Five Years Later: Ethnic Studies as Renewal in an Age of Structured Forgetting*
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
December 29, 2025
Five years ago, I stood at Teachers College, Columbia University, as the Edmond W. Gordon Lecturer, invited to speak on “Liberating Ways of Knowing: The Struggle for Ethnic Studies and the Educators We Need.” Time has passed,but the message has not aged. If anything, it has sharpened—because what was already a struggle over curriculum has become, unmistakably, a struggle over free speech, academic freedom, and democracy itself.
I began that day with land, because land is truth we too often treat as optional. We are never not on Native land. To acknowledge that is not to check a box; it is to practice another relationship to knowledge—one that insists history lives beneath us, not behind us. I've always said that "if there isn't dirt under your fingernails, you're not grassroots enough."
From there, I shared floricanto—meaning flower and song—because education, at its best, is not merely transmission. It is renewal. It is the restoration of spirit, connection, and belonging. We named the feelings the song “Agua de Estrellas” evoked—peace, tenderness, longing, hope—and I remember thinking: these are not “extras.” These are educational indicators and outcomes of a just and worthy education.
What I offered then was not simply an argument for Ethnic Studies as a course. It was an invitation to recognize Ethnic Studies as a different orientation—a framework that refuses the isolated, objectifying logic at the heart of so much assimilationist schooling.
The Cartesian “I” that stands alone, producing knowledge as if the world were merely an object to be measured, ranked, and managed, is precisely the mindset that makes it possible to treat communities as problems, children as data points, and histories as inconveniences. Ethnic Studies pushes back—not only by adding content, but by challenging the deeper rules: whose knowledge counts, whose humanity is centered, and what education is ultimately for.
Ethnic Studies pushes back against the Cartesian ego by insisting that learning is not an individual accomplishment detached from context, but a collective practice shaped by memory, power, and care. It recenters the body, spirit, and lived experience as legitimate sources of insight. It affirms that students do not arrive in classrooms as empty vessels, but as carriers of language, culture, ancestral knowledge, and moral imagination. And it asks educators to see themselves not as neutral technicians, but as ethical actors whose work either reproduces or resists injustice.
In this sense, Ethnic Studies is not simply about representation. It is about reorientation. It refuses the idea that schooling should prepare students only to compete, comply, or perform for systems that were never designed with them in mind. Instead, it calls for an education that prepares young people to belong, to think critically, to care deeply, and to act responsibly in a pluralistic democracy.
This is why Ethnic Studies cannot be reduced to a unit, a month, or a box to be checked. Its power lies in its ability to unsettle the assumptions that structure schooling itself—to interrupt the logics of ranking, sorting, and disposability that have long governed public education. And it is precisely this unsettling force that makes Ethnic Studies both transformative and threatening in our current moment.
At a time when Ethnic Studies and DEI initiatives are under sustained political attack—framed as divisive, ideological, or dangerous—the deeper truth is this: what is being resisted is not “identity,” but relational ways of doing, knowing, and being in the world. What is being feared is not history, but the possibility that students might learn to see themselves as fully human, fully entitled to voice, and fully capable of naming the structures that shape their lives.
This is why I shared the work of Academia Cuauhtli (meaning "Eagle Academy" in Nahuatl)—our Saturday academy grounded in bilingual learning, co-constructed curriculum, and community partnership.
One lesson from that work has stayed with me because it continues to prove true: if you anchor an initiative only in the university, you risk losing it to faculty mobility and institutional drift; if you anchor it only in the district, you risk losing it to organizational restructuring and political turnover. Anchored in the community—the holders of memory, consequence, and continuity—the work sustains.
When I look back now, what feels most enduring from that lecture is not any single policy detail, but a posture: the insistence that education must be a site of relationship rather than extraction; of truth rather than avoidance; of renewal rather than punishment. Five years ago, the urgency was clear. Today, the consequences of ignoring it are unavoidable.
Ethnic Studies pushes back against the Cartesian ego—and against the isolation, erasure, and moral indifference it produces—by offering something far more demanding and far more hopeful: an education rooted in connection and the shared work of becoming fully human together.
Like I always say, "Some day, Ethnic Studies will simply be called 'a good education.'"
Reference
*I draw from Trouillot (1995) who first expressed this concept of "structured forgetting."
Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.
