Texas state legislators seek to limit ethnic history studies in college requirements

by Jacquellena Carrero, NBC Latino

Students at public universities in Texas may no longer be able to take courses focusing on racial, ethnic or gender history to fulfill their core requirements for an undergraduate degree under new proposed legislation. Measures filed in the Texas Senate and House would change a 1955 state law to stipulate that only courses that give a comprehensive survey of American history or Texas history would count toward the six history credit requirement. The original Texas law simply states that students at public institutions must take two courses in American history.

The bill was proposed by State Representative Giovanni Capriglione and State Senator Dan Patrick in response to a study on the state of higher education in Texas. The study Recasting History, which was conducted by the National Association of Scholars, concludes that all too often the course readings gave strong emphasis to race, class or gender and therefore diminished the attention given to other important subjects in American history like military, diplomatic and intellectual history. The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) and Texas A&M University at College Station were the schools studied in the report.

UT Austin issued a statement back in January when the report that the legislation was based upon was initially released, saying that it paints a narrowly defined and largely inaccurate picture of the quality, depth and breadth of history teaching and research.

Several history professors from UT Austin and Texas A&M largely condemned the proposed legislation, saying that it would isolate race, class and gender as something separate from American history rather than incorporate them.

Anne Martinez, an Assistant Professor at UT Austin, teaches courses on Mexican American history, history of Mexican women, and Borderlands history among other subjects. She calls the proposed legislation misguided.

One of the ideas is the presumption that students aren't going to learn US history when in fact they are. It is an opportunity for students who have taken general US history throughout Kindergarten to 12th grade to explore something more specialized Martinez says. That's what college is about.

One of Martinez's biggest fears is that the legislation would send a message that U.S. history does not encompass all people.
It says that Mexican American history somehow isn't as valuable another history, she says.

RELATED: Could Mexican American studies return to Tucson schools?

One issue of broad concern to history professors was the foundation upon which the legislation was based. Several history professors called the study methodology flawed because researchers solely looked at syllabi and course reading materials and did not visit classrooms on site.

None of them visited my classroom. When I lecture in class, I give students a broad context to the specific things they read. We talk about the Monroe Doctrine, also known as part of diplomatic history, because it's important for setting the stage for US Mexican relations, Martinez says.

Carlos Blanton, a history professor at Texas A&M who teaches a course on Latino history, agreed with Martinez's concerns and called the legislation a shallow way to think about history.

If you're not in my class you're not going to know how it was presented. Judging a course by the syllabi is like judging a book by the cover and saying oh I see that there's a woman on the cover, this must be about gender, Blanton says.

Representative Capriglione and Senator Patrick did not immediately return requests for comment. However, Director of the National Association of Scholars Peter Wood, defended the legislation.

I do support the bills that have been introduced in the House and the Senate. They are small clarifications of the original legislation and it's quite clear that what was intended was comprehensive, but the universities were substituting other kinds of courses, Wood says.

Wood also stood by the methodology of the study. He called the decision not to attend classes an explicit methodological decision since visiting the 85 classes that the universities offer would have been an unfeasible task. Wood also argued that looking at course syllabi provided for a more meaningful study because different topics could have been discussed on days that researchers were present.

Our findings would have been treated as anecdotal. While we do not believe that syllabi show everything, it is one piece of data that we took seriously. We went out and purchased all readings assigned and read all 635 readings, Wood says.

History professors are not the only ones upset about the proposed legislation. Librotraficantes, a group of writers, professors, school board members, and students in Mexican American Studies programs have planned to travel to Austin Texas to protest the proposed change to Texas history requirement law.

Tony Diaz, leader of Librotraficantes, said that the impact of the law would be wide ranging.

Photo by Jesús Manuel Mena Garza. Copyright 2013. All rights reserved.

