

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
-Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I always start a meeting with the farm worker handclap in a tribute to University of Arizona Professor Mark Stegeman, the former president of the Tucson Unified School District, who as a pretext for eliminating the TUSD’s Mexican American Studies (MAS) Program, said that he went after MAS because after listening to Mexican Americans use the clap, he knew that Mexican American Studies was a cult. Stegeman’s statement proves my mother’s saying that “Para pendejo no se estudia. Se nace.”

I joined the struggle to Save Ethnic Studies in Arizona because the stupidity of xenophobes and their intent to destroy all the educational reforms that Mexican Americans have struggled for.

In this context I pay tribute to Paulo Freire who has become a legend so much so that we know the legend, but have contesting views of Freire. Our understanding of Freire and his relevance differ due to the fact that several generations separate us and time has a way of distorting reality. In other words, we do not have a common epistemological base, although we are all concerned with education.

Not everyone wants to be educated, however. The forces who benefit from the status quo want this generation to conform to their interests. Consequently, they see Freire as a subservice and worse, according to them, un-American. This is at the crux of the inquisition in Tucson.

When I first read Freire, it was in the context of another time. He was not a legend yet but one among other progressive educators.

The Sixties were a time when we wanted to transform society and create the underpinnings of a democratic and just society. Educators such as Freire were the antithesis of today’s “No Child Left Behind” which reduces learning to indoctrination with subject matter drilled into students.

Education today is reduced to “Roses are red and violets are blue” with no other answer acceptable.

As a junior high school teacher, my education included the great John Dewey who wrote, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” The purpose of teaching was to educate – to motivate, to engage students to learn – and if they did not, it was your fault not theirs.

Dewey gave literacy a meaning beyond reading the bible. Dating back to the days of Plato and the birth of the notion of democracy literacy has been associated with citizenship.

An American myth is that what makes this nation exceptional is its commitment to public education. The reality is that while Massachusetts Bay Colony had schools, eligibility was limited to race – blacks and Indians could not attend them. As the nation developed, former colonies became states. Compulsory education became more common.

Yet this changed with the growth of cities and the growing number of immigrants; by the second half of the 19th century, education was neither compulsory nor available to the children of immigrants. Reformers fought for compulsory education for the newcomers and the various states passed compulsory education laws — California in 1874 and Texas in 1915. However, the laws were not enforced, especially in the case of migrant children.

As the number of Mexicans grew, organizations such as the Alianza Hispano-Americana and the League of United Latino American Citizens pressed for educational reform. After World War II, educators such as George I. Sánchez demanded better education for Mexican American children and advocated for pedagogies such as bilingual education.

In 1960, the median education of Mexicans in Texas was the third grade and in California the eighth. However, teachers knew that this was an illusion and that large numbers of Mexican Americans were functionally illiterate. They knew that the schools were not teaching Mexicans rather warehousing them.

Reformers were also motivated by Vatican II which began in 1962; it gave birth to Liberation Theology. The poor had the right to enjoy the bounties of the earth – salvation was communal.

This environment produced giants such as Ivan Illich who in 1960 established a center in Cuernavaca, Mexico — CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación). It was a watering hole for educators and intellectuals throughout the Americas. His books Deschooling Society and Tools of Conviviality were anchors.

Many educators, myself included, looked at a lasting transformation emanating from education. Literacy was not the possession of communism or any other ideology, although note was taken of Mao’s literacy campaign in China.

Educators knew that literacy had broken the isolation of Helen Keller, a blind child with a limited vocabulary. Words freed Keller and words made her a world intellectual.

It did not take much to look around the schoolyard and recognize students mired in poverty and hopelessness. Many would go to jail because of a lack of literacy. I remember teaching literature from Classic Comic Books and occasionally motivating students to read.

I remembered my mother who had been legally blind since the age of four reading the Encyclopedia Britannica peering through the largest magnifying glass I had ever seen. Although she could not help me, she wanted me to read.

