This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
Do consider attending this conference taking place January 31-February 1, 2019 at the Bullock Museum located at 1800 Congress Ave., Austin, TX 78701 • Map it
Over ninety years ago, a border native and the only Mexican
American serving in the state legislature, José Tomas ‘JT’ Canales called for
an investigation into state-sanctioned violence unleashed on the predominantly
Mexican-origin community in the state’s southern border.
This two-day conference
held on the centennial of that investigation will dive deep into that
investigation and its ongoing legacies in the state of Texas.
Event Details
The Bullock Museum is pleased to host a FREE two-day conference
exploring the 1919 Canales Investigation and its ongoing legacies in Texas.
Presentations will feature internationally-recognized scholars and researchers
from the United States, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, who will deliver
different perspectives on the history of lynching and other extralegal violence
in Texas, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the U.S. South. Topics of discussion
will include the relationship between Mexican American communities and the
Texas Rangers, women’s anti-lynching activism, histories of racialized state
violence, and the importance of civil rights struggles throughout the twentieth
century, all set within broader considerations of borderlands and transnational
history.
Sessions run 8:30am-5:30pm on Thursday, January 31st and
8:30am-4:30pm on Friday, February 1st. Click here for
preliminary session and presenter details.
Registration is now open for this conference! Click the RSVP link
to register.
The 1919 Canales Investigation Conference is co-sponsored by:
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in
this forthcoming conference and subsequent edited volume, do not necessarily
represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Support for the Bullock
Museum's exhibitions and education programs provided by the Texas State History
Museum Foundation.
From a Dallas Morning News blog authored by Tom Steele on just how offensive the newly proposed book that is racist and disguising itself as Texas History. This is a key point in the debate over this Texas history book written by non-experts of Mexican American Studies:
The book is produced by Momentum Instruction, a company that appears
to be owned or operated by Cynthia Dunbar, a member of the Texas State
Board of Education from 2007 to 2011. Dunbar, a right-wing Christian activist who questioned the
constitutionality of public schools in 2008, labeled the education
system “tyrannical” when she published her book, One Nation Under God, while serving on the board.
Sigh. The Texas SBOE never ceases to amaze.
Dunbar is an anti-public school zealot who had earlier described public education as a "tool of Satan." You can't make this stuff up!
According to Roque Planas in a Huffington Post article on the same topic, indicates that Dunbar now works at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University as an administrator. He correctly asks by what magic is she now a multiculturalist? And what makes authors Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle Texas historians may be similarly asked.
Texas boasts a large number of renowned Mexican American Texas historians like Emilio Zamora, Andres Tijerina, Frank de la Teja, Antonia Castañeda, Carlos Blanton, Miguel Levario, and others such that the Texas Education Agency need not accord Dunbar's textbook any regard when there's serious scholars that are already doing this work.
Heck, their bias is even evident on their book's front cover. As many beautiful images as there are of Mexica (or Aztec) danzantes, they could have done much better. The guy looks menacing, especially when considered in the context of this text that says that Mexican Americans—or more specifically, Chicanos—are people that “adopted a revolutionary narrative that
opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society.” This statement alone shows that they can't even make it to first base with this text. It's a subliminal warning to Anglos like Donald Trump whose politics incite irrational fears of a browning America, of an alleged reconquista. If you happen to think the cover is beautiful, no problem—as it is inescapably gratuitous regardless.
Published:
A textbook proposed to help teach the cultural history of
Mexican-Americans in Texas public schools is under scrutiny by scholars,
some of whom decry the effort as racist and not a reflection of serious
academic study.
The textbook, titled Mexican American Heritage, describes
Mexican-Americans as people who “adopted a revolutionary narrative that
opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society.”
The book also links Mexican-Americans to immigrants in the country
illegally, saying illegal immigration has “caused a number of economic
and security problems” in the U.S. that include “poverty, drugs, crime,
non-assimilation, and exploitation”
The State Board of Education voted to include textbooks on Mexican-American studies after activists last year demanded the subject be formally included in state curriculum. Mexican American Heritage is the first textbook on the subject included in a list of proposed instructional materials.
