by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
July 14, 2026*
Updated August 21, 2026
I encourage readers to learn about Jim Estrada’s compelling and accessible book, The ABCs and Ñ of America’s Cultural Evolution: A Primer on the Growing Influence of Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos on the USA.
Estrada approaches Latino history and culture partly from the perspective of a corporate marketing professional who spent decades advising institutions about Latino communities. His central argument is that widespread ignorance about Latino history, identity, language, cultural diversity, and economic participation is not merely a social or educational deficiency. It is an economic liability—a consequential gap in knowledge and understanding.
Latinos are consumers, workers, students, taxpayers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and voters. Their growing presence shapes education, employment, health care, public finance, consumer markets, and virtually every major institution in the country. Estrada therefore argues that schools and universities should cultivate the historical knowledge and cultural competence necessary to function effectively in an increasingly diverse society (Estrada, 2013).
His argument is especially useful when placed in conversation with Texas leaders’ growing emphasis on the “return on investment,” or ROI, of higher education curricula and degree programs. On its face, asking whether public institutions use resources responsibly is reasonable. The problem arises when ROI is defined too narrowly—as though the value of education can be reduced to a graduate’s first salary, the immediate labor-market demand for a major, or the direct revenue generated by a particular academic program.
Such calculations tell us something, but not nearly enough.
A more appropriate framework would be what I call the Return on Knowing, or ROK.
ROK asks what students, institutions, communities, and the nation gain when people understand the histories, cultures, languages, experiences, and contributions of the populations with whom they live and work. It recognizes knowledge itself as a form of public infrastructure. Just as roads, schools, health systems, and communications networks make social and economic life possible, cultural and historical knowledge equips people to navigate an increasingly diverse democracy.
ROI asks, “How much money does this degree produce?”
ROK asks, “What becomes possible because people know more—and what does ignorance cost us?”
ROK includes economic benefits, but it extends well beyond them. It includes improved judgment, stronger public institutions, more effective professional practice, better communication, greater historical understanding, and the capacity to work across cultural and linguistic differences. It also includes the avoidance of costly mistakes that arise when institutions misunderstand the communities they serve.
This distinction also requires some care with the concept of efficiency itself. Fallace and Fantozzi (2013) caution against treating “social efficiency” as a historically coherent educational doctrine with a single ideological meaning. Efficiency has always depended upon the purposes against which educational outcomes are judged. The more important question, therefore, is not whether a university is efficient, but efficient at producing what—and according to whose conception of educational value?
To move in this direction, we must open a conceptual space between ROI as an instrumental metric and the normative framework that determines what counts as an efficient or valuable educational outcome in the first place. A university could conceivably be “efficient” at cultivating civic understanding, cultural knowledge, democratic capacity, intellectual discovery, critical inquiry, or human development—if these are recognized as legitimate forms of return.
The difficulty arises when ROI is defined almost exclusively through earnings, enrollment demand, program costs, completion rates, or labor-market outcomes. At that point, ROI ceases to function as a neutral measure and begins to operate as a theory of educational value, privileging some forms of knowledge while rendering others expendable.
The metric does not simply measure what universities produce; it increasingly helps determine what universities should produce, which fields deserve institutional support, and which forms of knowledge are permitted to survive. This is precisely the dynamic now unfolding across Texas public universities, where questions of enrollment, workforce alignment, program productivity, and economic return are increasingly being invoked to determine which fields warrant institutional support.
Employers, educators, health professionals, public officials, journalists, and nonprofit leaders who understand Latino histories and experiences are less likely to rely on stereotypes, design ineffective programs, misread demographic change, alienate workers or customers, or make decisions based on incomplete information. Cultural competence is therefore not a decorative addition to professional preparation. It is part of what makes institutions capable, responsive, and effective.
Seen through the lens of ROK, Estrada's The ABCs and Ñ also reveals the limitations of evaluating higher education solely through individual earnings. The return from investing in Latino students includes greater financial security for graduates and their families, but it also includes a more highly educated workforce, increased tax revenues, greater entrepreneurship, stronger public institutions, improved organizational decision-making, and professionals better prepared to serve the communities around them.
Conversely, what does the nation lose when it fails to educate students about Latino communities?
It loses talent when Latino students are underserved or pushed out of higher education. It loses institutional effectiveness when professionals are culturally unprepared. It loses economic opportunities when businesses misunderstand major consumer markets. It loses democratic capacity when the histories and contributions of large segments of the population are excluded from public knowledge. And it loses trust when students and families enter institutions that do not recognize their experiences or regard their histories as worthy of study.
This is why Mexican American Studies, Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, bilingual education, and culturally sustaining curricula should not be dismissed as peripheral expenses. They are investments in professional preparation, institutional effectiveness, social understanding, democratic participation, and the nation’s economic future.
They also benefit students of every background. Latino Studies is not only for Latino students, just as African American history is not only for Black students and women’s history is not only for women. These fields provide all students with the knowledge necessary to understand the society they inhabit. They help prepare graduates to teach, govern, practice medicine, conduct research, build organizations, serve clients, manage workplaces, and participate intelligently in public life.