In this context I read The Invisible Minority (NEA) in 1966. An essay by a 13 year-old Mexican girl caught my senses:

Me

To begin with, I am a Mexican. That sentence has a scent of bitterness as it is written. I feel if it weren’t for my nationality I would accomplish more. My being a Mexican has brought about my lack of initiative. No matter what I attempt to do, my dark skin always makes me feel that I will fail. Another thing that “gripes” me is that I am such a coward. I absolutely will not fight for something even if I know I’m right. I do not have the vocabulary that it would take to express myself strongly enough…

How could someone who looked at herself in this way learn?

I looked for inspiration to the work of humanist psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. His writings gave me goose pimples:

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

When students created an opening in 1968 and 1969, I became part of the first wave of hires. The mission was to set up a Chicano Studies Department.

My epistemological underpinnings differed from most activists — I did not consider the disciplines to be at the core of Chicano Studies. For me, its purpose was to liberate students through literacy. Its purpose was pedagogical.

This discipline-pedagogy dialogue consumed the next forty-two years. No one seemed to be listening until one day I was invited to speak at the 12th Annual Institute for Transformative Education sponsored by the TUSD Mexican American Studies Department.

I had written about the Arizona-Sonoran Border and published Corridors of Migration (Arizona 2008).

In the early 2000s I accompanied Armando Navarro and others to the border to protest the growing violence against Mexican immigrants. But participating in this conference and witnessing their resurrection of Freire reminded me of an encounter I had had in the 1980s when I got a call to go up to La Paz, the United Farm Workers headquarters.

I was not thrilled at the prospect of spending time there, I was not into rabbit’s food. However, I greatly admired César Chávez.

Much to my surprise when I go there I was introduced to Paulo Freire; César and he were to have a special encuentro. César arrived late and immediately launched into dialectic on how he was in the middle of union business and as a poor man could only control his time so it was a duty to use that time for the union.

I had feared that César was going to get blown away. However, after he finished, Freire got up emotionally and pointed to him and said only one word “praxis.”

My emotions so overwhelmed me at Tucson that I too could only think of the word “praxis” when I met Sean and the MAS teachers. These people were teachers.

So when the “rose are red” people tried to eliminate them I had no other choice but to enlist.

In this struggle I have often recalled the words of Fanon,

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)

I understand this but as a teacher I also understand that everyone has the right to be “Me” and feel proud of themselves. Roses can be blue and violets red.

Dr. Rodolfo Francisco Acuña, called the “father of Chicano Studies,” is a historian, professor emeritus, activist and the author of 20 titles, 32 academic articles and chapters in books, 155 book reviews and 188 opinion pieces. Currently, he teaches Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge.

It's painful to anticipate the persecution and the horrors that await these poor souls.  The "Wretched of the Earth," as Frantz Fanon referred to them in his classic, highly-influential, treatise on colonialism [download pdf version of his work here].

These are the Indigenous peoples and their descendants of this land and continent that are still bearing the brunt of colonialism.

Sometimes, literally, all one has is hope and faith in a better tomorrow...

-Angela Valenzuela

As the U.S. Shuts Its Doors, Migrants at the Mexican Border Continue to Hope

by Masha Gessen | The New Yorker | July 23, 2018

Let's Decolonize Higher Education

Powerful piece that calls for a decolonization of higher education through the very themes, topics, and methodologies utilized by ethnic studies, as well as by scholars in women and gender studies:

If there are areas of study that deserve more attention after the elections, they are the fields that were at the forefront of critiquing and opposing the extremely and largely intentional slow and ineffective post-racial script of “diversity and inclusion” all along, namely, critical, intersectional and decolonial Ethnic Studies fields as well as Women’s and Gender Studies. Support of these areas may represent the most direct and firm challenge to the current neo-fascist trend in society and to the liberal post-racialism in the academy. They are also the areas that are best prepared to equip students to critically analyze and oppose fascist, racist, and dehumanizing tendencies.

 Thanks to Dr. Aimee Villarreal for sharing. 

