My name is Ron Espiritu. I am an educator. For the past nine years, I've been teaching ethnic studies, Chicano studies, and African American studies to high school students in South Los Angeles.
And what I found working with my young people is that ethnic studies is empowering, is liberating, and is transformative for our young people. A growing body of research from scholars from across the country have shown and proven that ethnic studies has positive academic and social results for students of all races and ethnic groups. ethnic backgrounds.
Despite my own experiences and this research, ethnic studies continues to remain invisible for students at the K-12 level. And in the state of Arizona, ethnic studies has even been banned. Books by Latino authors have been pulled from the shelf in front of students'eyes and they're told that it's illegal for them to read these books in the classroom.
So how do we get to a point in 2014 where an entire state can ban a proven academic program? And to answer that question, I want to begin with the story of my grandmother, Margarita Pedraza. My grandmother grew up in San Antonio, Texas in the 1930s, and when she was going to elementary school, she was told that speaking Spanish was illegal. She was forced to wear a sign around her neck that says, I won't speak Spanish. She was physically intimidated and abused by her teachers and her administrators.
And sadly, this experience is common for many Mexican-American, Latinos, and other immigrants that have come into this country. And so in many ways, the story of my grandmother was a defining moment for me, and it was a defining moment for my mother, Dora Espiritu, who used the experiences of my grandmother as an inspiration to become an educator herself, and she became a bilingual education teacher. And in 1975 in San Antonio, Texas, after the historic Lau v. Nichols Supreme Court case that overturned these unjust laws, My mother began teaching at the very same school that my grandmother attended. Except this time, my mother was breaking the cycle, and she was making students feel proud of their linguistic abilities. She later went on to become a principal of a highly successful dual-language immersion program that had incredible results.
My father, David Espiritu, was also an educator for over 30 years, and he was also a principal of a bilingual education school in San Antonio, Texas, that had incredible results for the students and was a model for the district and the city. My parents inspired my two older sisters to become teachers, and they also inspired me to become a teacher. And we have this incredible model and example that as a teacher, you must respect the community that your students are in, and you must make them proud of their linguistic abilities and proud of their heritage. You see, I went to school in the 1990s in San Antonio, Texas, and while it was very different from my grandmother's experience, maybe in some ways it wasn't so different.
I never read a book by a Latino author or an African-American author. I studied Mexican-American history on May 22nd, a day before the school year ended. And it wasn't until I got here, to Amherst College, and I took my first black studies course, that I realized that there was an entire academic discipline that I had been cut off from.
And as I learned about the struggles of African Americans and other ethnicities, and the black liberation struggle, I became inspired to figure out who I was as a Chicano male from South Texas. I became hungry for knowledge. I became inspired, and once I found myself placed on the historical timeline, I became an intellectual. I was a student participant and a student organizer of an event called Voices for the Voiceless. And through this event, I met people like Jaime Shaggy Flores that connected me to these literary movements that I knew nothing about.
I met people like veteran Chicano poet... Raul Salinas, who taught me about my indigenous background as a Chicano. I met Luis Reyes Rivera, who taught me about the intersections between people of African descent and Puerto Ricans.
And I met Carmen Tafoya, who was the poet laureate of San Antonio, Texas, who's one of the band authors in Arizona. And I also became actively involved in the social movement of the time, which was the immigrant rights movement, which is an important lesson about ethnic studies because you have to put what you've learned into practice. And so I felt liberated. But I want to ask you the question, why do we have to wait to college until we have these experiences?
Shouldn't it be available for our young people in high school and elementary schools across the nation? I believe so. Ethnic Studies has a 45-year history in this country. It was in 1968, a group of multiracial students formed the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State University, and they staged the country's longest student strike.
And at the end of this struggle, they achieved the creation of the first ethnic studies program at the college level. UC Berkeley followed the next year, and student activism of college students spread ethnic studies to every major college and university. And an entire generation of students have been trained to go back into their community and to use their knowledge that they learned about themselves and their communities and use these theoretical frameworks to go back and solve problems in their community and be active agents for social change.
This movement was also at the high school level, and in 1968, the historic East L.A. walkouts was asking for the same things for high school students. Bilingual education, Mexican-American studies programs, culturally relevant curriculum.
And here we are. We're not done with this struggle. 1998 was a defining moment in ethnic studies history.
It was the year that the ethnic studies department in Tucson, Arizona was created, the country's first and only district-wide ethnic studies program. In the Mexican-American Studies program was the largest of the program. It was a national model for teachers like me. And the teachers in the Mexican American Studies program presented at conferences and freely shared their curriculum and their pedagogy.
