Misunderstanding Immigration History

The President came to El Paso last week. He promised a wall and repeated his lies about the dangers that immigrants pose. With El Paso as the backdrop, he claimed that this city of immigrants was dangerous before a border fence was built here in 2008.

Beyond refuting his comments about border communities like ours (El Paso was one of the safest communities in the United States before the fence was built here), about walls saving lives (in fact, walls push desperate families to cross in ever more hostile terrain, ensuring greater suffering and death), and about immigrants (who commit crimes at a lower rate than those Americans born here), it’s worth thinking about how we got to this place. How it came to be that 11 million undocumented immigrants call America home, how we came to militarize our border, how we arrived at such a disconnect between our ideals, our values, the reality of our lives — and the policies and political rhetoric that govern immigration and border security.

El Paso Times, 2003 

I’ve come to the conclusion that the challenges we face are largely of our own design — a function of the unintended consequences of immigration policy and the rhetoric we’ve used to describe immigrants and the border. At almost every step of modern immigration policy and immigration politics, we have exacerbated underlying problems and made things worse. Sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes with the most cynical exploitation of nativism and fear. Much of the history of immigration policy (and the source for the graphs that I’m using) is powerfully summarized in a report entitled “Unintended Consequences of U.S. Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America” by Douglas S Massey and Karen A. Pren.

Beto O'Rourke

Assault on Mexican American Collective Memory

Dr. Rodolfo F. Acuña, like the late Dr. Howard Zinn, is an important and a prolific historian in academia and beyond.  He has long been an ally in important struggles. More specifically, he’s an indispensable historian of the marginalized, the maligned and the ignored by the oppressive U.S. state. With his 1972 book publication of the classic Occupied America—among many other books, essays and social commentaries—Acuña has become one of the premier historians of the Chicana/o people. In this topical and timely book, Acuña produces another exceptional, well-written and well-cited book. In his life-long efforts to recover/preserve the Chicana/o collective memory, in this must-read book, he thoroughly documents and analyzes current and past unjust attacks against Chicana/os and Mexican immigrants by racist politicians, government officials and public figures in states like Arizona, Texas and California. In doing so, Acuña also sheds light on the heroic resistance and social activism by the attacked—i.e., millennials, students, teachers, activists, immigrants, community members, etc.—to defend their/our basic human rights, dignity and self-respect in their/our ancestral lands.

New California history texts will include Chicano history and diversity

Dolores Huerta 

By Stephen Magagnini, Sac Bee.

"After 10 years, thousands of public comments and contentious debates, the California Department of Education has rewritten the history curriculum for California’s more than 6.2 million public school students.

The new History-Social Science Framework for grades K-12 was adopted by the state school board on July 14. It reflects the struggles and progress of LGBT Americans in the United States and California. It also contains more detail on Latino history, along with the role Filipinos played in both World War II and the United Farm Workers movement."


Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article92446782.html#storylink=cpy

If you are willing to serve as a reviewer to see that the new textbooks meet the new requirements, apply here. 

2017 History–Social Science Adoption

The application for reviewers for the 2017 History­–Social Science Adoption is now live on the CDE Web site at http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/hs/im/, under the tab “Reviewer Info.” as a reviewer. Applications will be accepted through October 19, 2016.

California to Rewrite History Textbooks - Include Mexican Americans

Cesar Chavez and Duane Campbell

California to adopt a new guide to Mexican American (Chicano) history, (and everyone else)

"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed.  You can not un-educate the person who has learned to read.. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.

Cesar Chávez. November 9, 1984.

by Duane Campbell

History will change in May of 2016 for the students of California, and in subsequent years students throughout the nation.

We have a unique opportunity to change the history books in California  K-12 to include Chicano/Mexican American history.

Mexican American/ Chicano history is currently substantially absent from public school textbooks and curriculum in California- and it has been since 1986.  Latino student political non participation and alienation from school is significantly caused by Latino absence from the K-12 textbooks and curriculum.

