Chicana/o Mexican American Digital History Project grows

We have created an online history collection of Chicano/Mexican American/Latino activist history in the Sacramento region 1940- present.  We make this history available to students and teachers to balance the lack of inclusion of Chicano history in public schools, text books, and college classes.   Additional digital materials are welcome.

 https://sites.google.com/site/chicanodigital/

Chicano Digital History Project

A Chicano, Mexican-American Digital History Project  for the Sacramento region.

Goal :To create an on-line history collection of Chicano / Mexican American /Latino history in the Sacramento region.

 We encourage participation and contributions by others based upon the model established by the Farm Worker Movement documentation project.  See example. http://www.farmworkermovement.us/

The project has begun to assemble and to create a digital history of  Chicano and Mexican American history and activism in the Sacramento region 1940 – present.   Directors include Dr. Duane E. Campbell, Professor (emeritus) CSU-Sacramento and Professor Dolores Delgado Campbell, Professor of History at American River College.

The project is located at  http://MexicanAmericanDigitalHistory.org

Chicano/Mexican American Digital History project

A new, revised Mexican American Digital History has been created on line.  Our goal is to create an on-line history collection of Chicano / Mexican American/Latino history in the Sacramento region. You can find the project at MexicanAmericanDigitalHistory.org

  We encourage participation and contributions by others based upon the model established by the Farmworker Movement documentation project.  See example. http://www.farmworkermovement.us/

The project has begun to assemble and to create a digital history of  Chicano and Mexican American history and activism in the Sacramento region 1940 to the present. We will collect, write, and post this history so that it is not lost nor discarded.  We will make this history available to teachers to balance the lack of Chicano history in the public schools and universities.

When Chicano history is ignored .

    An interesting  and valuable publication was released today, “Opportunities and Challenges for Youth Civic Engagement”, by the  California Civic Engagement Project of the Center for Regional Change at U.C. Davis and funded by the California Endowment, among others.  The Civic Engagement Project describes itself as  a “new, nonpartisan data repository  and research initiative for the State of California.

Thanks for the good work.  If these organizations are indeed interested in improving youth engagement, they should look at the 48% of  public school youth who are Latino or descendents of Latinos.   As CCEP Policy Brief #1 says,  “ the proportion of state registration that is Latino and Asian has remained far below the proportions of these groups in the state’s overall population. “  Now, that is not new news.  

 Public schools, more than any other institution, reach these students.  Unfortunately due to past decisions and current budget restraints, the public schools are not usually  promoting civic engagement.   How does that happen?

 When the 48.72 % of students who are Latino , and the 11.5 % who are Asian do not see themselves as part of history,  for many their sense of self is  marginalized.   Marginalization negatively impacts their connections with school and their success at school. School marginalization contributes directly to low level civic engagement.   It contributes to an nearly 50% drop out rate for Latinos and some Asian students.  An accurate history  would provide some students with a  a sense of self, of direction,  of purpose. History and social science  classes  should help young people acquire and learn to use the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will prepare them to be competent and responsible citizens throughout their lives.   Instead, the current history textbooks tell a fairy tale of what happened here in the Southwest.

Latino Students Defend Education

Introduction: Latino Student Movements

by Editors. NACLA

Our education is under attack! What do we do? Fight back!” chanted high school students defending their beloved Mexican American Studies program in a Tucson, Arizona, school board meeting in April. They are not the only students fighting to defend education. Almost everywhere, education is under attack, and students across the Americas are fighting back in so many places that it would be impossible to include them all in just one issue.

Since the 1980s, the United States has been taking a page from the Pinochet neoliberal education playbook. Then president Ronald Reagan offered federally funded school vouchers for underprivileged youth to study at private schools (rather than investing the money into improving public schools). Voucher programs were promoted by right-wing think tanks, and former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. Vouchers have grown exponentially over the last three decades.

However, the modern-day assault on U.S. public higher education was actually launched by Reagan long before he had been elected to the Oval Office.

“Ronald Reagan launched his political career as governor of California in 1967 by having run not so much against his popular New Deal opponent, Pat Brown, as against the students and faculty of the University of California at Berkeley,” wrote University of California (UC) Santa Barbara English professor Christopher Newfield in a 2008 exposé on the privatization of the U.S. public university.³

Once elected, Reagan attacked public higher education. He called for an end to free tuition for state college and university students, demanded annual 20% cuts in higher education funding, slashed state funding for public university capital projects, and declared that the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”⁴

Indeed, since the late 1970s, in the United States, student contributions as a percentage of total university income have been on the rise, from 35% to 48% in 1998. Meanwhile state and local contributions fell from over 55% to less than 43%.⁵ This trend has only been exacerbated in recent years, with massive budget cuts, tuition hikes, and layoffs at universities across the country in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.