So happy to read these news about the ground that Ethnic Studies is gaining throughout the country.  This despite the anti-immigrant rhetoric and the racial and ethnic bias we still face as a country even if it's getting more attention from the news media—and as noted squarely at the Oscars this weekend, too.  

We ourselves here in Austin had a first-ever Ethnic Studies summit last Friday evening that brought together UT Ethnic Studies students and faculty with AISD school district staff, teachers, and high school students to talk about the first year of the roll out.  Currently taught in 8 high schools, AISD is the first district in the state of Texas to implement Ethnic Studies to scale—and with plans to offer it next year at the high school level districtwide.  You can view the summit at this link since we recorded it live on Facebook.

 Clearly Ethnic Studies is making a massive difference in these students' lives along the very same lines as the encouraging news story below.  Thanks to my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Roberto Calderón, for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

 

Historia Chicana

4 March 2018

Amid Anti-immigrant and Racial Clashes, Ethnic Studies Programs Blossom in Public Schools

By Tribune News Service on March 4, 2018 3:34 pm

As public debates swirl around “Dreamers,” President Donald Trump’s border wall and Black Lives Matter, the study of race and ethnicity is booming in public schools.

Nationwide, states and school systems are refining, expanding or adopting courses that explore history, literature and politics through the eyes of people who aren’t white. The programs, which until recently were banned in Arizona and derided as anti-American, are thriving in unexpected places. Some districts are making ethnic studies compulsory — for whites as well as minorities.

Teacher Jr Arimboanga shows his ethnic studies students a video about racism at John O’Connell High School in San Francisco on Jan. 22, 2018. (Josh Edelson/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

“In our current political context, especially with the president, there has been a huge gain in the critical study of race and ethnicity, and the desire for students to see themselves reflected in what they are learning,” said Julia Jordan-Zachery, a professor at Providence College in Rhode Island and president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies. “The interest predates Trump, but it’s only growing now. It’s a way of flipping the script on what teaching is traditionally supposed to be.”

It’s a profound shift from just seven years ago, when the closing of a Mexican-American studies program in Tucson caused a national uproar.

Last May, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb — who took over the job from Mike Pence, now the vice president — signed a law requiring every high school to offer an ethnic or racial studies elective each year. The move came after years of failed attempts to get similar laws on the books. What changed?

Republicans teamed up with Democrats and called for classes to be electives instead of requirements. Students need the “opportunity to take a class that relates to their experiences and heritage,” the bill’s co-sponsor, Republican state Rep. Robert Behning, said at the time.

Indiana leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People launched an aggressive lobbying effort, spurred in part by police shootings of unarmed black Americans.

In June, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill requiring ethnic studies for all public school students between kindergarten and 12th grade. As in Indiana, racial minority groups — emboldened in part by a number of hate crimes in one of the country’s whitest states — were behind the change.

The law compels Oregon educators to look at where they fail “to recognize the histories, contributions and perspectives of ethnic minorities and social minorities.” It includes women, the disabled, refugees, immigrants and LGBT people among “social minorities.”

Also last June, the Seattle school board said it would weave ethnic studies into its schools’ curriculums after coming under NAACP pressure.

While previous campaigns to establish ethnic studies programs around the U.S. targeted minority groups, the Seattle NAACP made a different case, asserting on its website, “Ethnic studies courses benefit white students, who disproportionately have the privilege to be unaware of the realities of racism.” The argument was similar in the mostly black and Latino city of Bridgeport, Conn., where last October school administrators decided to require students to take a half-year class on African-American studies, Caribbean/Latin American studies or a course on race to graduate.

“Even in places where it hasn’t fully blossomed, there are steps being taken to incorporate ethnic studies,” Jordan-Zachery said. That includes Kansas and Texas, where legislators are pushing measures that would institute Mexican-American studies classes and those on other ethnic groups.

“For much of the history of education in the U.S., we have been deleted and erased in textbooks,” said Georgina C. Perez, a Latina Democrat on the Texas state Board of Education. Through ethnic studies, she said, “we’re reclaiming our history.”