For the last two years the Mexican American Digital History Project and a broad group of allies have been working for to add Chicano history to the California History/Social Science Framework, the document that determines what goes into textbooks in California. See https://sites.google.com/site/chicanodigital/

We are pleased to inform you that the Quality Instructional Materials Commission an advisory committee of the  California State Board of Education have completed their proposed revised framework and it includes most of what we wanted on Mexican American history.  A significant dispute remains on how the document should cover Indian and Hindu history.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/us/debate-erupts-over-californias-india-history-curriculum.html

The final document will be approved by the QIC on May 19, and soon thereafter by the California State Board of Education.

The documents are here along with a link to the live webcast.

http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/cc/cd/iqcpubmeetings2016.asp

Hearings held today on inclusion of Mexican American History

 Hearings were  held today, Nov 19,  at the California Department of Education on the  draft History/Social Science Framework including the substantive changes proposed by the Mexican American Digital History project and our allies.  Additional comments can be made on Nov. 20.  Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) meeting —Also, public comment can be submitted during the 60-day draft HSS Framework public review and comment period (January–February 2016).  If you have additional changes to propose you must submit them during this period. The State Board of Education (SBE) will hold a public hearing at its May 2016 meeting before it takes action on the draft HSS Framework. The IQC and SBE meeting will be held in Sacramento at the California Department of Education (CDE) building.

In addition, public comment can be  submitted to the HSS mailbox at hssframework@cde.ca.gov or IQC mailbox at IQC@cde.ca.gov

If you have questions or comments, contact Duane Campbell of the Mexican American Digital History project in Sacramento at campd22702@gmail.com

Rethinking Columbus Day

Almost 25 years ago, Rethinking Schools published Rethinking Columbus, which described ways teachers can help students think critically about the so-called Discovery of America. Educators were hungry for alternatives to the traditional rah-rah Columbus story. For three solid months we sold 1,000 copies a day, seven days a week—more than 90,000 copies in its first three months of publication. Alas, today, we still need to rethink Columbus. Columbus Day is still a national holiday. This October too many school districts will introduce Columbus to children in kindergarten or first grade. The Columbus myth celebrates colonialism and the domination of Indigenous Peoples by Europeans. Countless Columbus biographies and textbooks fail to teach children anything about the Taíno people who greeted Columbus, and were later enslaved and killed by Columbus.

The Grape Strike That Transformed a Nation: 50 years Later

Steve Magagnini, The Sacramento Bee

Philip Vera Cruz 

On Sept. 8, 1965, Lorraine Agtang, her family and other Filipino grape pickers walked out of their fields to protest a cut in their pay from $1.40 to $1.25 an hour. Twelve days later, labor organizer Cesar Chavez and more than 1,200 Mexican workers joined the strike that led to the first United Farm Workers contracts with growers in 1970.


Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article34268826.html#storylink=cpy

Sacramento State professor emeritus Duane Campbell, who worked for the UFW from 1972 to 1980, said the strike “totally changed labor politics and Latino politics.” Inspired by the events of that September and the impact of the international table grape boycott that followed, thousands of people of different races and ethnicities devoted their lives to activism and nonviolent protest.

“It was a training ground for organizers who spread to hundreds of different fields – a large number of Latino legislators worked with the UFW,” Campbell said. “The strike and boycott awakened Latinos, ‘the sleeping giant of California politics,’ triggering the Chicano movement and the creation of Sacramento State  bilingual education department.”

Letters needed on Chicano/Mexican American History

Mañana is now !

We need your letters insisting on the expansion of Mexican American history.  The closing date is May 1, 2015.  Mañana is now.

We have a unique opportunity to change the history books in California  K-12 to include Chicano/Mexican American history- but we must act now. This is the time to get that letter written and e mailed  asking that Mexican American history be included in the re write of the History/Social Science Framework for California Schools.

Mexican American/ Chicano history is currently substantially absent from public school textbooks and curriculum in California- and it has been since 1986.  See the prior post below.  A guide to writing such a letter is here. https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/Home/latino-students-and-civic-engagement/project-plan---mexican-american-history.

The following letter from historian Dr. Lorena Marquez details some of the important Chicano history that is not covered in the framework and not covered in California history textbooks.