Angela Valenzuela

The U.S. Elections, Ethnic Studies, and the University : A View from the Historically Disenfranchised

jeudi 24 novembre 2016

Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
University of South Africa
Frantz Fanon Foundation

Responses to the results of the U.S. presidential election in the U.S. academy have included the idea that the field of political science finally proved to be defunct, and that the times call for more respect and support to areas such as philosophy and the humanities. What these responses miss is that, if anything, the elections made visible the problematic character of hegemonic models of the entire field of “arts and sciences,” including political science, philosophy, and the humanities. They also miss that the most relevant areas of scholarship at the moment might be the ones that are typically relegated to a second-class status or worse : Ethnic Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies and related fields.
I will avoid commenting much on the overwhelming lack of “diversity” in areas like philosophy and political science, which I think is connected to the very real limit that these areas find in responding adequately to the current situation. But I will note that considering that the racial composition of philosophy departments may be as bad or worse than the collective of Trump supporters in his rallies and the now in power Republican Party, I had a hard time reading a recent defense of college philosophy education as a serious response to the post-election crisis.
In many ways, the university is an engine as well as a mirror of the world, far from its usual presentation as an exceptional space. The same racism, structural inequalities, and phobias that are present in society can be found in the university, just often, but not always, with different codes. Needless to say, racism is not only found in some fraternity parties, but also sometimes in more sophisticated and lethal forms in faculty and administrator’s meetings and projects, including “diversity and inclusion” initiatives.
Consistent with the racial bias in higher education, many academics tend to look at Ethnic Studies fields as illegitimate intruders that challenge the quality of education, or as temporary remedial areas that provide refuge to students of color while the important fields (such as History, Sociology, and English, among other areas) subsume the scholarship produced in those fields and improve it. This is part of the reason why universities have not invested significantly in these fields, and why, what these fields do never gets to represent an important part of the rankings that universities use to rationalize their choice of supporting the units that already benefit from their large size and their alignment with the established rankings. Little attention is given to the limits and problems of criteria for excellence and prestige created and designed in contexts where racial denial and the racist construction of knowledge have been normative.
I would dare to say that many, if not most, of us faculty of color in institutions of higher learning feel like Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock in the Saturday Night Live’s skit where they hang out with white friends in election night. [1] The difference is that we cannot afford to laugh because the university space is not as unforgiving as their nice living-room where they hanged out with their white friends. We live in a context where our contributions and the fields that have so prominently called for attention to the significance of racism, sexism, and multiple other forms of structural inequality and phobias keep being ignored and in many cases are aggressively limited and shut down, while white academics share in the scandal of discovering that the country is racist, that race counted for so much, or that people seem to easily disregard racism and the threat on multiple communities as long as they are promised better economic conditions—of course, better economic conditions alone is not solely what many of they want. At the same time, the very same academics tend to remain blind to the racism, sexism, and structures of inequality and phobias that they perpetrate and that are constitutive of the academy itself.
Sanctuaries and the Decolonization of the University
If there are areas of study that deserve more attention after the elections, they are the fields that were at the forefront of critiquing and opposing the extremely and largely intentional slow and ineffective post-racial script of “diversity and inclusion” all along, namely, critical, intersectional and decolonial Ethnic Studies fields as well as Women’s and Gender Studies. Support of these areas may represent the most direct and firm challenge to the current neo-fascist trend in society and to the liberal post-racialism in the academy. They are also the areas that are best prepared to equip students to critically analyze and oppose fascist, racist, and dehumanizing tendencies. This includes not only the theoretical tools and multiple research projects, but also their attention to pedagogies that challenge the walls of separation between our campuses and the communities that surround them.
The critical and intersectional tools and pedagogies developed in decolonial Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programs allow us to see, for example, that while calls for making university campuses “sanctuaries” for the undocumented are extremely valuable today, our campuses have never offered a consistently safe space for students or communities of color. Even faculty of color are treated as threatening outsiders sometimes, and students of color take on the added responsibility of reaching out to their communities while their overall time for studying is reduced by added hours at work.
