We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies by Christopher Carmona, Ph.D. Our Lady of the Lake University May, 2026

Friends, I’m honored to share this powerful guest column by Dr. Christopher Carmona on the history, sacrifice, and continued struggle behind Mexican American and Ethnic Studies in Texas, as well as nationally. —Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies

by 

Christopher Carmona, Ph.D.

Our Lady of the Lake University

San Antonio

May, 2026

Can you imagine what it was like to stand up for what you believed was right? To be taught that your people were important enough to be taught? Can you imagine men with badges and guns and tear gas ready to hurt you? To be beaten with batons, to starve yourself so that maybe the university will sit down and listen to you? Can you imagine that you fought so hard to be seen in the history of these United States only to have your children and grandchildren stripped of that knowledge?

You are lucky enough to be in this college, don’t rock the boat. Just keep your head down, go to class, and get your degree. It doesn’t matter that your people are being shot down in the streets, too poor to buy new shoes, or too scared to walk on the same sidewalk as a white man. 

Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies programs are unique in American higher education in one undeniable way: they are the only academic disciplines whose very existence was extracted through sacrifice. These programs were not invited into the academy. They were demanded into it, and the demanding came at a cost measured in arrests, hunger strikes, and blood.

It is long past time for universities and policymakers to reckon with that history, and with the continuing failure to fund what communities bled to build.

Born of Struggle, Not Invitation

The founding of Centers for Mexican American Studies across the nation is not a footnote in higher education history. It is a chronicle of sustained resistance against institutions that consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the discipline until students and communities forced their hand.

It began in 1968. Throughout the country, racial justice and student activism were front and center, leading to a cascade of activism for ethnic studies programs, including Chicano studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, and American Indian studies. Building from this work, Chicana/o/x activists came together at the University of California, Santa Barbara and published El Plan de Santa Barbara, a document that united diverse activists from around the state and laid out a roadmap for Chicana/Chicano studies (Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, 1969). In response, UCSB created the first Chicano Studies Department in the UC system in 1970. California State University, Los Angeles had established a Mexican American studies program two years earlier, in 1968.

At California State University, Northridge, the price was higher. From 1967 to 1971, Los Angeles police arrested 400 students and faculty members across six major demonstrations. Eventually chaos ensued, fights erupted, and arrests were made, yet this didn’t stop students from being heard. The following morning, 2,000 students gathered in front of the Administration Building, causing the university president to declare a state of emergency. The activism ultimately established the creation of both the Afro-American and Chicano Studies departments (Acuña, 2011).

At UT Austin, Mexican American student activists in the 1960s agitated for the creation of an academic program that reflected their lives, experiences, and ways of knowing. From their efforts, in 1970, UT created the Center for Mexican American Studies, with Américo Paredes named its first director. Yet it would take 44 more years, until 2014, for the university to grant it an independent undergraduate major (University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, 2024).

Perhaps the most dramatic confrontation came at UCLA. UCLA first established an interdisciplinary Chicano studies program in 1973. But the retrenchment in California’s social and budget policies during the 1980s and the recession of the early 1990s took a toll. By 1989, funding had dwindled significantly, and UCLA suspended new admissions to the program. On April 28, 1993, the chancellor announced the program would not receive departmental status. What followed was a sit-in, mass arrests, and ultimately a hunger strike. 

On May 25, a small group declared a water-only fast. A village of tents sprang up outside Murphy Hall. Four days in, one protestor collapsed requiring medical attention. The group persevered, and on June 7, more than 400 students, faculty, and community supporters celebrated the creation of the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies. The strike drew the support of state senators, state representatives, city officials, and the Mothers of East L.A., resulting in one of the largest student and community mobilizations in UCLA’s history. Even then, full departmental status was not granted until 2005 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 1993; UCLA Newsroom, 2021).

source: UCLA Magazine

In Arizona, a thriving program was simply legislated out of existence. The Tucson school district’s Mexican American studies program grew to 48 course offerings and became the largest ethnic studies program in any school district in the nation, directly increasing graduation rates and grades across all classes (Cabrera et al., 2014). In 2010, state lawmakers passed a law that dismantled the program and banned a range of related books from classes statewide.