To the History/Social Science Framework Committee

Dear History Social Science Framework Committee,

I strongly urge you to revise the current draft of the History/Social Science Framework to include a more adequate recording of the history of California and the nation by including the significant contributions of ethnic Mexicans. Exclusion and omission of this history is a great disservice to the generations of Chicanas/os who have worked tirelessly to build this country. Latinos comprise nearly 39% of the state population and now constitute over 52% of the students in our schools. By hearing their histories in the larger rubric of United States history, they will feel validated, but most importantly, they will be empowered to make positive change in their communities.

 I recommend extension of the description of the Chicano movement to more adequately address this issue.  Recommended additions: Line 1959.  Page 348.

American Exceptionalism v Teaching History of Minorities

Ed. Below, the writer makes a good argument about history.  This is the background from which readers should insist that California revise its history texts to include Mexican American history.  See the prior post on how to support this effort. http://antiracismdsa.blogspot.com/2015/03/scholars-teachers-activists-join-in-our.html

by Jimmy Franco

American Exceptionalism Versus a True History of Minorities

Posted on April 4, 2015 by Jimmy Franco Sr.

The 2016 presidential election is now approaching and many candidates on the political right which include most Republicans are increasingly being asked a key question by nationalistic supporters that supposedly determines whether they are true Americans and patriots. That question is whether they believe in the doctrine of “American exceptionalism” and if they answer in the affirmative, which most do, then they have passed the test that allows them to enter the make-believe world of US historical romanticism and amnesia. The promoters of this metaphysical doctrine of American exceptionalism tend to be ultra-nationalists amd neoconservatives. They are adherents of a narrow method of

Manifest Destiny and empire building were supposedly guided by divine providence.

historical selectivity and strongly believe that the US has a very special and superior place in world history when compared to the supposed lesser achievements of other countries and peoples. To add weight to this ideological position god is often injected as an ally into this mystical American doctrine and exceptional force. An example of this national chauvinist belief is the opening paragraph of the 2012 Republican platform which described the US as having “a unique place and role in human history”. This could be dismissed as simply being a harmless and romanticized perception of the world, yet, this type of narrow ideological thinking is being disseminated within our society and when carried out in practice it negatively affects the way people think and behave. Such an ideological view and practice is often used in many of our current political discussions that pertain to racial, educational and economic inequality in addition to the US role of being the world’s policeman. Also, this subjective and mythical viewpoint promotes the undemocratic concept of a superior American People and distorts US History and our country’s past by either sugar-coating or denying certain aspects of it. Many negative historical events have left a deep historical imprint upon out present society and cannot be conveniently ignored nor covered over. This one-sided and nationalistic view of US History and our present society can be characterized by an old proverb which states that to make reality fit their narrow beliefs some people will ” cut the foot to fit the shoe”. 

Thanksgiving- A Troubled History

by RODOLFO ACUÑA

By far the “the king of the holidays” is Thanksgiving. The narrative has been burned into our consciousness to the point that few Americans question the facts because no one wants to lay the proverbial intellectual pedo.

Almost everyone is grateful for the day off. Merchants love Thanksgiving. It is the perfect opening act for Christmas.

The ritual of sitting down with the family to eat cheap turkey, chucked full of hormones, has been immortalized by Norman Rockwell. It is a day when you eat cheap turkeys and hams and everyone can pig out.

Not much thought is given to the truth of the narrative. Kids just want their four day relief from school, and parents are smug in the belief that the colonist and the Indians lived in peace. The only ones that care about changing the narrative are Native Americans who call it a National Day of Mourning.

I call Thanksgiving “El Día de los Pendejos” (The Day of the Fools). I tell my students to enjoy making graveyards out of their stomachs that they fill with the flesh of turkeys that have been held prisoners in small dirty cages.

Why do I call the Indians fools? Because they should have let the Pilgrims starve.

Few people know that the tradition of Thanksgiving was invented during the Civil war by President Abraham Lincoln in October 1863 when he proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday. Thereafter, the myth of the Pilgrims and the Indians was constructed.

The story is known by almost every American. For twelve years, from K-12, they learn the story of that in the early autumn of 1621 fifty-three surviving Pilgrims celebrated a successful harvest. The natives joined the celebration and instead of attacking the Pilgrims they made peace.

The Indians were thanked: their land was stolen from them, they were massacred, and many lived out their lives in slavery. The consequence is that less than one percent of Americans have Native American blood, contrasted to 90 percent of Mexican Americans with indigenous blood.

