“I Will Not Submit”: A Powerful Day at the Historic Texas People’s Hearing
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
August 13, 2026
Yesterday’s historic Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus People’s Hearing in Austin on “Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom” was powerful—intellectually, emotionally, and politically. It was also a reminder of what becomes possible when elected officials, students, faculty, advocates, allies, and community members come together to insist that public institutions remain accountable to the people they serve.
My special thanks go to Texas State Representative Lulu Flores for convening the hearing and for placing yesterday’s gathering within a much longer history of Mexican American political struggle in Texas. I especially appreciated her acknowledgment of the late State Representative Irma Rangel, the first Mexican American woman elected to the Texas House of Representatives, as well as the presence yesterday of former State Senator Gonzalo Barrientos.
That recognition mattered. Rangel and Barrientos represent a generation of Mexican American legislators who understood the importance of listening directly to communities and translating public testimony into policy. Their work reminds us of an earlier era when People’s Hearings and other forms of public engagement helped legislators confront inequities in higher education and imagine remedies. Barrientos helped initiate the legislative response to the elimination of affirmative action in Texas higher education, and Rangel ultimately authored House Bill 588, which became the Texas Top Ten Percent Law.
That history gives yesterday’s hearing even greater significance. People’s Hearings are not merely symbolic exercises. They create a public record, bring harms into public view that institutions might otherwise treat as merely administrative, and generate ideas capable of changing public policy.
I am also deeply grateful for the tireless work of the Latino Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, whose members have worked for months to bring attention to what is happening at UT Austin and to help make yesterday’s hearing possible. Dr. Emilio Zamora deserves special recognition for conceiving the idea of holding a People’s Hearing in the first place and for playing a central role in transforming that idea into reality.
Drawing on the long tradition of People’s Hearings as vehicles for public testimony, democratic accountability, and policy change, he recognized the need to create a public forum where students, faculty, advocates, and community members could place their concerns directly before elected officials. He was also deeply involved in the organizing work required to bring the hearing together.
I am also very grateful to Alicia Perez Hodge, Dr. Maria Unda, Neto Longoria, and the rest of this remarkable crew, whose sustained work, relationships, and persistence were indispensable. Organizing an event like this requires countless conversations, meetings, phone calls, invitations, drafts, negotiations, and acts of persistence that the public rarely sees. Yesterday’s powerful gathering was possible because people had an idea, organized around it, and refused to give up.
I left equally grateful to everyone who participated: the legislators who listened, the students who spoke with eloquence and courage, the faculty who brought scholarship and experience to the conversation, the community leaders who reminded us of the historical stakes, and the advocates who have been doing this work for years. People spoke with intellect, heart, urgency, and an unmistakable commitment to the future of public higher education in Texas.
And the timing could hardly have been more striking.
Today, the Austin American-Statesman Editorial Board published an opinion piece titled, “Texans Deserve Answers About UT’s New Center for Humanities,” arguing that a public university entrusted with taxpayer dollars has an obligation to explain major institutional decisions, particularly during a period of sweeping change.
That call for public accountability echoes one of the clearest messages emerging from yesterday’s hearing:
What is happening at UT Austin cannot simply be explained away as administrative reorganization.
The consolidation of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies into a new institutional structure involves fields representing decades of scholarship, institution-building, mentorship, intellectual struggle, and community investment. What happens to them matters not only to the university. It matters to the people of Texas whose histories, experiences, cultural contributions, and struggles for democracy these fields have helped document, interpret, and preserve.
We are, quite literally, in the fight of our lives for the heart and soul of Texas higher education.
I post a short, pre-hearing video and then a link to the hearing, compliments of Texas State Representative Lulu Flores.
There was a palpable sense in the room that something consequential is happening—and that silence at this moment would itself constitute a choice, and a poor one at that.
One message came through repeatedly:
There is still time for repair.
But that window will not remain open indefinitely.
Once departments lose their institutional standing, faculty lines disappear, graduate programs weaken, students go elsewhere, intellectual communities disperse, and decades of accumulated institutional knowledge are lost, restoration becomes extraordinarily difficult. What may look reversible on an organizational chart can become practically irreversible in the life of a university.
That is why this moment requires more than documentation.
It requires intervention.
And perhaps no moment captured that spirit more powerfully than longtime Chicana activist, intellectual, and movement leader Martha Cotera’s clarion call:
“I WILL NOT SUBMIT!”
Her words rang through the halls.
They were more than an expression of defiance. They summoned a much longer history of communities that fought their way into universities, demanded the right to study their own histories, created Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies, challenged exclusion, and insisted that public institutions become more genuinely democratic.
That history was present in the room yesterday—from the acknowledgment of the late Irma Rangel, to the presence of Gonzalo Barrientos, to Martha Cotera’s declaration, to the students now inheriting struggles they did not create but are being called upon to confront.
We inherit these struggles, but we also inherit their possibilities.
The question before us is whether we will allow institutions built through decades of sacrifice to be quietly diminished—or whether we will insist that Texas higher education remain capacious enough to tell the full story of Texas, accountable enough to answer to the public, and courageous enough to sustain the scholarship a democratic society requires.
Yesterday, the answer from the People’s Hearing was unmistakable.
We will not submit.
We will organize.
We will testify.
We will document.
We will teach.
We will remember.
And, most importantly, we will continue demanding repair while repair is still possible.