The pattern is consistent across decades and geography: communities bleed to establish these programs, and institutions continuously find ways to cut, consolidate, or erase them.

Community Anchors Running on Empty

These Centers are not simply academic units; they are community infrastructure, and they function as such every single day. The Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin was intended toconnect students to the Austin community through outreach and public events, building on its legacy of collective action. At UT Arlington, CMAS was established by the Texas Legislature as the university's focal point for interdisciplinary education, research, publication, and public outreach relating to Mexican Americans, and serves as a bridge between UTA and the Latino community in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. 

Before it was shut down, Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, CMAS collaborated with faculty, student affiliates, and community organizations to produce events, training, and programs that promote a deeper understanding of Mexican American culture and supported the K-12 to higher education pipeline and first-generation college student success. The University of Arizona's MAS department works collaboratively with community organizations to address issues and produce knowledge benefiting historically marginalized communities, and engages public policy on criminal justice, immigration, and systemic inequity.

These Centers do more community work per dollar than nearly any other academic unit on campus. Yet they have operated for decades on the edge of survival.

A UT Austin graduate described his undergraduate experience as "frustrating," noting that there "seemed to be such battles for funding for the Center for Mexican American Studies, and that was disillusioning." That battle never ended. In early 2026, UT Austin announced the consolidation of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, along with African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies, into a single new department. "It's important to realize that in joining these communities together, especially by force, you're creating a system in which they have to fight, sometimes with each other, for funding, and that is ridiculous and unfair," said one scholar at the national rally held in protest on UT's own campus. At the University of North Texas, facing a $45 million budget shortfall, the university cut its Mexican American Studies minor, along with Africana Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Asian Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

The fallback position of college and university administrations has always been the same: Chicano/a Studies simply isn't needed, and there is simply no funding. It has been a struggle and a test of wills for Chicano/a Studies to survive.

The Students Are There. The Resources Are Not.

What makes this institutional abandonment most indefensible is that student demand is not in question. The data are unambiguous.

Research shows that Ethnic Studies coursework benefits students through better school attendance, higher standardized test scores, higher GPAs, higher graduation rates, and even a reduction in interpersonal prejudice. A peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that assignment to Ethnic Studies substantially increased high school graduation, attendance, and the probability of enrolling in college (Dee & Penner, 2017). A longitudinal University of Michigan study involving 459 ninth-grade students, the majority Mexican or Mexican American, attending high-poverty schools, found that students enrolled in Ethnic Studies experience significant growth in critical reflection, which is linked to academic success, civic engagement, improved well-being, and support for equity-promoting policies (Cabrera et al., 2014).

In Texas, a 2024 youth-led research project found that students not enrolled in MAS courses wanted to learn more and enroll, but because school districts aren’t required to offer them, students may miss out on all the benefits (Valenzuela, 2023). In El Paso, only five schools across the two largest districts offer MAS, and teachers are sounding alarms that students are being cut off from their own history. Surveys of schools offering the MAS course found that a significant number could not run the class because no teacher could be found to teach it, or because students didn’t enroll due to lack of awareness or scheduling conflicts. Educators piece together curriculum without textbooks, relying on crowdsourced materials and digital resources.

Meanwhile, the majority of Mexican American and Ethnic Studies programs, most established after the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, are dramatically underfunded and understaffed, with many having one or no core tenure-track faculty. Nationally, only 5% of four-year institutions offer an Ethnic Studies major, figures researchers have called alarming given decades of Latino enrollment growth and demographic change across the Southwest.

A Choice, Not a Coincidence

Centers for Mexican American Studies were built on sacrifice: walkouts, riots, arrests, hunger strikes, and decades of community organizing. They were won fight by fight, campus by campus. Today they serve as the connective tissue between universities and the communities that bled to create them, preserving oral histories, training educators, conducting policy research, mentoring first-generation students, and anchoring cultural identity for millions of Americans.

The question is not whether students want this education. They do, and the research proves it. The question is not whether these Centers serve communities. They do, visibly and measurably. The question is whether the institutions entrusted with public education will finally make the choice to fund what has always been funded last, if at all.

