Cheers to a Successful 5th Annual Summit of the NACCS Tejas Foco!

I am happy to report that our 5th Annual Summit of the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas Foco Summit was a huge success. We recorded the entire event that will get edited and posted to our MAS4TxSchools website. 

There are many people to thank for this, but those that must have surely lost the most sleep and that deserve special mention are our Chair University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Professor Christopher Carmona, University of Texas Education Policy and Planning doctoral student Eliza Epstein, and Cassie Smith, doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico Albuquerque. The entire four-hour event was powerful. Gracias to all! 

Special thanks, as well, to our elected leaders that participated, expressing their wholehearted support and personal commitment to our cause of making Ethnic Studies a requirement for high school graduation, and "Comprehensive Ethnic Studies," as we term it, a reality. By this, we mean the full menu of support and resources that Ethnic Studies to scale requires, including resources for professional development, curriculum development, Grow Your Own educator pathways, expanded dual credit options, and restorative justice practices grounded in the languages and cultures of our communities. Note: When we say Ethnic Studies in Texas, we always also mean African American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Native American Studies.

Specifically, Congressman Joaquin Castro (serving San Antonio and Bexar County) opened up our beginning session, followed by Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia (serving Eastern Houston), both of whom courageously and powerfully represent us in the U.S. Congress.  

They were followed by our equally courageous and powerful representatives in the Texas House of Representatives, beginning with Texas State Representative Mary Gonzalez (who serves the City of El Paso and El Paso County), followed by Texas State Representative Rafael Anchia (who serves the western corridor of Dallas County), and Texas State Representative Christina Morales (who represents Houston and parts of Harris County). 

I get goosebumps just thinking about not solely their involvement in our Summit—that incidentally, would have been near-impossible to orchestrate in person—but most especially for their sincere and encouraging words of support.

Others present were State Board of Education members Ruben Cortez and Marisa Perez. Texas LULAC was also in attendance with Education Committee Chair, Rene Martinez and member, Velma Ybarra present. Other notables in attendance were Austin Community College Trustee Nora Comstock,  former member of the Houston Independent School District school board Sergio Lira, and Dr. Lisa Ramos, former Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Mexican American Studies Field of Study Advisory Committee. 

With such "people power," the future of education in Texas is a bright beacon of hope, brimming with possibility and promise.

I don't know if other people in other states experience their state leaders in the ways that we do. As the events of yesterday showed, we know them and their staff and experience and enjoy them as trusted members of our community with whom we have literally rubbed shoulders in this positive, life-giving, legacy agenda to which we have all dedicated our lives and careers. I cannot say enough... 

Thanks to the opening prayer delivered by Carrizo-Comecrudo nation elder, Juan Mancias, as well as for the opening statements provided below by 

Drs. Christopher Carmona and Emilio Zamora that set the tone for this inspirational day.

-Angela Valenzuela

Opening Remarks by Christopher Carmona and Emilio Zamora

Dr. Christopher Carmona 

      As the Chair of Tejas Foco Committee on Mexican American Studies, I welcome all of you to our 5th Annual Statewide Summit on Mexican American Studies for Texas.  Our theme is “Now is the Time for MAS!” and our purpose is to rededicate ourselves to advancing Mexican American Studies as critical pedagogy and subject matter in our Texas public schools, colleges, universities, and community-based education.

      When I was seven years old, I remember sitting outside of my elementary school’s principal’s office.  My parents inside discussing my behavior.  You see, I only spoke Spanish when I was a kid.  When they came out, they didn’t look angry at me, they simply looked at me with a look that I did not recognize. It was a look that I wouldn’t understand for years.  After this moment I remember they only spoke to me in English.  The principal had explained to them that the only way to succeed in this country is if you speak English and my parents took that to heart.  It was from this point on that my ability to speak Spanish began to die and almost forgotten.

      I was lucky as a kid though. My uncle was a poet. I remember being at my grandma’s house when the first box of his poetry books showed up at her house. He opened them and there was a book written by uncle. A Mexican American poet. This grounded me in wanting to be writer. I always had that in the back of my head. I have since become a poet and a writer. But in school, I never read any writings by a Latina or Latino author. I never saw us represented in our American literature or our American history, unless we were the invaders, the villains, the poor workers in the fields. My father and his brothers and sisters and my grandparents were migrant workers, but they were also veterans, businesspeople, and were able to send their kids to college. To have their own Mexican American dreams.