States and cities are following California, where education officials are standardizing what’s taught in ethnic studies classes after highly touted programs in San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles.

Ethnic studies grew out of the civil rights and anti-colonial movements of the 1960s. San Francisco State University was a pioneer, with its College of Ethnic Studies that launched in 1968. UC Berkeley opened an ethnic studies department a year later. In 1994, Berkeley High School became one of the first public high schools to offer ethnic studies.

A key for many programs is their reading lists. At Barack and Michelle Obama Elementary School in St. Paul, Minn., kids in an African-American studies class read “Desmond and the Very Mean Word,” a story based on the childhood of future Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu in apartheid South Africa.

At John O’Connell High School in San Francisco, ninth-grade ethnic studies students look at how news and entertainment media portray minorities, and they read from the autobiography of black nationalist Assata Shakur and the Eddie Huang memoir on his experience as an Asian-American, “Fresh off the Boat.”

In Sarah Rodriguez’s ethnic studies class at Santa Monica High School, a recent lesson revolved around students discussing activism against gentrification in Boyle Heights, where art galleries and coffee shops have attracted white and more well-off newcomers in the traditionally Mexican-American, working-class neighborhood.

Activists celebrated last year after an arts nonprofit called PSSST shut down amid criticism that it was helping to displace locals.

Rodriguez told the 17 students — a mix of sophomores, juniors and seniors — to discuss a Boyle Heights blog that suggested gentrification counted as a form of racist state violence.

She asked students if they agreed that the transformation of a neighborhood, often fueled by government policies that cater to business interests, could be described that way. Some said yes. Some said the answer wasn’t so simple, especially after they watched a documentary about a Latina artist who praised the arrival of galleries and said the neighborhood was now safer than when she grew up there.

“The class really challenges you to think about your identity yourself,” said Diana Hernandez, a Mexican-American sophomore. “It helps us make more sense of what we’re learning throughout the school day.”

Nationally, supporters of ethnic studies say they lead to better grades and graduation rates. They often cite a 2016 Stanford University study assessing the San Francisco Unified School District’s ethnic studies program when it was a pilot, from 2010 to 2014. The study found that students who took ethnic studies courses, including many who came from lower-income families, performed better overall than other students.

Ethnic studies students’ attendance rates were 21 percentage points higher, they earned more points toward graduation and their grade-point averages rose by 1.4 points. Students made the biggest gains in science and math, and boys and Latino students made the greatest improvements.

Jr Arimboanga, an ethnic studies teacher at John O’Connell High, one of the schools in the San Francisco study, said confidence and study skills have increased among students who have taken the classes.

“When you look at traditional world history that many of our students take, the textbook is the dominant narrative,” Arimboanga said. “It focuses on a Eurocentric experience. People of color are mentioned in negative or simplified ways. The African-American experience only starts with slavery and forgets the previous rich history in Africa. Latinos and Mexican-American students often have a paragraph around the Mexican-American War, but don’t read about the native experience of Latinx peoples before colonialism.”

His syllabus includes a screening of “Precious Knowledge,” a PBS documentary about the fight for Mexican-American studies in Tucson.

The school district shut down the program in 2012 after state officials threatened to withhold more than $14 million for violating a newly passed law banning courses tailored for a particular ethnic group or that were deemed to fuel anti-American sentiment.

Then-Arizona Superintendent of Education John Huppenthal said a Tucson class he observed — where a Che Guevara image hung on a wall and he said a lecture described Benjamin Franklin as racist — seemed anti-white. Kids “understood the framework that was being laid out — that Hispanics are the oppressed and Caucasians are the oppressors. That’s very troubling,” he told The Times at the time.

In response, the district introduced a program for “culturally relevant” teaching that didn’t run afoul of the law but still allowed classes on government and history with Mexican-American and African American perspectives.

In August, a federal judge in Phoenix declared the ban on ethnic studies unconstitutional, saying it violated Latino students’ First Amendment “right to receive information and ideas.”

In December the same judge banned Arizona from enforcing the law, and cited Huppenthal’s crusade against the courses.