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Symposium - The Mexican American Archival Enterprise at the Benson Latin American Collection: An Historical Appraisal

April 18-19, 2013

The Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) at The University of Texas at Austin is proud to sponsor a public symposia to be held in the fall and spring semesters of the academic year. This gathering of leading scholars from diverse disciplines is designed to facilitate and further conversations central to the changing field of Mexican American/Latino and Borderlands studies. The title of the spring 2013 symposium is "The Mexican American Archival Enterprise at the Benson Latin American Collection: An Historical Appraisal" and is scheduled to take place April 18-19, 2013. The evening reception and one-day symposium will provide the foundation for a scholarly examination of the rich holdings of the Mexican American and Latin@ Collections at The University of Texas at Austin.

The Mexican American and Latin@ Collections (originally the Mexican American Library Program) was established in 1974 as the result of an initiative by the Mexican American Graduate Association, with funding provided by the University of Texas General Libraries, the sponsorship of the Center for Mexican American Studies, and the continuing support by the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. The intent of the collection was to establish a major repository that would collect, preserve, and make available to researchers the necessary historical records to advance the Mexican American archival enterprise and enhance scholarly production in Mexican American studies. The symposium will demonstrate how these collections have aided in the development of Mexican American/Latino and Borderlands Studies even while we attempt to critique, challenge, and provoke the archive into being a more productive site for future scholarship.

Proceedings of the symposium will be published so as to reach a wider audience of researchers, librarians, archivists, and other supporters of the Mexican American archival enterprise. Invited scholars who have made use of the archives will highlight the depth and breadth of the collections and pay special attention to significant holdings in history, media, cultural arts, and literature that have helped to advance the study of Mexican Americans in the United States.

Sponsored by the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.

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And now a message from the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Director’s Message

It’s a conundrum, to be sure. What do you do when your longtime maid dies? After all, she practically raised your children. She cooked your eggs just so, lightly sprinkling them with something red. You asked her what, but you could not make out her response. (Sounded like “tapas”…) So do you send flowers to her family? Does she even have a family? Do you mention it in your year-end letter to friends and relatives? After all, she worked for you for almost forty years. These are delicate matters. It is what makes life in Hollywood so very challenging.

In 1976 Lupe Ontiveros earned her first role in Hollywood. She played a maid on Charlie’s Angels. Over the next thirty-six years she played, by her own account, more than 150 maids, holding her own against the likes of Jack Nicholson (twice). When she was not playing a maid, she played a prostitute or a madam. But she was also the patron saint of Chicano (and Latino) cinema, starring in now classic films: Zoot Suit, El Norte, Born in East L.A., My Family, … and the Earth Did Not Swallow Him, Selena, Chuck & Buck, Luminarias, and Real Women Have Curves. She had recurring roles in just about every Chicano-produced television series, and also Desperate Housewives. My personal favorite is her role as a drug lord in Taylor Hackford’s 1993 film Blood In, Blood Out. Without a doubt, her final shootout scene is matched in American cinema only by Queen Latifah’s in Set It Off. Lupe lived large on the silver screen.

Ontiveros passed away in July 2012 at age 69—much too early, to be sure. Yet she had an astounding career, especially in light of the limited roles available for Latino actors. Why, she even did voice work in an episode of Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy. So imagine my surprise when the Oscars did not include her in the “In Memoriam” segment. The Oscars also snubbed Russell Means, Sherman Hemsley, and Phyllis Diller. These oversights took place during an Oscar ceremony that one writer called “a lengthy celebration of xenophobia and misogyny” (The Nation). Another writer noted, “The more we pass off old stereotypes, rooted in hate, as normal—as MacFarlane did again and again last night—the longer those stereotypes, and their ability to harm people, will be in place” (The Atlantic). The Academy took the brunt of the blame, since its membership—similar to the declining viewership for the Oscar broadcast itself—is older (age 62 is the average), almost entirely white (94 percent), and mostly male (77 percent). The rationale for having MacFarlane as the host had to do with reaching out to a younger audience, which he did. The strategy relied heavily on what one writer called “the ironic hipster self-aware racism of ‘being so cool that we know it’s racist [and] that it’s ok to participate in it. We’re above it’” (Salon.com). Indeed, two Hollywood notables in the coveted 18 to 49 demographic received Oscars for creative work rooted in some form of racial masquerade: Quentin Tarantino and Ben Affleck. Of course such an approach overlooks the fact that non-whites made up more than half of all births and accounted for over 92 percent of population growth between 2000 and 2010. These are delicate matters, indeed. Earlier this week, the Academy quietly added Lupe Ontiveros to its online “In Memoriam” page.