ROK is therefore not a rejection of economic accountability. It is a more complete form of accountability. It asks policymakers to count benefits that narrow ROI calculations often ignore: knowledge, cultural competence, institutional trust, democratic literacy, social cohesion, and the prevention of costly errors.
It also requires us to acknowledge that not everything of public value can be captured in an immediate financial metric. Education prepares people not only to earn a living, but also to interpret the world, understand one another, evaluate evidence, remember history, and participate in democratic life.
Estrada’s work helps us see that ignorance has a price. Institutions pay that price through failed outreach, ineffective policies, cultural misunderstanding, lost markets, weakened trust, and poor decision-making. Communities pay it through misrepresentation, exclusion, and educational neglect.
The relevant policy question, then, is not simply whether Mexican American Studies or Latino Studies produces an acceptable financial return. It is whether Texas—and the nation—can afford the consequences of not knowing.
References
ASU News. (2014, February 7). Latino author makes economic case for teaching ethnic studies in schools. https://news.asu.edu/content/latino-author-makes-economic-case-teaching-ethnic-studies-schools
Estrada, J. (2013). The ABCs and Ñ of America’s cultural evolution: A primer on the growing influence of Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos on the USA. Tate Publishing & Enterprises.
Fallace, T., & Fantozzi, V. (2013). Was There Really a Social Efficiency Doctrine? The Uses and Abuses of an Idea in Educational History. Educational Researcher, 42(3), 142-150. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X13484509
Latino author makes economic case for teaching ethnic studies in schools
Making an economic case for teaching ethnic studies in America’s schools and universities is the focus of a book talk presented from noon to 1 p.m., Feb. 11, by ASU’s School of Transborder Studies. Author Jim Estrada, a corporate marketing consultant and former San Diego television journalist, suggested there is a substantial information gap about the nation’s largest non-white European populations that could negatively impact the United States economy.
Estrada’s book, "The ABCs and Ñ of America’s Cultural Evolution: A Primer on the Growing Influence of Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos on the USA," offers important insights into today’s 53 million U.S. Hispanics – including how their history and culture are influencing the nation.
The author said that he believes sharing accurate, non-subjective information about America’s Latinos, their histories and their contributions to our nation will lead to better understanding of their growing influence as consumers, students, taxpayers, voters and members of the workforce.
Registration for the lecture in Interdisciplinary Building B, B161-B, on ASU’s Tempe campus is required. RSVP to Lillian.Ruelas@asu.edu.
According to ASU’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, Latinos constitute Arizona’s most rapidly growing ethnicity and could represent more than 50 percent of the state’s population by mid-century. Its 2012 report, Arizona’s Emerging Latino Vote, noted in particular the state’s disproportionate growth in young Latino citizens. “The ramifications will be profound, with major impacts to be felt in the health care industries, at all levels of education, the workforce population and in state budgeting – just to cite a few,” the report stated.
“There are many thoughts on how to create cultural competence,” Estrada said. “The logical place to start is in educational institutions, which are charged with expanding the knowledge base that affects our personal and organizational missions, goals and objectives.
“So it’s really up to our schools to address this critical need for ethnic studies. For students entering the marketplace, it will enable them to adapt successfully to a changing world.”
Estrada is owner of Estrada Communications Group, based in Austin, Texas. He has worked with major corporations, such as AT&T, Anheuser-Busch and McDonald’s, advising them on outreach strategies to Latino consumers for the past three decades. He said every few years, as his client contacts would change, he would need to re-orient their staffs about the Latino market: “My job was to help them avoid making mistakes, cultural faux pas, in their marketing communications.”
After many years, Estrada realized that what he was teaching marketing clientele could benefit a broader audience if compiled in a book. The primer’s 10 short chapters are a collection of essays about different aspects of Latino culture and history, from the Spanish conquest of Mexico to Latino voting rights. A book review by National Hispanic News noted that topics range from language, cultural diversity and history to relationships with the dominant majority, law enforcement and each other.
“Each of these chapters touches on historical and cultural tidbits neither likely to be known by the average non-Hispanic nor by the segment of Latinos themselves who lack exposure to their own contributions to society, or who know little of their place in U.S. history,” the critic observed.
Estrada said the media and entertainment industries are also responsible for projecting a less than positive image of Latinos, as well as those of other non-white, racial, ethnic and immigrant groups. He explained that for decades, mass media have misrepresented Latinos to the nation’s mainstream Eurocentric society through acts of “commission,” use of stereotypic portrayals in media and acts of “omission,” failing to provide factual information about the many Latino contributions to America, and even by historical revisionism.
“Creating cultural awareness and competency takes time and cannot be too daunting a task,” Estrada said. “Providing readers with basic facts, or the ABCs, together with a rudimentary understanding of the influence Hispanics, Latinos and mestizos are having on them and their personal interests can create a sense of ease about learning.”
The School ofTransborder Studies is an academic unit in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
