Recognizing Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and Strategic Racism

By Duane E. Campbell

Cesar Chavez

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed.  You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read.  You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.  Cesar Chávez.  November 9, 1984.

On March 31, 2015,  Eleven  states  and numerous cities will hold holidays celebrating  labor and Latino Leader Cesar Chavez. Conferences, marches and celebrations will occur in numerous cities this weekend.  See the prior post on the UCD conference. A recent film Cesar Chavez: An American Hero, starring Michael Peña  as Cesar Chavez and Rosario Dawson  as Dolores Huerta presents important parts of this story and shows how Chavez was lied about and attacked by Ronald Reagan, the Nixon Administration, the Republican Party and numerous right wing forces.

Meanwhile,  in March of 2015  hundreds of farmworkers have walked off their jobs in Baja California, Mexico, from the agricultural fields just a few miles from the U.S. border , fields developed to provide a harvest to the U.S. markets.  Farm labor strikes and violence against strikers remains a volatile issue.  Farm workers deserve dignity, respect, and fair wages.  Achieving these goals will require a union. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-baja-farmworkers-20150325-story.html

The  current UFW leadership, as well as former UFW leaders  and current DSA Honorary Chairs  Eliseo Medina and Dolores Huerta  are recognized leaders in the ongoing efforts to achieve comprehensive immigration reform in the nation.

 On immigration, UFW President Arturo Rodriquez says, “We urge Republicans to abandon their political games that hurt millions of hard-working, taxpaying immigrants and their families, and help us finish the job by passing legislation such as the comprehensive reform bill that was approved by the Senate on a bipartisan vote in June 2013,”

Cesar Chavez Youth Leadership Conference

Support Ethnic Studies

Thank you!  In 24 hours over 100 people sent emails in support of AB 101. Can we reach 200? If you haven't sent an email yet it's super easy, just click on the orange button below. This Wednesday the Ethnic Studies bill will go before the Assembly Education Committee -- and they need to hear from you as soon as possible: Please click on the button above, add your name at the bottom of the email, and send.

Chavez March - Sacramento

Scholars, teachers, activists, join in our campaign to include Chicano history !

NEW- scholars, teachers, allies, activists have joined  in our campaign to improve the history textbooks in California by including the histories of  Mexican American/ Chicano people.  More than 52% of California students are descendants of Latino and Mexican people. Why can't they be found in the textbooks.
You are invited to participate. We need each of  you and your friends to write a letter.  Here is a guide. Here is how to write a letter and to send it. https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/Home/latino-students-and-civic-engagement/project-plan---mexican-american-history

By Duane Campbell

Mexican American/Chicano history is substantially absent from public school textbooks and curriculum in California- and it has been since  1986.  This year we have an opportunity to change that. 

California has the largest student  population of any state, with more than 6,236,000 students  in school in 2013.  Students who are Mexican American of Latino heritage make up over 53% of the total school population. 

Latino student political non participation  and disconnectedness is significantly caused by Latino absence from the K-12 textbooks and curriculum. 

Children and young adults need to see themselves in the curriculum.  Students, have low levels of attachment to California and U.S.  civics engagement in significant part because the government institution they encounter the most- the schools-  ignore the students’ own history, cultures and experiences.

California state textbooks currently largely ignore the roles of Mexican Americans and Latinos in building this state.  Students need to learn civic engagement – it is not automatic.  Students need to learn that they belong , that they are a part of the community and its history.

California schools and history teachers should lead the way in preparing  young people for civic life in our  pluralist society.   They  are not. Incomplete and inaccurate history, along with incomplete and inaccurate economics harms not only Latinos and Asians, but the Anglo students as well.  When Anglo students  are taught an inaccurate view of Latino /Mexicano history in the state, they fail to accurately understand the major demographic shift presently occurring  and this lack of knowledge   contributes  to fear, misunderstanding  and conflict such as that promoted in the current anti immigrant campaigns. 

We can change this.   The content of the k-12 textbooks and the curriculum is directed by a state document- the History/Social Science Framework for California’s public schools.  The current 1987 framework is outdated. State law requires that the frameworks be updated each 7 years.  There was no significant change from 1987 until 2009.  ( In 2001 the publishers added a photo of Cesar Chavez.)

The Dreamers Stories

On St. Patrick's Day- The Real Irish American Story

The Great Hunger 

Bill Bigelow. The Zinn Education Project

“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:

… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.

By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

Ethnic Studies Now - Sacramento

Ethnic Studies Now Coalition-Sacramento

In solidarity with school districts in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Monica and El Rancho, who have passed resolutions requiring Ethnic Studies classes for graduation, the Ethnic Studies Now-Sacramento coalition seeks your participation in establishing an Ethnic Studies grad requirement at Sacramento City Unified School District.   