Ethnic studies supporters hailed the decision, hoping it would spur the growth of such programs across the U.S.

But in Arizona, the subject remains touchy. State education officials said they want to preserve elements of the ban. Trustees of the Tucson Unified School District, although given the green light by the federal judge, held off on resuming Mexican-American studies courses in January.

“While it’s growing in California and elsewhere, it’s still a controversial issue here,” said school board member Kristel Foster, who sponsored the proposal to once again allow Mexican-American studies. “Every election here people still ask about Mexican-American studies. The ban is gone, and things have moved in many places nationally, but it’s still having an effect here.”

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Historia Chicana

Mexican American Studies

University of North Texas

Denton, Texas

5 REASONS MEXICAN WORKERS WOULD CHEER THE DEMISE OF NAFTA

Here is a critical and important read on NAFTA by Manuel Perez Rocha, an associate fellow of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies,  that underscores a deepening of inequality in its wake.  One very sad data point that Dr. Perez Rocha provides is 8,000 Mexicans dying of malnutrition annually as a result of malnutrition under NAFTA.

Do read this piece in its entirety. One of many important takeaways is the relationship of NAFTA to the push toward immigration to the U.S. and organized crime.  Pretty much all Mexicans would much rather stay home with their families in Mexico, but NAFTA-enabled inequalities are so severe that families do what they must to survive.

Thanks to Dr. Roberto Calderón for sharing.

-Angela

Historia Chicana

1 March 2018

5 REASONS MEXICAN WORKERS WOULD CHEER THE DEMISE OF NAFTA

By Manuel Pérez Rocha 

Monday, February 26, 2018, 12:27 PM

Mexican farmers take part 31 January, 2008 in Mexico City in a march of hundreds of corn producers protesting against the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). (LUIS ACOSTA/AFP/Getty Images)

This article was produced in partnership with Foreign Policy In Focus.

Mexicans have plenty not to like about Donald Trump: his racism, his wall, his tirades against immigrants. But if there's a disruption provoked by Trump we should actually embrace, it's the renegotiation of NAFTA—or even the trade pact's possible end.

Along with Mexico’s upcoming presidential elections on July 1—in which center-left candidate Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador (AMLO, as he is popularly known) is the clear front runner—the possible unraveling of NAFTA has the country's business elite and political establishment freaking out.

While AMLO sees the renegotiation of NAFTA as an opportunity for meaningful changes that would benefit the majority of Mexicans, Mexican negotiators from the ruling establishment party have been very busy trying to secure a deal before the vote, in order to keep the status quo as intact as possible.

During its 24 years, NAFTA has helped to widen inequalities in Mexico, Canada and the United States alike—and to play workers in the three countries against each other. Since the pact went into effect, inequality in Mexico has risen to levels at triple the OECD average, while about half of the population remains in poverty.

An end to NAFTA could help Mexico finally reduce its economic and political subordination to the United States, diversify its trade relations and develop a sovereign economic policy that benefits its population—not only transnational corporations.

Here are at least five reasons why most Mexicans would cheer the end of NAFTA.

1. NAFTA has been a net job destroyer in Mexico.

The most contentious issue in the NAFTA talks is the prevalence of very low salaries and labor standards in Mexico, which companies from the United States and Canada have exploited ruthlessly by moving jobs south of the border. This pressure has led the U.S. team to call for better labor standards in Mexico—a major progressive demand the administration would likely never take up for U.S. workers at home.

In the latest rounds of negotiations, the U.S. and Canadian governments have proposed raising the minimum wage in Mexico. A recent letter signed by 183 members of Congress urges the U.S. Trade Representative to negotiate “a new NAFTA” with “strong, clear and binding provisions that address Mexico’s labor conditions.” And Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to Trump, said recently that “higher wages in Mexico are in the interests of Mexico and the United States. Without this adjustment, Mexico will never have a robust middle class, and our middle class will wither if not die.”

The United States and Canada are also pushing for tougher Mexican labor standards, such as ensuring that Mexican workers can freely organize unions and stage strikes without fear of losing their jobs.