“Paradoxically, we pressed for the board to include texts on
Mexican-American studies, and we achieved it, but not in the way we were
expecting,” said Tony Diaz, host of the Nuestra Palabra (Our Word)
radio program in Houston and director of Intercultural Initiatives at
Lone Star College-North Harris. “Instead of a text that is respectful of
the Mexican-American history, we have a book poorly written, racist,
and prepared by non-experts.”
Eighth-graders
spread open their books during their history studies at John B. Hood
Middle School in Pleasant Grove. (Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)
Cynthia Dunbar
The Texas Education Agency says it followed standard procedure for
the call to submit instructional materials for Mexican-American
curriculums for the 2017-18 school year.
Texans have until September to submit comments on the proposed
instructional materials, TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said. She
also said the proposed textbooks will undergo review by a committee that
includes teachers and administrators and that committee will make
recommendations to the board.
Ultimately, books adopted by the elected members of the Texas State
Board of Education in November become part of the recommended
instructional materials for statewide curriculums, but school districts
aren’t required to embrace them. Individual districts can use their
state money to buy whatever textbooks they wish.
The book “is not a text that we have recommended nor we will be
recommending,” said Douglas Torres-Edwards, coordinator of a
TEA-approved Mexican-American studies course that has been implemented
in some Houston Independent School District schools. “Frankly, that
author is not recognized as someone who is part of the Mexican-American
studies scholarship, and most individuals engaged in scholarship will
not recognize her as an author.”
The book is produced by Momentum Instruction, a company that appears
to be owned or operated by Cynthia Dunbar, a member of the Texas State
Board of Education from 2007 to 2011.
Dunbar, a right-wing Christian activist who questioned the
constitutionality of public schools in 2008, labeled the education
system “tyrannical” when she published her book, One Nation Under God, while serving on the board.
Neither Dunbar nor any of the book’s other authors could be reached
for comment. A phone message and email to Momentum Instruction were not
returned.
The Texas Board of Education’s members sanction textbooks for use
statewide in a process that has for years been marred by ideological
fights over lessons on subjects including evolution, climate change and the influence of biblical figures such as Moses on America’s Founding Fathers. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
I applaud this research as it provides an appropriate framing of success. While so many groups begin at the proverbial "bottom," that bottom is demonstrably different across groups. Not unlike other groups, it's clear that Mexicans immigrants aspire to higher education.
"Asian American exceptionalism" is also a myth that is harmful to all groups, Asian Americans, included. "Stereotype promise" can indeed help some students achieve in schools; the downside though is becoming an "outlier" within one's own group, creating stressful environments for others.
Along with this re-framing of the achievement debate—oftentimes cast psychologically in terms of "grit" and "impulse control," this research will help dispel the myth that "Mexican American parents don't care" about their children's education.
My own research in Subtractive Schooling concurs with these findings and further illuminates why generational differences in student achievement and attitudes toward schools exist.
Who’s more successful: The child of
Chinese immigrants who is now a prominent attorney, or a
second-generation Mexican who completed high school and now holds a
stable, blue collar job?
The answer depends on how you define success.
In fact, according to a study by University of California, Irvine,
Sociology Professor Jennifer Lee and UCLA Sociology Professor Min Zhou,
contrary to stereotypes, Mexican-Americans are the most successful
second-generation group in the country. The reason is simple: The study
considered not just where people finished, but from where they started.
The report serves as counter-point to arguments raised by Amy Chua, a
Yale Law School professor better known as the Tiger Mom. In a new book,
The Triple Package, Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, argue that
some groups—namely Chinese, Jews, Cubans, and Nigerians—are more
successful than others because they possess certain cultural traits that
enable them to be.
In a nutshell, Chua’s “Triple Package” includes: a cultural
superiority complex, impulse control, and insecurity. Combined, the
authors assert, these traits drive the groups to succeed within a
broader American culture that is comparatively lackadaisical. They base
their argument on an analysis of test scores, educational achievement,
median household income, and other factors.
The UC study, however, argues that it’s not any specific cultural
trait that makes groups like Chinese-Americans more successful than
others. Lee and Zhou say both Chinese-American and Mexican-American
parents highly value education. Most parents do. But the reason
Chinese-Americans get ahead is because they start ahead. Way ahead, in
many cases.