Parents, students, educators, and community members are invited to attend a community meeting

March 18, 2015

6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Language Academy of Sacramento

2850 49^th St., Sacramento, CA 95817

www.ethnicstudiesnow.com

Obama Absurdly Labels Venezuela a Security Threat

Channeling Reagan, Obama continues US pressure on Latin American leftist governments

by Mark Weisbrot @MarkWeisbrot

Yesterday the White House took a new step toward the theater of the absurd by “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela,” as President Barack Obama put it in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner.

It remains to be seen whether anyone in the White House press corps will have the courage to ask what in the world the nation’s chief executive could mean by that. Is Venezuela financing a coming terrorist attack on U.S. territory? Planning an invasion? Building a nuclear weapon?

Write Chicano History Into the California State Textbooks

A call for public participation!

By Duane Campbell

Mexican American/Chicano history is substantially absent from public school textbooks and curriculum in California- and it has been since  1986.  This year we have an opportunity to change that.

California has the largest student  population of any state, with more than 6,236,000 students  in school in 2013.  Students who are Mexican American of Latino heritage make up over 53% of the total school population.

Latino student political non participation  and disconnectedness is significantly caused by Latino absence from the K-12 textbooks and curriculum.

Children and young adults need to see themselves in the curriculum.  Students, have low levels of attachment to California and U.S.  civics engagement in significant part because the government institution they encounter the most- the schools-  ignore the students’ own history, cultures and experiences.

California state textbooks currently largely ignore the roles of Mexican Americans and Latinos in building this state.  Students need to learn civic engagement – it is not automatic.  Students need to learn that they belong , that they are a part of the community and its history.

California schools and history teachers should lead the way in preparing  young people for civic life in our  pluralist society.   They  are not. Incomplete and inaccurate history, along with incomplete and inaccurate economics harms not only Latinos and Asians, but the Anglo students as well.  When Anglo students  are taught an inaccurate view of Latino /Mexicano history in the state, they fail to accurately understand the major demographic shift presently occurring  and this lack of knowledge   contributes  to fear, misunderstanding  and conflict such as that promoted in the current anti immigrant campaigns.

We can change this.   The content of the k-12 textbooks and the curriculum is directed by a state document- the History/Social Science Framework for California’s public schools.  The current 1987 framework is outdated. State law requires that the frameworks be updated each 7 years.  There was no significant change from 1987 until 2009.  ( In 2001 the publishers added a photo of Cesar Chavez.)

Ethnic Studies Now - Sacramento

Sign the petition

Sacramento City USD High School Students have joined efforts with the statewide/national coalition Ethnic Studies Now to require Ethnic Studies as a graduation requirement.  On February 24, 2015 they launched their petition campaign and hope to obtain over a 1,000 signatures for this measure. The students are asking community members to support this effort by signing the petition. The petition will go live by this afternoon – the link is as follows:  http://www.ethnicstudiesnow.com/scusd . Please spread the word. If you are interested in finding out more and getting involved a community meeting will be held on March 18, 2015 6 p.m. (location TBD).

In Solidarity,

Healthcare for the Undocumented _ Sacramento

Our Chance to Restore Healthcare Access to Undocumented Residents!

For nearly two years, a network of community organizations called the Building Healthy Communities collaborative has been working hard to convince Sacramento County to restore access to healthcare services for undocumented residents. The moment to win this campaign will come on March 18th, at 2pm, when the County will hold a workshop exploring the issue of reinstating healthcare access for all Sacramentans. 


County Workshop on Healthcare for the Undocumented:

Wednesday March 18, 2-5pm, 
700 H Street in the County Hearing Room

Join us at the workshop on the 18th from 2-5pm. We'll be distributing T-shirts so the County sees how much the crowd supports healthcare for everyone. We encourage people to stay til the end of the workshop when the public will be invited to give public comment about why you support this issue.

When Americans Lynched Mexicans and Mexican Americans

When Americans Lynched Mexicans

By WILLIAM D. CARRIGAN and CLIVE WEBB • FEB. 20, 2015

Photo Credit Rachel Levit

THE recent release of a landmark report on the history of lynching in the United States is a welcome contribution to the struggle over American collective memory. Few groups have suffered more systematic mistreatment, abuse and murder than African-Americans, the focus of the report.

One dimension of mob violence that is often overlooked, however, is that lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.
Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the crimes. One case, largely overlooked or ignored by American journalists but not by the Mexican government, was that of seven Mexican shepherds hanged by white vigilantes near Corpus Christi, Tex., in late November 1873. The mob was probably trying to intimidate the shepherds’ employer into selling his land. None of the killers were arrested.
From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.