MexicanAmerican Studies :A PedagogyNot Sociology
We have allowed the uninformed and ignorant todefine what Mexican American Studies is. Every time I discuss the subject Ifeel 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 willdistort your words to fit their preconceptions and belief system.As I have explained, MAS or Chicana/o Studies is notsociology. MAS has courses in sociology that examine the MAS corpus ofknowledge but MAS does not belong to the field of sociology. If it werejust sociology, it could be reduced to one or two courses on race.
MAS is a strategy that incorporatesmulti-disciplines. The truth be told, if the academy had cared about Latinos,which are the second largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world, it wouldhave hired specialists to explore the role of Mexican Americans and otherLatinos in the United States.
If this had happened Latino courses would beintegrated organically within departments. But consequent to the racism inhigher education this field of study has been ignored. Even today, mostacademic departments do not offer a single MAS or Latino course or employ asingle Latino faculty member.
Incredible but most schools of education have notdeveloped courses on how to teach or counsel Latino students. This is criminalsince I would not expect, no matter how good she is, an optometrist to performopen heart surgery.{ed. note. Including CSU-Sacramento since the end of Bilingual Education Dept.}
How to teach Mexican American students was themotive for establishing CHS.
The record of its accomplishments speaks to itsimportance:
In 1968 only about fifty Mexican Americansnationally had doctorates; today there are thousands. Truth be told, MASdeveloped despite the academy.
The dramatic surge in the study of Mexicans in theUnited States and Mexico surged because of Chicana.o studies.
Before December 31, 1970, not a single dissertationhad been written under the category “Chicano.” By 2010 870 dissertations wererecorded under this heading. Under “Mexican American” 82 dissertations had beenwritten before 1971, and 2,824 after that date. For “Latinos” the record shows6 before 1971 and 2,887 after.
Mexican scholarship also benefitted from Chicana/ostudies. I found 660 in the Proquest data bank before 1971; after 9,078. Thenumber of books and journal articles on Chicano and Latinos alsoexploded.
It is improbable that this would have happenedwithout Chicana/o student militancy.
Despite this impressive growth, there is stillconfusion as to why MAS was developed and why it is necessary. Repeatingmyself, MAS was an outgrowth of the education reform movement that wanted tostem the horrendous dropout rate among Mexican American children.
Reformers advocated a course of study designed totrain more teachers on how to teach Latino children as well as encouragingresearch on their contributions to the United States. The best availableresearch concludes that a student who has a poor self-image has difficultylearning. The dominate research also shows that Mexican Americans have anegative 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 designedcourses on how to motivate students to acquire skills for success in school andlife.
An additional component, which has been as of lateignored, is these courses prepare educators to teach Mexican American children.It teaches methods and the content courses on how to teach Mexican Americans aswell as all students to appreciate the importance of Latinos to our society.
How others look at students is very important to thestudents’ educational success.
With time the pedagogical function of Chicana/ostudies has been obfuscated and today most professors want to forget it. Evenat California State University Northridge, the largest Chicana/o Studies departmentsin the country, most professors know their discipline but few know thedepartment’s course of study or its pedagogical mission.
There has been a failure to communicate this messagealthough the curriculum has defined the department’s growth.
The Tucson Unified School District’s MAS program hasyielded important lessons. Its primary strength is that it molded a team ofteachers committed to how to teach all students and found the key on how tomotivate high risk Latino youth.
While the course of study remains important, the hubaround which the Tucson program revolves is its team of teachers.
TUSD’s MAS program began in 1997 in response to acourt mandate. The recently fired Sean Arce was one of the co-founders of theprogram and he molded the group into a team. While the teachers specialize indifferent disciplines, they have almost daily interaction with each other anddiscuss how to more effectively teach students. Lessons in the Mexicanhistorical and cultural experience are then applied to the American experience.
As of 2010, MAS co-sponsored twelve “AnnualInstitutes for Transformative Education Conferences” in which prominenteducators made presentations for four days to MAS and other teachers. Sean andhis team kept the mission to teach focused and they built upon this newknowledge.
I attended two conferences at which I met educatorssuch as Pedro Noguera of New York University, Sherry Marx of Utah StateUniversity, Angela Valenzuela of the University of Texas Austin and David Stovallof the University of Illinois at Chicago - College of Education. It wasinstructive to learn about different theories and pedagogies that are currentlybeing used.
I spoke to various MAS teachers that included whiteAmericans. Their enthusiasm was contagious.
It was all the more impressive because it was on theadvent of HB 2281 that was proposing the elimination of the program makingclaims that were simply mendacious. Since then the program and the teachershave gone through a living hell.
They have been libeled as un-American, subversiveand the livelihood of their families attacked. Without any funds and limitednational exposure, the team, the students and the community have fought back.
Struggle destroys lesser beings, but it also helps createlegends. The best in the Mexican American community surfaced in this strugglein the persona of Sean Arce. He did not take a deal, he did not sell out, andhe 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 responseis that then it won’t be MAS but just another program to teach Mexicans andothers to learn how to dance the jarabe tapatio.
Removing a person like Sean is like taking the heartout 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 sendSuperintendent John Pedicone and his gaggle of thugs to the Oz; like theStrawman, the Oz could give them brain: “It must be inconvenient to be made offlesh, for you must sleep, and eat and drink. However, you have brains, and itis worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly."
Apparently the Arizona cabal has neither brains nora heart.
What Tucson had will be very difficult to replicate.The Pedicones and the Huppenthals will be condemned by history, but this meanslittle because we cannot travel back to the future.
The whole affair leaves me feeling how I felt thefirst time I read the Chicano poet, Abelardo who wrote:
“Stupid America, remember that chicanito
Tucson haslost its heart, we are left with the Tin Woodman who has no heart, and there isno rainbow in the horizon.
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