However, the Mexican government contends ludicrously that "salary policy is an internal matter.”

Worse still, a new labor bill being proposed in Mexico would eliminate all restrictions on subcontracting, including those that require “common-sense” compliance with health and safety laws. Labor organizations like the AFL-CIO have warned that the bill’s “overall impact would be to prevent unions fighting for a living wage," Reuters paraphrases, and would "lure more jobs south of the border."

NAFTA was sold to Mexicans as a deal that would reduce the salary gap between Mexico and its neighbors to the north. In fact, this gap has only widened. Manufacturing workers in Mexico earn an average wage of about $13 a day, while the typical assembly-line worker in the United States makes $25 per hour, according to the Labor Department. As the Chicago Tribune reports, “In Mexico, $2 per hour workers make $40,000 SUVs.”

What would happen to NAFTA jobs in Mexico if the pact ended? Not much.

Although the Mexican government and the business elite boast that NAFTA has made Mexico into an exporting powerhouse of the manufacturing sector, the overall job market is not so dependent on exports.

As Alberto Arroyo Picard, a professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City, told In These Times, a forthcoming paper of his demonstrates with official data that Mexico´s manufacturing exporting sector accounts for only 2.4 percent of the total jobs in the country.

One could argue that many other jobs in Mexico depend on foreign investors—for example, the retail sector. However, as they have in the United States, foreign companies like Wal-Mart have displaced scores of smaller Mexican companies, destroying countless jobs. According to small and medium business leaders in the country, more than 600,000 companies have gone bankrupt during the current administration alone, and only 5 percent of Mexico´s companies export.

2. Multinational companies have used NAFTA to devastate Mexico's environment.

Despite containing a nonbinding environmental side agreement, NAFTA’s “environmental safeguards” never had the funding or legal mandate needed to actually protect the environment. And so NAFTA has had a terrible effect on the health of North American communities, as several co-authors and I documented in a 2014 report published by the Sierra Club.

In Mexico, we wrote, "NAFTA has encouraged a boom in environmentally destructive mining activities." One reason? Along with passing NAFTA, the Mexican government ratified national laws that "facilitated the entry of Canadian and U.S. mining corporations into Mexico," our report states, giving them easy access to lands and mineral resources. 

Since then, the Mexican government has granted more than 32,000 mining concessions and devoted more than 20 percent of Mexico’s land to mining, which has been devastating for the environment. Mexico has meanwhile become the world’s leading importer of toxic sodium cyanide for mining, which is a major source of water contamination.

While the rights of foreign mining companies are strongly protected under NAFTA, the pact’s environmental side agreement has not required Mexico to better regulate the harmful environmental impacts of runaway extraction. Commercial rights are better protected than environmental and human rights.

3. NAFTA has destroyed the livelihoods of millions in the Mexican countryside.

NAFTA backers' promise that Mexico would become an “agro-exporting power” failed. Instead, Mexico now imports 45 percent of the food it consumes, making it one of the most import-dependent countries in the world for food.

Mexico now relies heavily on the United States for basic staples like corn, soy, wheat, rice, and beans. According to one study, in fact, a stunning 99 percent of Mexico's imports of corn come from the heavily subsidized U.S agriculture industry. All this has cost Mexico more than $20 billion in the last five years alone.

Food dependency reflects the devastation of Mexico's small farmers’ livelihoods since NAFTA. Left to compete with U.S.-based mega-exporters, millions of Mexican farmers have been driven out of work, driving displacement, impoverishment and massive social disruption—and creating huge opportunities for organized crime groups.

Victor Suarez of the National Association of Rural Commercialization Enterprises has said that what Mexico needs is to “reach food self-sufficiency" and "re-activate the internal production of food to generate employment, income and opportunities to young people" to keep them "from resorting to migration or organized crime."

4. Corporations are using NAFTA to roll back legitimate government measures aimed at protecting health and the environment.  

Although foreign direct investment from NAFTA has been heralded as the panacea for economic growth, Mexico’s economy grew at “an anemic 1.2 percent growth rate per capita from 1994 to 2016,” according to The Washington Post. And even that modest growth has been heavily concentrated in few economic enclaves, accentuating regional disparities.

