10/14 Reading Response

 “The dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance… As a people we have resisted and we have taken expedient positions, but we have never been allowed to develop unencumbered—we have never been allowed to be fully ourselves.” - Gloria Anzaldua, “La conciencia de la mestiza/ Towards a New Consciousness”, p. 86

Watching Precious Knowledge (2011) directed by Ari Palos and Eren Isabel McGinnis was a constant act of dedication after the first twenty minutes of the film. The shift of watching the success of  the Mexican-American Studies program (MAS) to the documentation of MAS’s untimely demise is what I think makes watching this film feel surreal: the first twenty or so minutes demonstrates to the viewer that there is a strong correlation between an increase in positive academic and nonacademic outcomes for students who participate in MAS with the remaining 50 minutes showcasing all the ways two prominent politicians use their power and their networks to put an end to this same program. 

I audibly gasped when the film introduced clips of Tom Horne describing why he believed MAS needed to be eliminated. From the get-go it was clear to me as an observer and current educator that Horne did not understand what was happening in the classrooms he was vilifying. Moments before these clips I was bearing witness to the fruits of the MAS teachers’ labor: parents and teachers sharing anecdotes of students being authentically engaged in their classes, students having an increase in their academic performance on state testing, and graduation rates rising and averaging at 93% over a continuous six year period of time. With these types of data points I couldn’t help but think that the implementation of a social justice curriculum that MAS implemented and unsurprisingly sounds very similar (and likely is) what Julio Cammarota and Augustine Romero describe in “A Critically Compassionate Pedagogy for Latino Youth” as the answer to a myriad of issues public schools often face (i.e. poor attendance, poor standardized test scores, poor graduate rates, etc.). And yet, despite these facts, there were also people, such as Superintendent Tom Horne and State Senator John Huppenthal (and many more like them) that believed the program was “indoctrinating” students into developing an anti-American mindset (read socialist mindset).

 Once Tom Horne was introduced, the act of continuing to bear witness to MAS’s story became increasingly difficult. I wanted to stop watching as the testimonials in support of passing bill 1108 to withhold public funds for MAS demonstrated the clear disconnect politicians had to the actual classroom, and again when Senator Huppernthal stated that “I can tell you from personal experience there are social systems set up that are not perfect, but what you have in the United States is more opportunity, more prosperity than you could ever dream” as an explanation for why Ethnic Studies are “evil ideas” that lead to unhealthy outcomes for the students who engaged in this type of learning, and again when clips from local radio stations and write ins from the Arizona Daily Star began comparing MAS to the KKK and purported that MAS posed a threat  by “endangering the safety of white students” and again and again and again. Over and over I was seeing firsthand how politics, and the ignorance of those in power did what Gloria Anzaldua describes as the “intracultural split” where white people actively separate themselves from other cultures, (in this case Mexican culture) as a means of maintaining power and wealth (p. 85-86). More specifically, I think the successful elimination of MAS demonstrates what Anzaldua aptly describes as “whites in power… whitewash[ing] and distort[ing] history” to continue the spread of misinformation that prioritizes a Westernized/Euro-centric narrative of history, which by extension maintains racially-based biases, stereotypes, and prejudices between and among racial groups that then leads to long-term, systemic inequities (86).  

Forcing myself to watch the demise of MAS  was heartbreaking. As a teacher, I couldn’t (and still can’t) understand how a program that started with so much idealism and hope, that demonstrated successful outcomes over a continuous period of time was successfully dismantled by public figures who fundamentally did not understand and refused to understand the program.  After finishing the film I felt lost; I didn’t even want to write this blog post for class. I thought to myself: what is the point of completing work for this class if I just witnessed the elimination of a program that was grounded in pedagogy that was culturally responsive and restorative, that put students first and taught them skills for both academic excellence and personal success? Before even reading Anzaldua’s chapter, I needed to find hope. While in this search for hope, I found acts of resistance like librotraficante and accounts of how Tucson’s decision to ban MAS led to an emergence of similar program’s elsewhere. But what I needed most (and successfully found) was the official court ruling. Thankfully it was one that helped me breathe again. There is hope, I thought after skimming the article. I can write. And so I did.

My desire to go past the required reading for this week I think proved yet again that teaching is more than just a job, at least for me. To me, teaching is a huge privilege and responsibility that positions me every day as the person who stands between making the lives of my students better or worse, to make them feel seen or invisible, heard or dismissed. As a teacher I feel compelled to ensure that I am always doing right by my students, even when I know what is right may go against what my school and district leaders tell me to do. So of course after watching Precious Knowledge I needed to know that “right” eventually came along for the students and teachers of MAS. To be sure, seven years is a long time to wait for justice, but the long-awaited verdict is one that proved to me, thankfully, that one must be unrelenting when seeking to do what is “right”, especially when it contradicts the beliefs of those in power.