Trump demands that schools now teach slavery as something that helped black people.
Our historical truths aren’t erasable…
To control a people you must first control what they think about themselves and how they regard their history and culture. And when your conqueror makes you ashamed of your culture and your history, he needs no prison walls and no chains to hold you. John Henrik Clarke, African-American historian, and pioneer of Pan-African and Africana Studies.
Truth telling is a virtue, not a crime…
President Trump has targeted programs and initiatives that focus on fairness, equality, inclusion, and accessibility and even wants to outlaw historical truth. The most egregious example of this is Trump’s demand that schools now teach slavery as something that helped black people – i.e., slaves – develop skills from which they could benefit in the future.
Truth-telling Mexican American / Chicano(a) Studies is vulnerable…
As a discipline dealing with historical truth-telling, Mexican American / Chicano(a) Studies (MAS) is vulnerable to Trump’s truth-erasure campaign. For, the historical truth is that for generations Mexican Americans have been at the receiving end of racism and its ugly cousins.
We have never succumbed. Rather, cloaked in the dignity of our culture and our history, we have organized and fought back.
Another righteous historical truth is that we have never succumbed. Rather, cloaked in the dignity of our culture and our history, we have organized and fought back. We have marched, we have picketed. We have confronted policy makers. We have sued. We voted. We have designed and put in place Mexican American Studies curricula in schools. Many of us (including my good self) have been arrested doing these things.
Try as Trump and his cultists may, they cannot erase the truths in our history. Some examples of these truths (faithful readers will recognize that I’ve written about these before in this space):
Labor / women…
Organized labor has played a large role in our history. Women, some even as teenagers, are “unsung heroines” in this respect.
* In Los Angeles in the 1930s, 18-year-old Josefina Fierro de Bright, with Luisa Moreno (discussed below), organized Spanish-speaking union workers in various industries.
* In 1938 18-year-old Emma Tenanyuca, of San Antonio, Texas, led a strike of 12,000 workers, challenging pay violations, unfair production quotas, and unsanitary working conditions. The union prevailed.
In 1938 18-year-old Emma Tenanyuca, of San Antonio, Texas, led a strike of 12,000 workers. The union prevailed.
* In the 1930s-1940s, while in her early 20s, Luisa Moreno unionized Mexican women cannery plant workers in California, fighting for maternity leave, equal pay for women, and racial equality.
* In 1939, Moreno and Fierro de Bright brought together 73 organizations in the National Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples, the first national effort to unite Latino workers to work for civil, labor, and women rights.
* In the 1950s while in her 20s, union organizer Soledad “Chole” Alatorre led strikes that improved working conditions for garment workers in Los Angeles.
Chicano-dominant unions in Arizona went beyond the traditional role of unions. For example, in the1950s, the racist domestic terrorist group Ku Klux Klan tried to get a foothold in the predominantly Mexican American mining towns to discourage Mexican Americans from registering to vote and from voting. Mexican American miners, under the leadership of the unions, drove out the KKK.
Military…
It boggles the mind to think that teaching young people about the patriotism of the Mexican American community can be perceived as “un-American.” A sampling of this “un-American” history:
During World War II, some Mexican-American families had two, three, four or more sons in the military during World War II. The fighting Medinas pictured here.
* About 750,000 Mexican Americans served in the military during World War II. Some Mexican-American families had two, three, four or more sons in the military during World War II.
* Mexican Americans/Latinos have earned more Congressional Medals of Honor and other military wartime decorations in proportion to their numbers than any other ethnic group in the U.S. In his second term, President Obama belatedly conferred the Medal of Honor on 24 WW II, Korea, and Viet Nam veterans. Of these, 17 were Latino.
* Mexican American women, who, along with women all over the country, took over the factories and manufactured ammunition and other war materiel, played a crucial role in winning WW II.
* Groups such as Tucson’s Asociación de Madres y Esposas (Association of Mothers and Wives) sold war bonds and collected scrap metal to sell, and they picked cotton in the fields outside of Tucson, donating the proceeds to the war effort.
Mexican Americans’ patriotism is not limited to WW II. Approximately 200,000 Mexican Americans served during World War I, and an estimated 70,000 Mexican Americans served in the Korean War. In the Vietnam War, Mexican Americans were about 20% of combat troops, despite making up a much smaller percentage of the overall population. One study found that while Mexican Americans / Chicanos comprised 11.8% of the five southwestern states, Mexican Americans / Chicanos accounted for over 21% of the Vietnam fatalities from those states.
