Mexican American Studies in Texas!

Los Niños Nos Miran 

Signs from a June 12 protest against the name change.  RUBEN PAQUIAN

Whose knowledge is of most worth? Whose stories comprise our collective histories and whose are rendered silent?   Which Texas children find their communities’ accomplishments and struggles and names between the covers of their textbooks?   Who decides?

The teaching of history – histories – in Texas schools came closer to true authenticity today with a decision by the State Board of Education that the state will not only have credit courses in Mexican American Studies but that the courses will in fact bear that name – the name chosen by Mexican Americans. 

The name should not have been an issue. But in what seemed be an act of resistance to the very idea of ethnic studies – and to the sustained, organized advocacy for the inclusion of Mexican American Studies in our schools, members of the SBOE (mostly Republican and Anglo) decided in April that their grudging okay for the courses would be granted on the condition the courses be named “Ethnic Studies: An Overview of Americans of Mexican Descent.”  A name that evoked the demeaning othering from the Jim Crow era. A name not used by Mexican Americans to name themselves.    Angela Valenzuela, scholar activist and one of the leaders of the concerted effort for Mexican American Studies, has written powerfully and frankly about the struggle for the courses and the insulting naming.   The name could not stand in contradiction to the courses themselves.

She and her colleagues focused on the content:  historically accurate, culturally rich, research-based histories and literature grounded in the centuries of experiences and breadth of knowledge of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas and the US.  “Mexican American Studies” is itself an established body of scholarship with myriads of serious publications, journals, professional expertise, and academic courses.  They argued that the K-12 curriculum needs to build on and draw from that breadth and depth of established knowledge and ways of knowing.

What caught my eye in the Republican characterization was the word overview.  "Overview" is pedagogically indefensible.  An “overview” is by definition superficial; it holds the “viewer” at a distance from the subject.  The subject itself is static; the viewer (presumably learner) is passive, observing but not engaged.  “Studies” on the other hand denotes active inquiry, discovery, cognition, exploration.  One who studies engages, questions, delves, and – this must be emphasized – adds to the subject, contributes to the collective knowledge.  An “Overview of…” posits the subject as fixed, as derived from an external authority or fixed source separate from the learner.  “Ethnic Studies” invites the learner in, requires the learner’s active role.

That active role – embodied over many months by the students, teachers, parents, community elders, scholars and allies who built the coalition in support of Mexican American Studies – may be what intimidated the conservatives on the SBOE to try to slip “overview” into the title.  It didn’t work. 

Here is Angela Valenzuela’s post on June 14, celebrating the SBOE’s acceptance of the name Mexican Americans call themselves and their history here in Texas.  I urge you to seek out her blog posts from this past April as well as June 13 and 14 to read her account, and her generous posts of other writers’ recounting, of this successful struggle to make our children’s schooling consonant with their histories:

Thursday, June 14, 2018

What’s in a Name? Texas SBOE Tentatively Approves ‘Ethnic Studies: Mexican American Studies’

Happy to see that the Texas Observer gave us some ink.  Still savoring the taste of victory this morning.  I'm hoping that we can continue to be a presence and force in SBOE policy and politics, as a whole. It is our moment to own public education. Latinos will be a third of the entire US population by 2050 or 2060 no matter what anyone does to limit our presence. So the education of Latinos should be everybody's business at the same time that we need to grasp that only we can and must do for ourselves since there's nobody else out there that will do this. Plus, we are not only abundantly capable of doing this, but what we have still to offer this country is breathtaking. Why? Because we have such amazing leadership and we also have amazing super powers—as Tuesday’s show of strength revealed! 

Finally, we need new adherents and allies and we need to continue being allies to all who suffer and whose stories have similarly been marginalized by the dominant narrative. 

Sí se puede!

-Angela

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