- Howard Adams, “Prison of Grass”
09 March 2013
08 March 2013
07 March 2013
Declining Interest In 'Chicano Studies' Reflects A Latino Identify Shift | KPBS.org
Xicano Studies is a class issue?
"The declining enrollment is not true everywhere. At San Diego City
College, a community college, the Chicano Studies department is
requesting more capacity for its courses because of saturation,
professor Elva Salinas said in an email.
Mariscal, of UC San Diego, said the decline in interest tends to magnify as an institution becomes more selective and elite. There is even less interest in Chicano Studies among students at UC San Diego than at San Diego State, he said."
Mariscal, of UC San Diego, said the decline in interest tends to magnify as an institution becomes more selective and elite. There is even less interest in Chicano Studies among students at UC San Diego than at San Diego State, he said."
Declining Interest In 'Chicano Studies' Reflects A Latino Identify Shift | KPBS.org
by Adrian Florido
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
SAN DIEGO — On the campus of San Diego State University recently, Sandy Chavez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, said, without hesitation, that she thinks of herself primarily as American.
Yes, she is Latina, of Mexican heritage. She’s visited family in Mexico, and on weekends as a child she woke up to her parents playing Mexican music on the stereo. But she’s never described herself principally as Mexican or Latina, much less Chicana, a term preferred by many young Mexican-Americans in the 1960s and 70s.
“A lot of people say Latina, Chicana. I don’t even really know the distinction between them,” Chavez said.
By official projections, next year, Latinos will surpass whites as California’s largest ethnic group. This is due in large part to young people like Chavez, the children of immigrants from Mexico, who are also landing on college campuses in record numbers.
But these students see themselves differently than earlier generations of Mexican-Americans.
And on campuses like San Diego State University and others, that shifting sense of identity is posing a recruitment challenge to Chicano Studies programs that grew out of the Chicano political movement of the Civil Rights era.
Last semester marked a milestone at San Diego State University. TheChicano Studies Department failed to meet its enrollment target. It’s falling short this semester, too, having enrolled just two-thirds of its target of roughly 1,300 students.
“It’s a small crisis, in terms of the department’s history,” said Isidro Ortiz, a longtime professor of Chicano Studies.
Ironically, the drop in enrollment coincides with record numbers of Latino students on campus, a large proportion Mexican-American. Last year the university was recognized as a Hispanic Serving Institution by the federal government, a designation that qualifies it for grant funding because its undergraduate student body is at least 25 percent Latino.
Professors and administrators are trying to figure out why the record number of Latinos on campus hasn’t translated into more interest in Chicano Studies courses. One theory is that a growing number of them think of themselves like Sandy Chavez does.
“Students in many cases don’t identify as Chicanos, as did the generation that created this department,” Ortiz said. Many more identify as Mexican, Mexican-American, or simply American.
Chicano Studies departments at San Diego State and across the West grew out of the Mexican-American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Its members rejected the term Mexican-American and instead adopted the term “Chicano,” which is thought to derive from the indigenous pronunciation of Mexicano.
Identifying as Chicano symbolized solidarity with a proud, sometimes even militant, struggle against second-class status — a struggle by Mexican-Americans to be recognized by politicians, employers, and by academia.
That led a group of Chicano academics to call a summit at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1969. There, they drafted a plan to begin establishing university Chicano Studies curricula and departments. Within a few years, they were established at universities in California, Arizona, and Texas.
At San Diego State University, the department flourished well into the 1990s, and even the last decade. But in recent years, Ortiz said, the declining enrollment became apparent, and last year, the missed target. That has forced a conversation within the department about how relevant the term Chicano — with its political, even radical, connotations — is to young Mexican-Americans today.
Continued, even unprecedented, civic engagement by Latinos suggests it’s not mere apathy driving them away from an interest in studying the Mexican-American community in an academic context. Take the ongoing movement in support of immigration reform, driven in large part by young Mexican-Americans, and voter turnout in the last election.
“But maybe that term,” – Chicano – “is not what’s appropriate for unifying a mobilization of young people in 2013,” said Jorge Mariscal, a professor of Chicano arts and humanities at UC San Diego.
He said understanding the community’s demographic evolution is key. The Latinos on university campuses today are the children of the large wave of immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 1980s and 90s, well after the Chicano movement’s heyday.