Chon A. Noriega

Director and Professor

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Feisty Gals: Sotomayor, Kagan ready for battles

By Dana Milbank, Washington Post

For a quarter-century, Antonin Scalia has been the reigning bully of the Supreme Court, but finally a couple of justices are willing to face him down.

As it happens, the two manning up to take on Nino the Terrible are women: the court’s newest members, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The acerbic Scalia, the court’s longest-serving justice, got his latest comeuppance Wednesday morning, as he tried to make the absurd argument that Congress’s renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 by votes of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 390 to 33 in the House did not mean that Congress actually supported the act. Scalia, assuming powers of clairvoyance, argued that the lawmakers were secretly afraid to vote against this “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Kagan wasn’t about to let him get away with that. In a breach of decorum, she interrupted his questioning of counsel to argue with him directly. “Well, that sounds like a good argument to me, Justice Scalia,” she said. “It was clear to 98 senators, including every senator from a covered state, who decided that there was a continuing need for this piece of legislation.”

Scalia replied to Kagan, “Or decided that perhaps they’d better not vote against it, that there’s nothing, that there’s no — none of their interests in voting against it.”

Justice Stephen Breyer defused the tension. “I don’t know what they’re thinking exactly,” he said, changing the subject.

The styles of the two Obama appointees are different. Sotomayor is blunt and caustic, repeatedly interrupting. In an opinion this week, she harshly criticized a Texas prosecutor for a racist line of questioning. She has been on the interview circuit publicizing her memoir.

Kagan is choosier about when to interject herself, but she’s sardonic and sharp-witted. (“Well, that’s a big, new power that you are giving us,” she said, mockingly, when a lawyer tried to argue that the justices should overrule Congress’s discrimination findings.)

Both are more forceful than the Clinton appointees, the amiable Breyer and the frail Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The two new justices are sending a message to the court’s conservative majority: You may have the votes, but you’re going to have a fight.

Wednesday’s voting rights case was typical. Surprisingly, the five conservative justices seemed willing to strike down a landmark civil rights law (the provision that gives extra scrutiny to states with past discrimination) that was renewed with near-unanimous votes in Congress. Conservative jurists usually claim deference to the elected branches, but in this case they look an awful lot like activist judges legislating from the bench.

Sotomayor allowed the lawyer for the Alabama county seeking to overturn the law to get just four sentences into his argument before interrupting him. “Assuming I accept your premise — and there’s some question about that — that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn’t,” she charged. “Why would we vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?”

Moments later, Kagan pointed out that “Alabama has no black statewide elected officials” and has one of the worst records of voting rights violations.

Scalia and Justice Samuel Alito tried to assist the Alabama county’s lawyer by offering some friendly hypotheticals, but Sotomayor wasn’t interested in hearing that. “The problem with those hypotheticals is obvious,” she said, because “it’s a real record as to what Alabama has done to earn its place on the list.”

Sotomayor continued questioning as if she were the only jurist in the room. “Discrimination is discrimination,” she informed him, “and what Congress said is it continues.”

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy tried to quiet her. “I would like to hear the answer to the question,” he said. The lawyer got out a few more sentences — and then Kagan broke in.

Sotomayor continued to pipe up, even when Solicitor General Donald Verrilli was defending the Voting Rights Act — at one point breaking in as Alito was attempting to speak. Chief Justice John Roberts overruled her. “Justice Alito,” he directed.

Scalia was not about to surrender his title of worst-behaved justice. He mocked the civil rights law as he questioned the government lawyer. “Even the name of it is wonderful,” he said. “The Voting Rights Act: Who is going to vote against that?” (Verrilli cautioned him not to ignore actual votes of Congress in favor of “motive analysis.”)

But Scalia’s mouth was no longer the loudest in the room. When the Alabama county’s lawyer returned for his rebuttal, he managed to utter only five words — “Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice” — before Sotomayor broke in.

Twitter: @milbank

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