      I never learned our stories in school. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that I read Bless Me, Ultima and it wasn’t even assigned in class. It was part of a UIL event. Then it wasn’t until college, specifically grad school that I read Occupied America, Anzaldua’s Borderlands, They Call Them Greasers by Arnoldo Deleon and many others. It wasn’t until grad school that I got the education that I should have received in school. That is why I do this work. So that the next generation will see themselves as part of America, which is just as much as theirs as it is ours from the first days of school to the last.

   Today we will be tackling these issues. Teachers, students, professors, artists, education activists, elders and other community representatives will be leading the discussions.  The discussion topics on Mexican American Studies will include the following:

1. Innovative practices and learning opportunities in the classrooms, 

2. Impressive curriculum and professional development activities, 

3. Extraordinary policy work and advocacy, 

4. Significant accomplishments in Mexican American Studies,

5. Innovative educational programs in Texas, 

6. and the inspiring cause for social justice in the education of our youth. 

We invite you to participate in these discussions and to join us in the ongoing work of advancing Mexican American Studies in Texas.

Dr. Emilio Zamora

            This is the fifth time that we gather to promote Mexican American Studies, but it is not the first time that we have stood up for our right to an education that is authentic and liberatory.

      Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Mexicans established independent schools, and teacher training and curriculum development programs in response to discrimination and segregation in official Texas schools;

* In 1911, the delegates that gathered in Laredo as the 1911 Congreso Mexicanista condemned racism and segregation in the schools and called for developing their own;

* In 1930, Mexican parents from Del Rio filed the first desegregation suit against separate and unequal schools;

* Beginning in the late 1930s and continuing in the 1940s, Mexican educators convinced the Office of the Superintendent of Texas schools to establish state-sponsored workshops in Texas to develop curriculum on Mexican Americans and Latin Americans and to prepare teachers in the use of these materials;

* In the 1950s, LULAC sponsored the Little Schools of the 400 to teach Mexican preschool children a vocabulary of 400 basic English words to challenge the official, questionable claim that record numbers of them failed the first grade because they did not have a basic knowledge of English; and

* Beginning in the late 1960s, Mexican students of college and university age waged a movement that continues to win battles for Mexican American Studies.This was followed in 1968 with the passage of the Bilingual Education Act by Lyndon B. Johnson.

* Fifty years later in 2018, we in the NACCS Tejas Foco convinced the Texas State Board of Education to adopt Ethnic Studies courses for Mexican Americans, African Americans, Asian American Studies, and Native Americans

We are the inheritors of this revolutionary tradition abetted by a spirit that will never rest until we secure respect as a community, together with the educational right to know our history, culture, language, and the bases of oppression on behalf of our communities.

Enjoy the summit!

Happy to share this publication by Education Policy and Planning Student, Andrene Castro.  It considers the very important role of African American K-12 educator activism historically and its meaningfulness and importance for us today.  It is a reminder that Ethnic Studies and educator activism tend to go hand-in-hand historically.

Angela Valenzuela

The Activist Work of K-12 Educators: Then and Now

By Andrene Castro October 7, 2017 1

---

Black students’ educational needs are central to Black political and social activism. It is no secret that Black activism in institutions of higher education, particularly during the tumultuous decades from the 1950s through the 1970s, catalyzed new freedom struggles and enhanced the intellectual development of African Diaspora Studies in educational spaces. Yet, the activism of K-12 educators in public schools receives too little attention. While some education scholars have documented Black teachers’ activism since the late eighteenth century, public school teachers deserve broader recognition within Black activism historiography.
From the late nineteenth century through the present, parallel movements shaped teachers’ activism: the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling to desegregate schools, Civil Rights and Black Power struggles, and the burgeoning women’s movement. Against this backdrop, Black teachers served as recruiting agents for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Civil Rights movement. They also called for schools to uphold the promises of desegregation, actually integrating schools and reforming school finance through more equitable allocation of resources.
Inspired by the campus movements of the sixties, the collective efforts of K-12 educators, students, and parents at Berkeley High School, for example, led to the development of the first Black Studies department in 1969. Despite this early move to diversify the K-12 curriculum, its legacy remains in flux. Today, many teachers are front-line activists fighting for the constitutionality of African American history and ethnic studies courses in public schools. And still intellectual activism and activist scholarship is often misperceived as a project only for academics, though Black teachers in K-12 settings have long embraced these pursuits. In fact, several scholars point to a strong lineage of sociopolitical activism in education. This scholarship highlights vanguards such as Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, Alain LeRoy Locke, and Sylvia Wynter—Black intellectuals who receive too little credit for advancing curricular theory.