Fifty years of hunger strikes, arrests, and advocacy should be enough to earn more than a footnote in a budget that gets cut the moment the economy tightens. The discipline that required the most sacrifice to establish has received the least institutional investment to sustain.

The Pattern Repeats: What Is Happening at UC Berkeley

The story of Ethnic Studies under siege is not only a Texas story or a historical one. It is unfolding right now on one of the most storied campuses in the country. In September 2025, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons disclosed the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration as part of a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus, without notifying those affected until weeks after the disclosure had already occurred. Among those named was renowned Jewish feminist scholar Judith Butler, whose family lost members in the Holocaust. As Dr. César A. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a first-year student there, has written: the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement chose federal favor over the safety of its own community (Cruz, 2026).

That same year, Berkeley indefinitely closed the Multicultural Community Center, a student-built, student-run hub of multiracial organizing located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, won by students in 1999 after a hunger strike. When the administration eventually announced it would reopen the center, political art reflecting the movements that created it had been stripped from the walls. Administrators justified the erasure by saying they wanted to make the space “more welcoming,” using the same language used to neutralize Ethnic Studies programs across the country. As doctoral student Sarah Halabe noted plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students” (Cruz, 2026).

Then, in April 2026, Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies department announced it would not renew two lecturer positions for the coming academic year, citing “financial deficits,” eliminating ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department. Lecturer Diana Negrín discovered her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself; neither the department nor the dean’s office had told her. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, put it starkly: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department” (Cruz, 2026). Meanwhile, construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex on campus unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person, on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. The university had funding for a five-court sand facility, but not for the lecturers who teach the history of the very communities whose bones were found in the ground beneath it.

Source: Department of Mexican American and 
Latino Studies

Berkeley is not an outlier. It is a mirror. What is happening there: the disclosure of student names to federal investigators, the gutting of a student-won multicultural center, the defunding of Ethnic Studies under cover of budget language. It is the same pattern this op-ed traces across decades of Texas and national history. 

The tactics change; the goal does not. Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed” (Cruz, 2026). That sentence could have been spoken by a lecturer at UT Austin, Cal State Northridge, or UCLA in any decade since 1968. When the institutions that claim to champion free inquiry are the first to comply with repression, it is community, not administration, that must hold the line.

That is not a coincidence. It is a policy. And it is one we have the power to change.

Christopher Carmona focuses on government affairs, nonprofit strategy, and education policy. He has consulted on Texas ethnic studies legislation, co-authored official Texas State Board of Education reports on Mexican American Studies implementation and served as Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and Research at Our Lady of the Lake University. 

References

Cruz, César A. “What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back.” Medium.com, May 1, 2026. Republished by Angela Valenzuela, Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, May 5, 2026. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/05/what-cal-is-this-year-of-repression-at.html

Dr. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a UC Berkeley first-year student, chronicles a pattern of institutional capitulation at UC Berkeley during the 2025–26 academic year: the university’s disclosure of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to federal investigators; the indefinite closure and subsequent depoliticization of the student-built Multicultural Community Center; the nonrenewal of two Ethnic Studies lecturers citing budget deficits; and the discovery of Ohlone ancestral remains beneath a construction site for a new beach volleyball facility. Cruz frames these events as interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. The essay calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to organize collectively in defense of Ethnic Studies and the democratic mission of public higher education. Published on the blog of Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Professor of Education at UT Austin and a leading scholar of Mexican American education and equity policy.

Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. La Causa Publications, 1969.

Dee, Thomas S., and Emily K. Penner. "The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum." American Educational Research Journal 54.1 (2017): 127-166 [pdf].

Cabrera, Nolan L., Jeffrey F. Milem, Oiyan Pong, and Ronald W. Marx. “Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson.” American Educational Research Journal 51, no. 6 (2014): 1084–1118. (University of Michigan longitudinal study referenced in op-ed.)

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. State University of New York Press, 1999.