Education / civil rights…
In Méndez v. Westminster School District, the court ruled that segregation of children by race/ethnicity was unconstitutional.
* Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the “Bilingual Education Act,” the first piece of federal legislation that recognized the educational value of bilingualism came about after a national bilingual education symposium in Tucson in 1966 produced a report (“The Invisible Minority”) which became the basis for the 1968 passage of Title VII.
* Enrique “Hank” Oyama spent 15 months in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans and then was drafted into the U.S. Army. After the war, Oyama made history by successfully challenging Arizona’s miscegenation law that outlawed interracial marriages.
* Juanita Loroña and others of the Madres y Esposas movement led the fight to desegregate public facilities in Arizona. In many communities, Mexican American children were allowed to swim in public pools only one day a week. Loroña’s group, with the help of the copper miners’ unions in Arizona’s mining towns, petitioned, picketed, and took this issue to court—and won!
* In 1945, in the Los Angeles, CA history-making desegregation lawsuit Méndez v. Westminster School District, the court ruled, for the first time in our country’s history, that segregation of children by race/ethnicity was unconstitutional. This was nine (9) years before the historic Brown v. Board of Education case! In fact, this case was cited in the Brown v. Board case.
These historical truths cannot be undone. Nor can the tons of them that can be found in hundreds of books, journal articles, monographs, Master’s theses, Doctoral dissertations, documentaries, news articles, etc.
Indeed, Trump and his minions will find out that ours is not a history of victimhood. Our history is one of achievement, of triumph, of faith and belief in ourselves. So even as we tremble with indignation at Trump’s racist policies and practices, we need to again cloak ourselves in the dignity of our culture and our history and organize and fight back. Not because we hate Trump but because we love ourselves, our historical truths.
My heart soars like a hawk…
I feel a deep pride in having played a meaningful role in the creation and development of what is today the Mexican American Studies Department (MAS) at the University of Arizona (UA)
A personal note: For the umpteenth time in my life, I feel a deep pride in having played a meaningful role in the creation and development of what is today the Mexican American Studies Department (MAS) at the University of Arizona (UA), which teaches our community’s historical truths.
In 1968, I was a UA sophomore and the Chair of the Mexican American Liberation Committee (MALC, which would evolve into MEChA). On December 17, 1968, MALC presented a list of “Demands” to then-UA President Richard A. Harvill.
Our demands rested on six (6) basic pillars, viz.: Recruitment and admission of Chicana(o) students … Establishment of “bridge” programs that would facilitate the transition of these students to the university … Recruitment and hiring of Chicana(o) faculty and staff … Establishment of Mexican American/Chicano Studies programs … Establishment of Chicano Cultural/Resource centers, and Involvement of students and the community in the development and operation of MAS/Chicano Studies and other programs dealing with Chicanos(as).
Predictably, the UA’s initial response to the MALC demands was resistance. The UA Chief of Police called us (and the Black Student Union, who had also submitted its own demands) “extremists” and “Communist inspired” and suggested bringing charges against us.
In that MALC students had nurtured working relationships with barrio organizations, we posited our demands as a community-UA issue rather than just a UA issue. This strategy was powerful and proved effective. In early 1969, after some back-and-forth verbal jousting, the UA agreed to address the MALC demands.
Three of our six demands were implemented immediately, in 1970-71: The creation of: the position of Assistant Dean for Mexican American Affairs … the New Start “bridge” program, and the Mexican American Studies program.
[Dedicated initiatives, re: recruitment of Chicano(a) faculty / staff and students, and the establishment of a Chicano(a) Cultural/Resource Center would be implemented later.]
Thus, I went from being a student activist in 1968 demanding Mexican American Studies to being a member of the faculty-student-community committee that fashioned the initial MAS curricula to being a Mexican American Studies and Research Center faculty member when I retired from the UA 30-plus years later (and I had served as a member and chair of the MASRC Faculty Advisory Board).
Quite a heady trip for a Barrio Hollywood reform-school alumnus. c/s
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Copyright by Salomon Baldenegro. Photo of Emma Tenayuca copyrighted by Barrio Dog Productions. Photo of Sal Baldenegro provided by the author. All other mages in the public domain. To contact Sal write: salomonrb@msn.com