How the Refugee Crisis was created

Little Manilla, Filipino history

Good piece in the Sacramento Bee by Steve Magagnini

On Oct. 2, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law AB123 requiring public schools to teach their students about the contributions of Filipino Americans to the state’s fields of plenty and the farmworkers movement that transformed American labor.

Many Californians don’t know that Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers movement were inspired by Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz and other Filipino farmworkers who led the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) and started the Delano grape workers strike of 1965. “The students of California need to learn that the sacrifices made by both Filipino and Latino workers benefited all California,” Huerta said.

Much of that history is detailed in “Little Manila Is In The Heart,” a new book by Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University and a daughter of Stockton’s once-vibrant Little Manila District – for half a century the apex of Filipino life in America. Little Manila – like Sacramento’s Japantown and Chinatown – was wiped out by urban redevelopment in the 1950s and ’60s. But its legacy lives on in California’s fields and levees, said Mabalon, 41.

What do Californians need to know about Filipino Americans?

They built the Central Valley with their bare hands in asparagus, tomatoes, celery, peaches, tomatoes and grapes. Filipino and Mexican immigrants and their families turned California into the seventh-largest economy in the world. There are still Filipinos working in the fields and sorting asparagus with Mexican immigrants. The first seven Filipinos – called Indios by the Spaniards – arrived on a Spanish galleon that landed around Morro Bay on Oct. 18, 1587.

More;

smagagnini@sacbee.com

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/a Studies- Not Hispanic

Identity Crisis: An Arrested Development

By  Rodolfo Acuña

The debate as to what to name Chicana/o Studies will have future repercussions. The proposals are not new; they are not innovative; and they are symptomatic of the historical struggle of Mexican origin people in the United States to identify themselves. 

The problem is that the group has grown so large and the stakes so high that the consequences will hurt everyone. Unfortunately, the level of the discourse lacks logic, and it prolongs a resolution to the identity crisis of Mexican Americans.

Admittedly, Latinos have a lot in common, but we also have a lot of differences, e.g., in social class, population size, where we live, and our history to name a few dissimilarities. These differences strew the landscape with landmines especially for those who already believe that all Latinas/os look alike. It makes it easier for them to lump us into one generic brand.

The Chicano Movement from 1960's to Today

Chicana/o history

Accountability - Why History Matters

Rodolfo F. Acuña

What is so frustrating about politics is that there is so little accountability. We can continually screw up as my students would say and are not held accountable. Because we as a society are ahistorical, we are unable to sort out the lies that our leaders tell us or correct our own errors. Millions of dollars are spent to distort reality making elections a sham.

Let’s take a minute and review this thesis in light of California Propositions 30 and 32. Proponents made every effort to sway voters through emotional appeals rarely putting their arguments in a historical context.  Up to the last day I had people calling me and asking me for advice.

The truth be told, neither side was honest about the propositions, and very few people know the historical context for Props 30 and 32. Their geneses begin before most Americans were born, reaching back to the post World War II era when American corporations tried to regain the political and economic hegemony they had lost during the Great Depression. The nation’s plutocracy wanted to continue tapping into the national treasury while returning to the laissez faire of the 1920s. In order to accomplish this goal, the economic royalists as President Franklin Roosevelt used to call them had to neuter labor, which they did with the passage of Taft Hartley Act of 1948 and a purging of militants from labor.

This war was about power and the transference of wealth. Organized labor, however, continued to be a thorn in the side of the plutocracy that resented the high taxes necessary to educate Americans. During the 1960s, a war broke out over the funding of public education, which has lasted to the present and has led to the transference of the cost of social production from the plutocracy to working and middle classes.  

The economic royalists in recent times have had major victories. They seized  control of the state of Arizona by neutralizing labor, and it has tried to do the same in Wisconsin and Ohio. The big prize is California where teacher and public sector unions are still a factor. This is where Prop 32 comes in.

Proposition 30 is 32’s cousin. It is a sibling of Prop 13 (1978). It was 13 that underfunded K-12 and higher education in California and dismantled a premier educational system, making our schools competitive with Mississippi and Arizona.

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.