COLONIZING BY TEXTBOOK, Part 1
What my students saw in a Spanish class
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Tejano Monument, Austin, TX
Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/8069642490 |
Two students burst into my course on the American High
School, angry to the point of tears, theirs the anger of righteous
indignation. Forget the syllabus and
the assigned lesson: we had to hear their story.
These two Rice students had observed earlier that day in
classrooms at one of the city’s predominantly Latino high schools: 95% Latino, some recently immigrated, most
long-time Texans. The subject of their
fury: a Spanish I textbook. The kind that goes chapter by chapter
introducing grammar rules, verb conjugations, and vocabulary. The interesting
stuff is found in those sidebars,-- you know the ones that are in color and
talk about the countries and cultures where this new language is spoken.
My students were almost shouting, “It keeps saying
‘they’!” “’They’ eat this, ‘they’ wear
that….it keeps saying ‘they’!”
Seated in a Spanish class among Mexican American students,
my Anglo students were shocked to find that these “cultural” sidebars described
Spanish-speakers as an exotic “other.”
The “they” were all native speakers of Spanish wearing rebozos and singing
Mariachi; “they all” eat tacos and enchiladas, with corn as the staple in their
diet.
The “they” assumed the book – and the class – would be
exclusively for non-Spanish speakers.
The problem of “othering” non-Anglo students is larger than
the book: the district had vetoed several principals’ attempts to add
Spanish-for-Spanish-speakers to their course offerings. Those courses in
Spanish and Latin American literature, in advanced composition and conversation,
were seen as electives “we can’t afford”
despite a Latino majority in the district’s student population. Thus students
who were fluent in Spanish were having to sit through Spanish 1 and 2 to get
“foreign language” credits on their transcript.
My students were very upset at what they came to see a form
of cultural colonizing in the selection of the book. Even more upsetting was
the silence about those “cultural” sidebars: the teacher did not mention them,
nor did the students speak up against
this objectification of themselves and their families and their
language. Angela Valenzuela’s
path-breaking book Subtractive
Schooling: US-Mexican Youth would
suggest that by high school these students had probably absorbed this
colonizing, this culturally subtractive curriculum, as normal, as the way we do
school. My students, preparing to be
teachers, wanted assurance that this othering is not normal, will not be inevitable.
They wanted to learn ways to teach respectfully, drawing on what students bring
to class. They aspired to amass culturally rich and authentic instructional
materials and, most important, they wanted to not hurt their students. And they
wanted to work in schools that supported that vision and made it, not
subtractive schooling, the norm.
That old textbook is not likely to still be bouncing around
in our city’s high schools. But the colonizing continues and in very dangerous
ways.
The newest instrument of colonizing is a proposed textbook
that is as startling in the audacity of its racism as in the utter falseness of
its content. Whether as a cynical
backlash against the hard-fought victory for Mexican American Studies courses
to be approved by the State Board of Education in Texas or as a brash and
opportunistic commercial venture, “Mexican American Heritage” produced by
uninformed Anglo writers and a conservative former member of the state board of
education – does far more damage than those references to a “they,” to the
“them” in those Spanish I textbooks that so upset my students. The "Mexican American Heritage" book didn't sit well with the State Board of Education committee that reviewed it, either:
"Jamie Riddle and Valarie Angle failed to meet the professional standards and guiding principles for the preparation of a textbook worthy of our teachers and youth in Texas classrooms. They failed to engage in critical dialogue with current scholarship and, as a consequence, presented a prolific misrepresentation of facts. This means that the proposed textbook is really a polemic attempting to masquerade as a textbook."
You can learn more about this book here. Its errors and racist
messages are documented by scholars and activists, as well as journalists. It does not take historians to
know that a book that calls Mexicans “lazy” is toxic, racist, and frankly
ridiculous.
But this racist text is not being met with silence. Critiques have emerged from historians,
activists, community groups, and most important from the state’s Mexican
American community – the “we” of this story.
And this book can be stopped. In fact, the book has catalyzed a
movement. When the State Board of
Education meets later this month to vote on this book, the opposition will be
organized, vocal and most of all, present.
Add your voice to opposition to having this fake history book in our
schools. See my next post for ways you
can speak up against colonizing the Mexican American children of Texas.
To register your thoughts on this book or share experiences with other ways our schools and our instructional materials may be colonizing our kids, click on the word “comments” below.
No such silence has greeted an openly racist, erroneous text being proposed to teach "Mexican American Heritage" in Texas schools. The Texas State Board of Education will meet next week to vote on state approval of this book. The book has inspired a movement: historians, parents, teachers, community activists, even some elected officials have spoken out against it. This book is a blatant attempt to colonize children of Mexican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Cuban -- indeed Mexican-American -- heritage. In adopting this book, the state would be officially sanctioning a definition of these children and their families as "lazy" -- and worse. 