Valenzuela, Angela. “Struggles For/With/Through Ethnic Studies in Texas: Third Spaces as Anchors for Collective Action.” Teachers College Record 125, no. 3 (2023). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01614681231181793

Acuña, Rodolfo. The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe. Rutgers University Press, 2011. (Source for CSUN founding history and 1967–1971 campus activism.)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Hunger Strike for Chicano Studies Department Collection, 1993. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0b69p9s1

UCLA Newsroom. “Hail to the Hills: Starving for Justice.” UCLA Magazine, March 28, 2021. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/hunger-strike-chicana-chicano-studies

University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “About: History of MALS.” Liberal Arts, UT Austin, 2024. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/about/

From Walkouts to Takeovers: Texas Escalates Its War on Student Voice, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 From Walkouts to Takeovers: Texas Escalates Its War on Student Voice

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 9, 2026

The recent op-ed by Jasmin Lee, Daniel Dawer, and Cory Brautigam exposes something deeply troubling about the Texas Education Agency’s latest threats against school districts where students have protested immigration enforcement. What is at stake is not merely student discipline or classroom order. What we are witnessing is the attempted expansion of state takeover power into the realm of political speech. I quote: "there are no recorded instances of state education agencies using takeover as a consequence for student activism anywhere in the nation."

Think about that. This is a singular policy agenda unique to Texas.

Historically, state takeovers were justified—however controversially—on grounds such as academic performance or financial mismanagement. But under the new logic advanced by Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the Texas Education Agency, student protest itself may now constitute a trigger for state intervention. If this standard holds, students walking out to protest immigration raids, detention of classmates, or broader questions of justice could effectively place their entire school district at risk of state control.

This is a stunning escalation. It transforms the accountability apparatus of the state into a mechanism for disciplining democratic participation.

The irony, of course, is profound. Texas political leaders frequently invoke “free speech” as justification for dismantling diversity initiatives, regulating curriculum, and policing universities. Yet when students exercise that very freedom—especially in defense of immigrant communities—the response is investigation, intimidation, and the threat of takeover.

None of this should surprise us. For decades, state takeover policies have disproportionately targeted Black and Latino communities. The takeover of Houston ISD already revealed how such interventions often produce cultures of fear, censorship, and top-down control rather than meaningful educational improvement. Extending this logic to student protest simply strips away the last remaining pretense that these policies are primarily about academic outcomes.

At its core, this moment reflects not simply an assertion of state power, but an alarming turn toward extremism in Texas education policy. Threatening to take over entire school districts because students engage in protest is wildly out of step with the democratic purposes of public education. Schools are supposed to cultivate civic participation, not punish it. 

Yet Texas leaders are now attempting to police student speech itself—deciding who gets to speak, who gets to organize, and who gets to define the boundaries of democratic participation in our schools. When student protest becomes grounds for state intervention, accountability policy has been transformed—even disfigured—into a tool of political control.

Young people have always been central to movements for justice—from the Chicano walkouts of 1968 to the student protests against gun violence in recent years. To threaten entire school districts because students speak out today is not only historically short-sighted; it is a warning sign about the direction of governance in Texas public education.

If student activism becomes grounds for state takeover, then what we are witnessing is not school accountability—it is the political capture of public education. Public education is recast not as a space for democratic learning, but as a site for enforcing political obedience.

TEA’s threats over student activism lay bare the takeover agenda

By Jasmin Lee, Daniel Dawer and Cory Brautigam,Guests ColumnistsFeb 10, 2026 | Austin-American Statesman

Crockett High School students walk out of school on Jan. 30 as part of a nationwide protest of the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton later ordered investigations into such student protests at Austin Independent School District.

Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

In response to growing student protests against violence committed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the Texas Education Agency last week announced sanctions for school districts where students participate in “inappropriate political activism.” At the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton — who have ordered investigations into student protests at Austin Independent School District — TEA has threatened to revoke teachers’ certifications or take over entire districts if they are deemed to have supported such activism.

This move from TEA represents a dangerous weaponization of state takeover policy.

Rather than using intimidation tactics to silence the speech of perceived political opponents, TEA and state lawmakers should support educators’ and students’ rights to teach and learn without interference.

Historically, when Texas students participated in walkouts to protest gun violence or racial segregation, lawmakers did not threaten to take over their school districts. Instead, takeover remained an extreme measure reserved for cases of persistent academic underperformance or financial mismanagement — criteria specified in the Texas Education Code. Defying state and national precedent, TEA’s recent guidance threatens to deploy takeover policy in new ways by identifying political speech as a justification for intervention.