Universities cannot become real sanctuaries for people of color as long as what they consider sanctum continues to be premised on our secondary status, if not the expectation of our disappearance and the mere “inclusion” of our scholarship in the very same fields and structures that have denied those issues entry for so long. We will not go far if we fail to confront the reality that the liberal arts and sciences themselves, not neo-fascist ideologues, are responsible for all this. Likewise, our efforts to address and counter the racist forces that are becoming so obvious today—but that have been dominant all along—will be undercut if calls for increasing the number of sanctuaries for the undocumented collapse into the affirmation of discourses and practices of inclusion, instead of becoming part of the struggle for decolonization.
The opposite of exclusion, in contexts structured by coloniality is not inclusion, but decolonization. Inclusion, in these contexts, is just another form of coloniality.
Long before Trump promised a wall, universities have been increasing their disconnection with their surrounding communities and making it more difficult for those communities to consider universities not only accessible, but also relevant. University policies of “diversity and inclusion” and the increasing disconnect of universities from communities contributed to failing in the effort to produce the kind of student body and scholars who would stand up to the neo-liberal and neo-fascist challenges of the time.
In this context, neither rejecting the vulgar racism and sexism of the Trump campaign, nor voting for Clinton, nor joining campaigns to increase the number of sanctuaries for the undocumented assume the depth and weight of the challenge. The struggle is against racial liberalism, racial neoliberalism, white supremacy, sexism, heteronormativity, and neo-fascism combined, all of which represent a challenge to excellence in knowledge production, not to mention a threat to historically disenfranchised communities, among others. For this reason, as much as calls to secure college campuses as sanctuaries for the undocumented are important, the real challenge for white academics and those who share the perspectives that seem to be most dominant among them is not so much joining these campaigns, but becoming part of the struggle to decolonize the university. That, I anticipate, will be much more difficult to all of them. To be sure, this does not mean that there should not be efforts to bring different sectors together in favor of the sanctuaries—clearly we should strive for that—, but only that a) we cannot allow this cause to become yet another means of strengthening post-racialism, liberal inclusion, and the redemption (without reparations) of whiteness, and b) this is only part of a larger struggle that includes the desegregation and the decolonization of the university.
Critical, Intersectional, and Decolonial Thinking and Research Today
The times call, not for yet another round of self-congratulatory efforts from scholars in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences who aim to “save” their units in a context of austerity and now moral outrage, but for a serious reflection on the entanglement of all of these areas with the order of knowledge, being, and power that naturalizes race and other forms of structural inequalities and phobias. Likewise, the current moment provides yet another opportunity for academics to learn from and support the most rigorous and consistent anti-racist, anti-sexist, and decolonial scholarship and pedagogy there is, found in Ethnic Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as in Sexuality Studies fields.
This is a moment to identify and develop new strategies of transformation beyond “diversity and inclusion” initiatives. Here is an opportunity to break from the spell of academic liberalism and to support the kind of research that has always identified the limits of post-racial discourses in the academy. Administrators will unlikely find more direct legal means of opposing the neo-fascist trends than by aggressively supporting Ethnic Studies and related areas that have a substantial record of producing critical, intersectional, and decolonial scholarship.
Critical, intersectional, and decolonial epistemic and research fields should receive enough support to serve as matrixes for the transformation of the humanities, the sciences, and, as Johnella Butler has put it, the common good. [2] Their task should include not only innovate research, theory, and methods, but also the creation of civic engagement opportunities that can make universities, not isolated bubbles or quasi-commercial malls that remain inaccessible to working class and immigrant communities, but sanctuaries as well as houses for empowerment and bridges to historically disenfranchised communities.
These units should be given an opportunity to take the lead in challenging the divides between intellectual movements and scholarly contributions, on the one hand, and social and artistic movements, on the other, with the idea that they all can contribute to the task of desegregating and decolonizing our epistemic and social formations. Ethnic Studies and related units that are truly oriented by critical, intersectional, and decolonial perspectives can lead an intellectual and pedagogical wave of critical, intersectional, and decolonial work that can make the entire university more relevant than ever to the 21st century and more responsive to the challenges of our liberal, neo-liberal, and neo-fascist times. Likewise, trailblazers in the efforts to counter the post-racial narrative that greatly contributed to our current situation, and tested leaders in the effort to decolonize the university should be given opportunities to shape the current responses to neo-fascism and to move the university forward in the 21st century.
There are no laws that make these changes impossible. It is rather a question of vision and priorities. Every day that goes by without firm and serious steps in this direction is yet another unnecessary postponement, another lost opportunity.

Notes

[1] See Saturday Night Live, “Election Night,” Nov. 13, 2016. URL : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHG0ezLiVGc

[2] See Johnnella E Butler, "Ethnic Studies as a Matrix for the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Common Good." In Color-Line to Borderlands : The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies, edited by Johnella E. Butler, 18-41. Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2001.