To attract this investment, the Mexican government agreed to enormous curbs on its ability to regulate industry.

NAFTA's "investment chapter" helped establish a so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism that lets corporations sue governments in supranational tribunals, like the World Bank’s International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, when a government’s regulation in the public interest tampers with corporate profits.

This means that multinational companies and unelected foreign bureaucrats, not voters and their representatives, get the final say over many health and safety regulations that impact local populations.

The first case under NAFTA was concluded in 2000, when a World Bank tribunal ruled in favor of the U.S. waste management company Metalclad, forcing Mexican taxpayers to pay the U.S. company $16.7 million. The reason was that a municipality in San Luis Potosi had denied the company a construction permit until existing toxic contamination was cleaned up. 

This was just the beginning. To date, Mexico has paid more than $200 million under similar ISDS, with more than $1 billion more in pending cases.

These provisions have come under huge criticism from civil society groups, which argue that they make it easier for corporations to roll back legitimate government measures aimed at protecting health, the environment and other priorities. Now even the U.S. Trade Representative office is considering a proposal for the NAFTA renegotiations that would give each of the countries the option to opt-in or out of the controversial provision, as Inside U.S. Trade reported.

However, the Mexican government is trying to preserve ISDS. Why would lawmakers seek to continue being handcuffed in policy making?

In talks over another agreement — the Transpacific Partnership — Mexican Secretary of Economy Ildefonso Guajardo gave a reason: “The trade agreement will give protection" in the event that "future presidents of the country try to revert Mexico´s energy reform.”

In other words, ISDS is a tool for the present government to cement the privatization of Mexico’s oil and other industries. No wonder Jack Gerard, head of the American Petroleum Institute, says that ISDS is crucial to maximizing the industry's economic upside in a new NAFTA deal.

5. NAFTA made Mexico the most obese country in Latin America.

Because the initial promises for NAFTA utterly failed, the new spin is to hype its “consumer benefits.”

Extreme examples in The Washington Post, for instance, celebrate that Mexico is “buying more U.S. goods than ever” and that in “Mexico’s Costco stores, staples such as tortilla chips and chipotle salsa are trucked in from factories in California and Texas that produce for both sides of the border.”

Another article in the Post celebrates the Americanization of Mexico, saying that “Mexicans have become accustomed to such luxurious shopping centers, where you can browse Williams-Sonoma crockery, try on Steve Madden shoes, eat at Olive Garden, take your kids to Chuck E. Cheese’s, and watch War for the Planet of the Apes on the big screen."

The reality is that the Americanization of Mexican culture has meant the destruction of Mexico's food security and sovereignty—and with it, Mexicans' health. The consumption patterns encouraged by a glut of U.S.-made processed foods have made Mexico the second-most obese of the OECD, with diabetes becoming the country's leading cause of death.

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has documented that Mexican diets under NAFTA have shifted "from traditional food staples toward energy-dense, processed foods and animal-source foods—which tend to be higher in fats and added sweeteners.” The New York Times similarly reported late last year that NAFTA had transformed Mexico “in a way that would saddle millions with diet-related illnesses.”

Meanwhile, in a sad irony that speaks to the inequality and disparities provoked by NAFTA and related policies, some 8,000 Mexicans die of malnutrition every year.

What Mexico Needs Instead of NAFTA

Any new integration model for North America should be based on justice, equality, democracy, peace and care of the environment.

Mexico needs trade agreements that include binding labor chapters, support small and medium companies and don't rely on suppressing wages. Complex, anti-democratic investor privileges should be excluded.

Instead of greater deregulation, Mexico should push for a new agreement of cooperation and complementation in North America, one that strengthens our internal economy, devolves food sovereignty and self-sufficiency, elevates the rights of workers and the environment and diversifies our relations with the world.

