Mexican
American Studies : A Pedagogy
Not Sociology
By
Rodolfo F.
Acuña
We have allowed the uninformed and ignorant to
define what Mexican American Studies is. Every time I discuss the subject I
feel as frustrated as a scientist trying to explain science to a creationist.
No matter how well you know the field those who do not want to believe will
distort your words to fit their preconceptions and belief system.
As I have explained, MAS or Chicana/o Studies is not
sociology. MAS has courses in sociology that examine the MAS corpus of
knowledge but MAS does not belong to the field of sociology. If it were
just sociology, it could be reduced to one or two courses on race.
MAS is a strategy that incorporates
multi-disciplines. The truth be told, if the academy had cared about Latinos,
which are the second largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world, it would
have hired specialists to explore the role of Mexican Americans and other
Latinos in the United States.
If this had happened Latino courses would be
integrated organically within departments. But consequent to the racism in
higher education this field of study has been ignored. Even today, most
academic departments do not offer a single MAS or Latino course or employ a
single Latino faculty member.
Incredible but most schools of education have not
developed courses on how to teach or counsel Latino students. This is criminal
since I would not expect, no matter how good she is, an optometrist to perform
open heart surgery.
(Editors note: Apply the above to the elimination of Bilingual Multicultural Education at CSU Sacramento. Including support of the elimination by "Latino" faculty.)
How to teach Mexican American students was the
motive for establishing CHS.
The record of its accomplishments speaks to its
importance:
In 1968 only about fifty Mexican Americans
nationally had doctorates; today there are thousands. Truth be told, MAS
developed despite the academy.
The dramatic surge in the study of Mexicans in the
United States and Mexico surged because of Chicana.o studies.
Before December 31, 1970, not a single dissertation
had been written under the category “Chicano.” By 2010 870 dissertations were
recorded under this heading. Under “Mexican American” 82 dissertations had been
written before 1971, and 2,824 after that date. For “Latinos” the record shows
6 before 1971 and 2,887 after.
Mexican scholarship also benefitted from Chicana/o
studies. I found 660 in the Proquest data bank before 1971; after 9,078. The
number of books and journal articles on Chicano and Latinos also
exploded.
It is improbable that this would have happened
without Chicana/o student militancy.
Despite this impressive growth, there is still
confusion as to why MAS was developed and why it is necessary. Repeating
myself, MAS was an outgrowth of the education reform movement that wanted to
stem the horrendous dropout rate among Mexican American children.
Reformers advocated a course of study designed to
train more teachers on how to teach Latino children as well as encouraging
research on their contributions to the United States. The best available
research concludes that a student who has a poor self-image has difficulty
learning. The dominate research also shows that Mexican Americans have a
negative self-image due in part to the American education system.
Today this research has been almost totally erased;
however, the hypothesis has not been disproved.
MAS took these studies into account and designed
courses on how to motivate students to acquire skills for success in school and
life.
An additional component, which has been as of late
ignored, is these courses prepare educators to teach Mexican American children.
It teaches methods and the content courses on how to teach Mexican Americans as
well as all students to appreciate the importance of Latinos to our society.
How others look at students is very important to the
students’ educational success.
With time the pedagogical function of Chicana/o
studies has been obfuscated and today most professors want to forget it. Even
at California State University Northridge, the largest Chicana/o Studies departments
in the country, most professors know their discipline but few know the
department’s course of study or its pedagogical mission.
There has been a failure to communicate this message
although the curriculum has defined the department’s growth.
The Tucson Unified School District’s MAS program has
yielded important lessons. Its primary strength is that it molded a team of
teachers committed to how to teach all students and found the key on how to
motivate high risk Latino youth.
While the course of study remains important, the hub
around which the Tucson program revolves is its team of teachers.
TUSD’s MAS program began in 1997 in response to a
court mandate. The recently fired Sean Arce was one of the co-founders of the
program and he molded the group into a team. While the teachers specialize in
different disciplines, they have almost daily interaction with each other and
discuss how to more effectively teach students. Lessons in the Mexican
historical and cultural experience are then applied to the American experience.
As of 2010, MAS co-sponsored twelve “Annual
Institutes for Transformative Education Conferences” in which prominent
educators made presentations for four days to MAS and other teachers. Sean and
his team kept the mission to teach focused and they built upon this new
knowledge.
I attended two conferences at which I met educators
such as Pedro Noguera of New York University, Sherry Marx of Utah State
University, Angela Valenzuela of the University of Texas Austin and David Stovall
of the University of Illinois at Chicago - College of Education. It was
instructive to learn about different theories and pedagogies that are currently
being used.
I spoke to various MAS teachers that included white
Americans. Their enthusiasm was contagious.
It was all the more impressive because it was on the
advent of HB 2281 that was proposing the elimination of the program making
claims that were simply mendacious. Since then the program and the teachers
have gone through a living hell.
They have been libeled as un-American, subversive
and the livelihood of their families attacked. Without any funds and limited
national exposure, the team, the students and the community have fought back.
Struggle destroys lesser beings, but it also helps create
legends. The best in the Mexican American community surfaced in this struggle
in the persona of Sean Arce. He did not take a deal, he did not sell out, and
he fought back, jeopardizing his home and family.
But much more than Sean is at stake. Some have say,
“Well if we win in court at least we will still have the program.” My response
is that then it won’t be MAS but just another program to teach Mexicans and
others to learn how to dance the jarabe tapatio.
Removing a person like Sean is like taking the heart
out of the program. It is reducing the program to the Tin Woodman of the
“Wizard of Oz” who asked: "Do you suppose Oz could give me a heart?"
If wishes could come true I would send
Superintendent John Pedicone and his gaggle of thugs to the Oz; like the
Strawman, the Oz could give them brain: “It must be inconvenient to be made of
flesh, for you must sleep, and eat and drink. However, you have brains, and it
is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly."
Apparently the Arizona cabal has neither brains nor
a heart.
What Tucson had will be very difficult to replicate.
The Pedicones and the Huppenthals will be condemned by history, but this means
little because we cannot travel back to the future.
The whole affair leaves me feeling how I felt the
first time I read the Chicano poet, Abelardo who wrote:
“Stupid America, remember that chicanito
flunking math and English
he is the Picasso
of your western states but he will die
with one thousand masterpieces
hanging only from his mind."
Tucson has
lost its heart, we are left with the Tin Woodman who has no heart, and there is
no rainbow in the horizon.
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