“It means that many of these young people don’t know what the term Chicano means in the U.S. context,” Mariscal said. “So it’s really the demographic change, and the culture that those new young people bring, that is slowly moving off center stage the term Chicano, and therefore Chicano Studies.”
Unlike the Chicano generation, which saw itself outside the mainstream and was clearly a minority, today’s young Mexican-Americans increasingly are the mainstream. Many are voting, participating in the political system from within. The four-decade-old Chicano movement is increasingly a vague memory, the term imbued with nebulous meaning.
“I don’t know, when I think of a Chicano I think of somebody who grew up in the streets of East LA,” said Ernesto Limón, an undergraduate at San Diego State.
The declining enrollment is not true everywhere. At San Diego City College, a community college, the Chicano Studies department is requesting more capacity for its courses because of saturation, professor Elva Salinas said in an email.
Mariscal, of UC San Diego, said the decline in interest tends to magnify as an institution becomes more selective and elite. There is even less interest in Chicano Studies among students at UC San Diego than at San Diego State, he said.
At San Diego State, Ortiz said Chicano Studies faculty recently held a first meeting to discuss the decline in enrollment and how the department might address it. Chicano Studies departments at other universities have retooled the curriculum to include classes reflective of the greater diversity within Latino communities.
Several university departments have changed their names to include "Latino" or "Hispanic," in an effort to give the department broader appeal among the large and still growing Latino student population.
“We should be in a position to be able to capitalize on those numbers,” Ortiz said. “And I think we will be able to, provided we can solve this puzzle.”
Teachers Make Handy Scapegoats, But Spiraling Inequality Is Really What Ails Our Education System
Stanford University scholar Linda Darling-Hammond explains the connection.
March 4, 2013 |
No shortage of ink had been put to paper pondering what it is that ails America's education system. We know that, on average, our kids' educational outcomes lag behind those of other wealthy countries, but why is that? But one of the core problems, if not the core problem, is only rarely discussed: the staggering, and increasing inequality that marks the American economy today.
That's the conclusion Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University, has drawn from her research. AlterNet recently spoke with Darling-Hammond -- below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.
Joshua Holland: You’ve done research on the connection between poverty and educational outcomes. We hear a lot about how poorly American students do compared to those in other wealthy countries, in terms of math or reading scores, but you found that American kids in wealthier schools do quite well. Tell us a little bit about that.
Linda Darling-Hammond: Well, there are a couple of things to know before we talk about the scores. First of all, the United States has more children living in poverty, by a long shot, than any other industrialized nation. Right now about one in four children are living in poverty. In most other industrialized nations we’re talking about well under 10 percent, because there’s so many more supports for housing, healthcare, employment, and so on.
With that very high poverty rate, our average scores on international tests look a little above the average in reading, about at the average in science and somewhat below the average in math, and a lot has been made out of that in the United States. But in fact, students in American schools where fewer than 10 percent of the students live in poverty actually are number one in the world in reading. Students in schools with up to 25 percent of kids living in poverty would rank number three in the world in reading, and even schools with as many as 50 percent of kids in poverty scored well above the averages in the OECD nations – which is mostly the European and some Asian nations. Our teachers are doing something very right in terms of educating kids to high levels in much more challenging circumstances than children face in other countries.
The place where we really see the negative affects are in the growing number of schools with concentrated poverty, where more than 75 percent of children are poor. And there -- the children in those schools score at levels that are near those of developing countries, with all the challenges that they face.
JH: In the United States, we have five times the rate of childhood poverty as the average in the OECD countries.
Let's talk about how this dynamic works. I can see at least two ways: you’d expect poor kids to have problems with preparation rising directly from being poor, and you’d also expect them to go to schools with fewer resources.
Let’s take this second one of those first. I think it's important to understand the way our local schools are financed. They get about 10 percent of their funds from the federal government and the other 90 percent are split more or less equally between state and local governments. So we know a lot about how much money we spend on kids, on average, but that doesn’t tell us about the wide disparities in school funding. If you’re in a wealthy state and in a community with a good property tax base, you’re going to do a lot better. How does that affect educational outcomes, these disparities in school funding?