MANUEL PEREZ ROCHA

Manuel Perez Rocha is an associate fellow of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

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Historia Chicana

Mexican American Studies

University of North Texas

Denton, Texas

Announcement: Education & Ethnic Studies Summit, Chapman University, April 28, 2018

Headed at the end of April to Chapman University for this exciting conference on Ethnic Studies.  I like the focus on community, critical consciousness, spirituality, and solidarity.
-Angela

Fracking Puts Drinking Water at Risk: Here's what you can do

The more that I read about hydraulic fracking (or "fracking"), the more concerned I get.  What folks should know is the Halliburton loophole that stripped the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of its authority to regulate fracking. 

Ed Johnson, President of Environment America provides helpful resources on what we as citizens can do.   I would also check out the Environment America web page.  If you are a teacher, the  World Change Documentary Club Action Plan has great resources.

Angela Valenzuela

#ohfrackno

Source: World Change Documentary Club Action Plan https://www.worldchangedocclub.com/frackinghttps://www.worldchangedocclub.com/fracking

Why is fracking exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and five other bedrock environmental laws?

In 2005, thanks to oil and gas industry lobbying, the EPA was stripped of its authority to regulate fracking. It’s called the Halliburton loophole.

And now EPA research has finally concluded what we’ve suspected all along: fracking puts our drinking water at risk.¹

Take action: Tell your senators to close the fracking loophole.  You can find out who represents you here.

Since 2005, We’ve permitted the oil and gas industry to frack more than 137,000 wells.²

These fracking operations have used at least 6 billion pounds of chemicals, many of them potential carcinogens, many injected directly into the ground near drinking water supplies.³

We know that at least 157 of the chemicals used in fracking fluid are toxic to humans and aquatic life. And we know that fracking produces billions of gallons of fracking fluid waste each year.

Why then is fracking exempt from any environmental laws?

The EPA is not allowed to regulate hydraulic fracturing like it does other energy industries, via safety regulations stemming from key environmental laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.

Thanks to a provision that was tacked on to the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the EPA was stripped of its authority to regulate fracking. This exemption was nicknamed the Halliburton loophole, named for the company that patented fracking in the 1940’s and remains one of the largest manufacturers of fracking fluids.⁴

It was wrong then and it’s wrong now -- especially when we should be making a wholesale shift to conservation and renewable energy.

Yours, 

Ed Johnson
Environment America President


1. Fighting Fracking: A Toolkit for Activists, Environment America Research and Policy Center, 

     Dec 12, 2016

3. Stop Fracking our Future
4. Fracking by the Numbers, Environment America Research and Policy Center, April 2016

5. Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on

    Drinking Water Resources in the United States (Final Report), Dec 19, 2016

6. The Halliburton Loophole, The New York Times, Nov 2, 2009

ACLU Online Video Training on Students’ Free Speech Rights TONIGHT (March 1, 2018)

***MEDIA ADVISORY***

ACLU Online Video Training on Students’ Free Speech Rights TONIGHT

https://www.facebook.com/pg/aclu/posts/?ref=page_internal

CONTACT: Josh Bell, 212-549-2666, jbell@aclu.org
WHAT:
The American Civil Liberties Union will host a live online video training to educate students about their First Amendment rights in light of the surge of student protests following the Parkland school shooting.
Thousands of people from all 50 states have already registered to watch the training, which will be broadcast on YouTube Live.
The video session will cover various ways that students can speak out under the Constitution, including whether schools can discipline students for walkouts and other forms of political expression. The training is intended not only for students but also for parents, teachers, administrators, and anyone else who wants to support student engagement and free speech rights.
The ACLU has also created an online form for students to report on how their schools are responding to protests.
WHO: 
Faiz Shakir, ACLU National Political DirectorBen Wizner, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project DirectorVera Eidelman, ACLU Attorney
WHEN: 
Thursday, March 1, 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT
LIVESTREAM & RESOURCES:https://www.aclu.org/StudentProtestRights
The ACLU’s Know Your Rights guide for student speech is here:https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/students-free-speech-rights-public-schools

If you would rather not receive future communications from American Civil Liberties Union, let us know by clicking here.
American Civil Liberties Union, 125 Broad Street 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004-2400 United States