Dunbar High School, Washington DC in 1917. Photo: The Crisis, March 1917, page 221

Anna Julia Cooper’s work as a teacher, leader, and innovator at M Street High School, later known as Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, encouraged Black educators to view their role not only as teachers, but also as intellectuals. Cooper’s contribution to M Street helped establish the school as a premier educational institution, boasting notable faculty and alumnae. Omissions of teachers’ intellectual activism are particularly damaging to Black educators who—without these role models—fail to recognize the broader contributions of Black scholars and educators in the social and political history of schooling in the US.
As the largest professional occupation in the US, teaching accounts for the most professional employees among college-educated white women, Black women, and Black men. While the profession is well received, most teachers receive too little credit for their efforts. Critical education scholars challenge the notion that teaching is an apolitical enterprise. Scholars such as Paulo Freire and Gloria Ladson-Billings argue that teaching is in itself a political act because education is inherently political.
Beyond this conceptualization, the teacher-as-activist is also an identity and a consciousness one comes to assume, characterized by explicit social and political orientations against racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and classism. For Bob Moses, an educator and Civil Rights leader, his vision for economic and political freedom connects intricately with education: “When I was in Mississippi [in the 1960s], I saw very graphically how literacy mattered. Sharecroppers weren’t literate, so they were outside the economic arrangement. That’s what’s happening now in the inner cities. We’re growing young people who are outside the economic arrangements for the information-age technologies.”
Despite the commitment that teachers make to educate children, not all teachers are activists. Understanding when and where teachers enter activism begins with recognizing that public schools are social institutions rife with contradictions. As critical sites for socialization, schools reify dominant perspectives of anti-blackness, heteropatriarchy, Eurocentrism, and religiosity, often while providing a public good of “assimilationist” democracy.
A prominent example of this tension emerges from the historical and legal scholarship on school segregation and its impact on the teacher labor market. For example, teacher activists and researchers recounting teacher segregation in Chicago highlight discriminatory labor policies that subjected Black teachers to be newly classified as Full Time Basis Substitutes (FTBs). Despite doing the same work, this distinction amounted to different wages and benefits than white teachers received. Over the course of two years in 1967 and 1968, an organization called Concerned FTBs led more than a hundred schools in a strike against institutional and procedural racism and school segregation.
These histories reveal how societal tensions give rise to Black teacher activism. Even contemporary movements, such as Black Lives Matter, illustrate symbiotic relationships amongst movements, activism, and education. The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of organizations demanding an end to state-sanctioned violence, considers public schooling a form of the state’s violent apparatus. With numerous policy initiatives addressing federal, state, and local inequities in school funding, excessive discipline and policing in schools, and the neo-liberalization of public schools—teacher activism is inevitable.

Civil Rights leader and education reformer Bob Moses at the Meridian Freedom School Convention, 1964 (Mark Levy Collection, Queens College Civil Rights Archives)

As a result of neoliberalism’s assault on Black youth and educators (i.e., closed schools, loss of Black anchor institutions, as well as the displacement of Black teachers), teachers have grown increasingly politicized. In May 2016 more than 1,500 teachers called in sick at 94 of Detroit’s 97 public schools. Similar activities repeated across the country in school districts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. These massive protests or “sickouts” targeted many of the same practices waged in the aftermath of the 1954 ruling.
Beyond public demonstrations, forms of Black teacher activism consistently take shape inside the classroom through teaching and learning. These acts generally remain unnoticed and seldom catalyze the masses. However, many teachers express their activism through pedagogy, whereby texts become tactics. In this view, teaching-as-activism is indispensable to Black intellectual and activist scholarship. Teacher activists critique power, encourage intellectual curiosity, deepen self-identity and consciousness, and strive to make history culturally relevant for students.
Nevertheless, positioning teacher activism in this broader canon requires a degree of rupture. We must first acknowledge the traditions of teacher activism that enabled Black teachers, especially Black women, to “uplift the race, develop the community, gain for it the more equitable place in society it deserved, while creating for themselves important positions of leadership.” Second, we must recognize that teaching in schools does indeed “constitute legitimate and necessary forms of activist strategies.” This reconceptualization of activism parallels Black youths’ new age activism in the twenty-first century. At a time when there is a dire need to recruit and retain more teachers of color in the workforce, recognizing the activist work of K-12 educators is vital.

• ← Previous : Invisible No More: A New Book on Police Violence Against Women of Color
• Tips for Writing Successful AAIHS Conference Proposals : Next →

Andrene Castro

Andrene Jones Castro is a PhD student in Educational Policy and Planning with a concentration in African & African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research primarily explores the cultural politics of race and gender in teacher labor markets, education policies, and the intersections of schools and communities. Follow her on Twitter @followurdrene.