06 March 2013
Attorney General Holder: President Could Order Drone Strike Inside US
By Krishnadev Calamur, NPR
ttorney
General Eric Holder has said in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul that the
president could in an "entirely hypothetical" situation authorize the
military to use lethal force within U.S. territory.The letter to Paul came in response to three inquiries the Kentucky Republican sent to John Brennan, President Obama's nominee for CIA director. Paul's letters asked if it was legal for the U.S. government to use lethal force, including in the form of drone strikes, on Americans inside the country.
Here's Holder's response, in part:
"As members of this Administration have previously indicated, the U.S. government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. As a policy matter, moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat. We have a long history of using the criminal justice system to incapacitate individuals located in our country who pose a threat to the United States and its interests abroad. Hundreds of individuals have been arrested and convicted of terrorism-related offenses in our federal courts."The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no President will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the President could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.
"Were such an emergency to arise, I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the President on the scope of his authority."In a separate response, Brennan told Paul that the "CIA does not conduct lethal operations inside the United States - nor does it have any authority to do so."
Published on Jan 28, 2013
Sean Arce and Jose Gonzalez speak at DePaul University January 21, 2013 (Dr. MLK Jr Day) about critical consciousness, radical love, and liberation education. These Maestros drop precious knowledge about how to combat the 3-D theory (deletion, denial, and distortion) imposed on our gente by the Eurocentric instituions. Paulo Freire is a huge influence on the presentation and should be anaylised as such. Don't run away from the knowledge please seek it.
Seattle High School Teacher's Race and Social Justice Curriculum Suspended After Parent Complaint | Slog
posted by ANNA MINARD on SAT, MAR 2, 2013 at 3:55 PM
It’s not every day that we get news tips from concerned high-school studentsfighting a curriculum change. But I got a call yesterday from Zak Meyer, a senior at The Center School (the public high school in the Armory at the Seattle Center), wanting to know if I’d heard the rumors about the suspension of his school’s race and social justice curriculum.
Full disclosure: I’m a graduate of the school, and I’d taken the class Meyer was talking about. Rumors were, indeed, racing across social networks and among alumni that something weird was going on. I asked him to fill me in.
Click below for the full story.
Seattle High School Teacher's Race and Social Justice Curriculum Suspended After Parent Complaint | Slog
05 March 2013
Hugo Chavez, president of Venzezuela dead at 58
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the charismatic leftist who dominated his country with sweeping political change and flamboyant speeches, died Tuesday at age 58, after a long battle with cancer that was shrouded in mystery and prevented him from being inaugurated for a fourth term.
Adored or reviled for his self-styled populist revolution, Chavez held sway over Venezuela through a cult of personality, government reforms that championed the downtrodden, and an endless stream of rhetoric denouncing capitalism, imperialism and the United States.
The "Chavistas" praised El Comandante for reducing extreme poverty and expanding access to health care and education. Critics blamed him for high inflation, food shortages, escalating crime and mismanagement of the country’s oil industry.
Click here for full story.
Tucson teaches score legal victory in battle against HB 2281 proponents
Raza Defense Fund Supporter, We would like to thank all of you who have supported Sean Arce and Jose Gonzalez in this legal struggle that has been placed upon them and providing us with the necessary financial assistance to get us through these extremely challenging times.
On February 13, Pima County Judge Ted B. Borek dismissed the defamation case against Arce and Gonzalez calling them to pay $1 million dollars, with the stipulation that each party would pay their own legal costs.
See following Arizona Daily Star story:
http://azstarnet.com/news/local/education/precollegiate/former-tusd-teacher-s-mexican-american-studies-suit-dismissed/article_d1d2dd2d-9e73-503a-b3af-54cbacc7e253.html
While we are extremely pleased with this dismissal, this whole legal process has taken a financial and emotional toll on Arce and Gonzalez and their familias.
The costs of depositions, video recordings of depositions, legal research, court filings and other associated court costs have left Arce and Gonzalez with unpaid legal fees in the amount of $8,200.
We are again asking for your financial assistance to help Arce and Gonzalez to place this behind them by donating online or mailing a check to the Raza Defense Fund.
Online contributions can be made at:
https://www.wepay.com/donations/144408
Checks to be made in the mail can be made and sent to:
Raza Defense Fund
300 South Convent
Tucson, Arizona 85701
We will keep you informed as to the amount of money that has come in.
Mil Gracias
Raza Defense Fund
For more info on this case, please visit http://tinyurl.com/RazaDefenseFund
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