The study, called “The Success Frame and Achievement Paradox: The
Cost and Consequences for Asian-Americans,” looked at Chinese-,
Vietnamese-, and Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles whose parents
immigrated to the U.S. At first glance, the study’s findings seem to
reinforce claims made by Chua and her supporters: Children of Chinese
immigrants far exceeded other groups when it came to educational
outcomes. Sixty-four percent of Chinese immigrants’ children graduated
from college, compared to 46 percent of native-born whites in L.A. Of
the Chinese-American college graduates, 22 percent went on to attain
graduate degrees.
Asian-American kids, the study found, have good role models and extra
help from family and community when it comes to schooling. They also
benefit from well-educated parents who put them in good schools and push
them into high-income, high-status professions, including medicine,
pharmacy, engineering, and law.
Mexican-Americans had the lowest level of educational attainment in
the study. Eighty-six percent had graduated from high school, compared
to 100 percent of the Chinese-Americans, and just 17 percent had
graduated from college.
Fundamental to Chinese-Americans’ overall level of success is that
their parents are already highly educated. Chinese immigrant parents
were by far the most highly educated in the study—in L.A., 60 percent of
Chinese immigrant fathers and 40 percent of Chinese immigrant mothers
had a bachelor’s degree or higher. According to a separate study by Pew
Research Center, 61 percent of recent Asian immigrants between the ages
of 25 and 64 had a bachelor’s degree, which is more than double the U.S.
average.
Meanwhile, Mexican-Americans’ high school graduation rate was more
than double that of their parents, and their college graduation rate
more than doubled that of their fathers and tripled that of their
mothers. According to Lee, the results are clear: When success is
measured as progress from generation to generation, Mexican-Americans
come out on top.
The study found that Mexican parents strongly value education, but
that their frame of academic achievement is less exacting than
Chinese-American parents. They emphasize finishing high school, possibly
going to college—though not necessarily an elite one—and having some
kind of career. Mexicans aspiring to higher education, the study found,
look toward good colleges in the L.A. area, and often settle on
community colleges in their neighborhoods. Because many Mexican parents
have a relatively low level of education, they were not as well-equipped
to help their children succeed as Chinese-American parents.
“My mom never said to me to, ‘Get an A.’ She said, ‘Do your best,’”
Nadia, a 28-year-old second-generation Mexican-American who is working
toward her master’s in education, told the researchers. Nadia was the
first in her family to go to college and pursued a graduate degree even
though her parents didn’t understand the point of staying in school
beyond a bachelor’s degree.
Lee found that second-generation Mexican-Americans who attained the
highest education outcomes had access to public resources at their
schools such as zero periods, College Bound programs, and AP classes, in
which students learned how to apply for colleges. Many also had a
teacher, guidance counselor, or coach who encouraged them along the way
and guided them through the college application process.
Consider Camille, one of the study’s subjects. A 27-year-old
second-generation Mexican woman who earned a bachelor’s and master’s
degree from the University of Southern California, Camille’s parents
arrived in the U.S. as unauthorized immigrants and worked in garment
factories. Her parents wanted her and her twin sister to attend college
but had no way to help them.
After high school, the twins attended a local community college,
where Camille met a guidance counselor who guided her through the
admissions process to a four-year college. After Camille was accepted by
USC, the counselor visited her parents to persuade them of the merits
of allowing their daughter to leave home for school. “She really went
above and beyond,” Camille said.
The point of the study, Lee says, was to reframe the debate about what success means.
“We wanted to understand how parents’ position and parents’
immigration status, how their level of education, how all of these
factors then shape how the second generation frames success,” she says.
“We really wanted to reframe the debate about success.”
Professor Jennifer Lee of University of California, Irvine.
Photo by Zócalo Public Square
Lee says that in the U.S., Asian-Americans benefit from a broad
cultural belief in “Asian-American exceptionalism”—that Asians are
inherently brighter and more hard-working than others—while other
groups, such as Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, are subjected
to negative stereotypes.