We have spent the last three years documenting Texas’s 2023 takeover of Houston Independent School District. Through hundreds of interviews with educators, families and students, we’ve learned how the HISD takeover has disrupted teaching and learning, contributed to staff turnover and enrollment declines, and created a culture of pervasive fear and mistrust.

Research on takeovers shows they disproportionately target majority-Black and Latino districts, don’t lead to long-term academic gains, and subject stakeholders to emotional turmoil. Houstonians know this reality all too well.

Hundreds of Crockett High School students participated in the Jan. 30 walkout, which 

was among similar student demonstrations held at other Austin-area schools.

Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

TEA originally justified the HISD takeover by citing chronic academic failure at just one of the district’s 274 schools — a low threshold for intervention, to be sure, but at least one codified in statute. Student protests, on the other hand, are not mentioned in the Texas Education Code’s chapter on school accountability. In fact, there are no recorded instances of state education agencies using takeover as a consequence for student activism anywhere in the nation.

Under TEA’s vague new criteria, standard teaching practices like making connections between current events and a novel like “Animal Farm” — a text included in TEA’s proposed Literary Works list — could put districts at risk of takeover. Did the teacher encourage “inappropriate political activism” or facilitate speech that “disrupts learning”? If students hold an event to raise awareness about a classmate’s detention by ICE, as they did for HISD senior Mauro Yosueth Henriquez, would this constitute grounds for takeover?

Now, imagine a scenario where TEA takes over a district for these reasons. What reforms would an appointed board of managers put in place? Even before TEA’s new guidelines were introduced, HISD’s state-appointed leadership closed school libraries, restricted student access to reading full books, and suspended 45 students for participating in a single protest. How much further would officials go in policing teacher and student speech?

Moreover, takeovers typically specify the metrics that districts must meet to regain local control. What exit criteria would determine whether sufficient “improvement” had been made under these conditions? This could mean silencing or removing individuals whose political beliefs diverge from those held by state leadership.

Takeovers have always been about controlling what communities — especially Black and Latino communities — can say, think and do. By threatening to take over school districts in response to students’ political activism, TEA’s guidance rips away the facade that takeover is about improving student learning. It is, and has always been, about race, power and domination.

TEA must stop caving to political demands from the governor and attorney general and instead focus on its own stated purpose: supporting educators and students in their pursuit of critical thinking and lifelong learning.

Jasmin Lee, Daniel Dawer and Cory Brautigam are doctoral students at Rice University, the University of Texas at Austin and Penn State University, respectively.

UT takes disciplinary action against students after Tower sit-in, The Daily Texan, Nov. 18, 2025

UT-Austin is investigating students for a peaceful sit-in meant to deliver a letter about the Trump Compact and the University’s proposed departmental consolidations—including ethnic and area studies programs, as earlier reporting in The Daily Texan makes clear. 

Branding this action as “disruptive conduct” chills student activism and diverts attention from the real issue: students are seeking transparency and accountability in decisions that will reshape their academic futures. A public university should welcome—not punish—such democratic engagement. It is especially disturbing that the very students most directly affected by these decisions are being denied a meaningful voice in the process.

—Angela Valenzuela

UT takes disciplinary action against students after Tower sit-in

Lizzie Bassett and Diego Hernandez

November 18, 2025

Justin Doud

Kelly Soucy, UT’s Associate Dean of Students, and Aaron Voyles, the Associate Dean of Students, tell computer science second-year Daniel Ramirez and graduate student Áine McGehee Marley that she is unable to schedule a meeting between the students and senior leadership after telling the students to leave the tower alongside UTPD Sergeant Chad Martinka following an SDS sit-in Nov. 7.

The University sent notices of disciplinary action to two students on Monday after they conducted a sit-in at the Tower on Nov. 7, according to documents obtained by The Daily Texan.

The students, Daniel Ramirez, a computer science sophomore and a member of Students for a Democratic Society, and Áine McGehee Marley, a College of Liberal Arts Ph.D. student and organizer for UT Graduate Workers Union, received the letters on Monday afternoon in an email. In the letters, the Student Conduct and Academic Integrity committee said they may have violated University policy by engaging in disruptive conduct and unauthorized entry. They are now under investigation.

