These documents include an editorial urging the non-celebration of a supposedly racist, Thanksgiving holiday; refer to Americans as “Yankees” and “gringos”; dark talk of a concerted white conspiracy to steal Texas from Mexico; and mention “our people” in California during an article on the Mexican-American War captioned “Death to the Invader!” Also getting top billing in these lesson plans is Aztlan, the mythological homeland of indigenous Mexican civilization supposedly situated in the American Southwest.
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The notion of making a field of study out of ethnic and racial divisions is a relatively new phenomenon, borne like so many other national ailments, out of the tumult of the 1960s. The National Association of Ethnic Studies traces the roots of their discipline to “the demands of students of color and others in the Third World Liberation Front demanding an increase of students of color, faculty of color, a more comprehensive curriculum that spoke the concerns and needs of marginalized communities of color.” Violent protests in pursuit of these goals at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University (involving our current Attorney General Eric Holder) were successful, and eventually, racial and ethnic studies found their way into course catalogs at high schools and universities across the United States.
These classes have a certain surface-level appeal. What better way to accommodate our increasing diversity than courses which allow racial and ethnic minorities to explore and celebrate their particular backgrounds? These ideas are also rooted in the notion that “mainstream” Texas or American history is little more than Anglo propaganda meant to further oppressive systems and stereotypes. Though coursework focused on other ethnic groups are very much a part of this discussion, Mexican American or Hispanic American or Chicano/Chicana studies have dominated recent controversies. In principle, the classes are simply a way to teach students about famous Hispanics and their contributions to our state and nation. However, in practice they often become left-wing indoctrination machines which spin a dystopian yarn out of American history.
The Mexican American studies courses pioneered in Tucson, Arizona are a frightening example. Texts used in the class include Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a dense Marxist tome which praises Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,which teaches that “people of Mexican extraction in the United States are … captives of a system that renders them second-class citizens.”
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