In elite U.S. universities, Asian-Americans make up a
disproportionate percentage of the student population. Although they
comprise just 5.5 percent of the American population, Asian-Americans
account for just under one-fifth of the entering class at schools such
as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. At University of California, Berkeley,
they make up 43 percent of the student body, but they are just 13
percent of the state’s population. Chinese parents also define success
narrowly and invest their resources in their sons and daughters
achieving it. (This is also, Lee says, why you don’t see many
Chinese-Americans in careers such as writing, acting, fashion, and art.)
Lee argues that Asian-American students gain from this “stereotype
promise”—the idea that being viewed through the lens of positive
stereotypes can serve as a performance booster. In her research, she has
found that positive stereotypes about Asian-Americans are reinforced in
schools by teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators. In some
cases, Asian students with mediocre grades in junior high were placed in
advanced classes in high school regardless. (Stereotype promise can
have a negative effect as well; Asian-Americans who are not high
achieving reported feeling like outliers.)
Comparing different ethnic groups and their places in society, Lee
often uses a baseball analogy. Asian-Americans, she says, tend to end up
on the third base of life. But “their parents are so highly-educated,
they almost start the race to get ahead on third base,” Lee says. “But
all we see is that they’ve made it to third base. That’s not to say they
don’t work hard to get there. They do. But they have certain advantages
that other groups don’t have.”
Mexican-Americans, Lee says, are starting from behind home plate. “In
the sense that they come [to the U.S.] much more poorly educated than
the average American, they have a lot more catching up to do just to get
to where the average American is. For Mexican-Americans, the fact that
their children make it to first or second base is enormous progress.”
Mitch Moxley has written for publications including GQ, the Atlantic, and Grantland, and he is the features editor at Roads & Kingdoms. Follow him on Twitter.
Excellent, current information on Latino demographics. Internally, such as with what we are seeing in Austin, Texas, hundreds upon hundreds of Latinos, mostly Mexican Americans and Mexicans, are getting displaced. Austin's numbers of immigrants are declining but not solely because of the macro-level factors implied here but because of the rampant pace of gentrification. Here is a good article on this such that a declining representation of the Latino demographic in cities like Austin must also take micro-level factors into account.
As
immigration from Latin America slows, the immigrant share among each of
the nation’s 14 largest Hispanic origin groups is in decline, according
to a new Pew Research Center analysis
of U.S. Census Bureau data. Overall, the share of the Hispanic
population that is foreign born has decreased from 40% in 2000 to 35% in
2013.
The foreign-born share of Salvadorans fell from 76% in 2000 to 59% in
2013 – the largest percentage point decline of any of the six largest
Hispanic origin groups. Dominicans, Guatemalans and Colombians all had
decreases of over 13 percentage points in their foreign-born shares over
the same period. Mexicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic origin group,
also saw a decline, though it was only 8 percentage points since 2000.
Despite falling immigrant shares across all Latino origin groups, fast
Latino population growth has led to continued growth in the number of
Latino immigrants (though growth has slowed in recent years). Among all
Latinos, there were 14.1 million immigrants in 2000. By 2005, that
number reached 16.8 million, and by 2013, there were 19 million Latino
immigrants in the U.S. The same pattern is present among all major
Latino origin groups, though for three – Ecuadorians, Mexicans and
Nicaraguans – the number of immigrants has declined since 2010.
The nation’s Latino population is its largest minority group, numbering
more than 53 million, or 17.1% of the U.S. population, in 2013. It is
also diverse in a number of ways. While Mexicans are by far the largest
origin group at 34.6 million (making up 64.1% of all U.S. Latinos), the
nation’s Latinos trace their roots to every part of Latin America.
Puerto Ricans are the second-largest Latino origin group and represent
about 9.5% of all U.S. Latinos. Beyond these two groups, no other makes
up more than 5% of the U.S. Latino population. Cubans and Salvadorans,
the two next largest groups, each make up just under 4% of the Latino
population, with populations of about 2 million each.
The report and its accompanying statistical profiles provide detailed
geographic, demographic and economic characteristics for each of the
nation’s 14 largest Hispanic origin groups: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans,
Salvadorans, Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans, Colombians, Spaniards,
Hondurans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Argentineans, Nicaraguans and
Venezuelans.