During the sit-in on Nov. 7, 14 students, including Ramirez and McGehee Marley, attempted to set up a meeting with the University leadership to deliver a letter with multiple demands, including the University to reject the Trump administration’s compact and stop the possible consolidation of smaller liberal arts departments.

Ramirez said he was not surprised to receive the notice, as other students received similar notices during the April 2024 pro-Palestinian protests, also for disruptive conduct. 

“Given what we’ve seen in the past from UT administration, they have continuously revealed that they will do whatever they can to stop students from using their campus,” McGehee Marley  said. “We are allowed to be on our campus, and to be reprimanded and punished for that is ridiculous.” 

The committee claims the 14 students rushed their way into the University Leadership’s offices in the letters, creating a significant disruption. Ramirez said this is an unfair and inaccurate retelling of the events, claiming the actual sit-in was more civil than described. 

“We did not rush in there, we walked,” Ramirez said. “The picture they’re trying to create is that we were disruptive, and that we didn’t have authorized entry. But this was a public space, so we think both of these charges are pretty ridiculous.” 

The letters initially scheduled the students to meet with the University on Wednesday. McGehee Marley’s meeting was for 1:30 and Ramirez’ was scheduled for 2:30, giving both less than 48 hours of notice. However, the students chose to reschedule their meetings to allow for more time to prepare. 

McGehee said the letters show that the University is afraid of student activism.

“This is … supposed to be Texas’s top state school, and there is a complete lack of transparency on how things are being decided by administrators,” McGehee said. 

Ramirez said presenting the letter was one of the only ways students can make their voices heard.

“We haven’t seen it done any other way, right?” Ramirez said. “There’s basically no institutional support for democratic accountability from the people who actually attend this University.” 

A spokesperson said the University cannot comment on individual student cases due to privacy laws.

Taking stock of a youth movement’s gains, losses

I found this to be a really helpful piece, particularly in light of what very often feels like the slow pace of change in our social policies and in our practices, as a whole.  I myself find that public policy requires an enormous amount of patience coupled with continuing hard work.  I do like the view expressed herein that the pursuit of social change is an investment in our communities and in our future.  

What merits mention is that the very process of pursuing positive social change is actually never without an equally positive impact of, in this case, educating our communities on the combined issues of gun violence, policy, politics, and the role of individual, organizational, and collective agency and power in a democracy.  

So individually, we may not harvest the victory we seek even if collectively, we ultimately do.  After all, the seeds of change that these youth activists represent are the essential building blocks to victory.  It matters, for example, that the students successfully framed gun-control legislation as a "school safety issue," rather than a Second Amendment one.  To decouple these is an advance.

Social movements matter.  They always do.  Things will change.  They already are.  

In the meantime, we educate and sow peace and healing in our troubled world.

Sí se puede!  Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela
#SurvivorsEmpowered #NotOneMore

Demonstrators, many of them high school students, fill Pennsylvania Avenue during the March for Our Lives rally in support of gun control in Washington last March.

—Alex Brandon/AP

Taking stock of a youth movement’s 

gains, losses

By Stephen Sawchuk

February 12, 2019

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For Philly native Rachel Steinig, a core March for Our Lives activist, returning to the University of Pennsylvania for her sophomore year highlighted a stark contrast between her life on the protest frontlines and the orderly campus. There just weren't many supports there for student organizing or activism, said Steinig.

So in January, nine months after student walkouts rippled through American schools, the 19-year-old and a handful of her classmates decided to fill the void themselves, and launched the UPenn chapter of March for Our Lives.

In a few weeks, the chapter had amassed an email list of some 250 students, visited the Philadelphia office of Sen. Pat Toomey to lobby for a federal proposal to close gun background-check loopholes, and contacted long-established Philadelphia gun-violence groups, to ask how it can help.

As the anniversary of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School arrives, the efforts of groups like this one represent one of several possible answers to this question: What is the future of the extraordinary youth activism #neveragain unleashed in 2018?

Continue reading here.