They invited us into their classrooms, and I was a student of those teachers. They had incredible academic results. 93% of the students in the Mexican-American studies were graduating from high school, and 85% of them were getting accepted into college. This, compared to a district-wide average for Mexican-American students not in the program, of a 50% dropout rate. Equally important, students in the Mexican American Studies program, according to the 2012 Cabrera study, were outperforming their peers in reading, writing, and math.
Now, the funny thing is about math is they didn't even teach math, right? So how is that possible? And I think it proves this point, is that the program was allowing students to develop that intellectual identity.
It was a defining moment for those young people. And so despite all this success, In 2011, a group of politicians called this program un-American and unpatriotic and accused the teachers of trying to teach students to overthrow the government. Yeah.
Which was the furthest from the truth. And the community responded. Students and parents and teachers staged hundreds of walkouts and protests and sit-ins, and they took over the school board.
And they galvanized an entire nation to defend the ethnic studies program in Tucson, Arizona. I was there in 2012 as part of the libro traficante book smuggling operation. We were putting contraband books by Latino authors in the trunk of our cars and taking them across territory that these books were illegal. You know, and one of the things that the students and the teachers told me was that We're happy that you're here, but the real movement is back in your respective local communities. Go back there and create your ethnic studies programs.
So for the past nine years, I've been engaged in that struggle. As a member of the People's Education Movement and organization, I've worked to create and share ethnic studies curriculum and develop ethnic studies pedagogy. And at the school that I teach at, Animo South Los Angeles, we have an 11-year history of offering ethnic studies classes to all of our 9th grade incoming students and an elective also for upperclassmen in Chicano African American Studies.
These are some of my students. And through an important collaborative relationship with my administrators and with the counselors and with the other academic disciplines in my school site, we have created, myself and the other teachers that have taught these classes, an academically rigorous course and program that focuses on reading and writing skills, that focuses on listening and speaking skills, that focuses on critical thinking. through a project-based approach to learning.
And before I share some of my own curriculum, I just have to say, I don't have this all figured out. Being a teacher is a grind on a daily basis, and I am working to be better every single day. So these are my humble ideas, but they're research-focused and they have results.
An ethnic studies program has three components. Number one, it needs to be decolonial. Number two, it needs to be culturally relevant.
And number three, it needs to be community responsive. and social justice based. What I mean by decolonial is that oftentimes students go through history classes and they believe that African American history began with slavery. And that's not true.
We have thousands of years of history from our ancestors and those that came before us. The West African dancers that come to my school every year is one part of an entire curriculum that makes students understand knowledge of self and where we come from. The Aztec dancers that come to my school site are one example of an infusion of a curriculum that celebrates the indigeneity of our Chicano and our Latino students. We put Columbus on trial for crimes against indigenous people, right?
And we look at history from different vantage points, and we connect how colonialism of 500 years has shaped the current economic, political, and social system. that our students engage with in South LA. The course needs to be culturally relevant in it that it has to be specifically tailored to the community that you teach in. So I teach in a community that's half Latino and half African American, and one of the things that we focused on is celebrating and understanding the legacy and the lessons of the unsung heroes of American history.
The program needs to be community responsive. in that my community is half black and half brown. One of the centerpiece units that I teach is the missing chapter book on black and brown unity. And I grab the state textbooks and I tell the students, hey, let's look for that chapter because, man, there's a whole lot written about it.
And of course, we can't find the chapter. So I say, it's okay. The knowledge is out there, we'll create it together. And so we create the missing chapter book on black and brown unity.
This is a picture of two of my students, and I wanted to share one of the written ideas that came from my student London. She's here on the left. And she said this about what she learned.
Oftentimes you grow up believing that blacks and Latinos are arch rivals only because we aren't taught any better. But how can we expect to be taught otherwise when our parents and our grandparents have been sheltered from the truth? And the truth is, is that black and Latinos are not enemies. And in fact, they are allies and have faced many of the same struggles throughout the course of history.
We need to address our struggles and unite with one another to try to overcome them. If we were to learn about how African and indigenous people. came together in Mexico for the liberation of their collective struggles, then we should get the sense to do the same. And I think her words are profound in a lesson and an understanding that's absent from most schools that has a multiracial population.
And finally, one of the most important lessons about ethnic studies is that ethnic studies is a struggle by itself. And so the students engaged in this innovative project that was brought to my attention by two friends of mine, Professor Elia Serna and Professor John Avalos-Rios, who were creating pop-up books with their students. And the idea of the Papa book is a simple idea.
It's that 500 years ago, the Maya indigenous people books were burned by the Spaniards. Two years ago, in 2011, our books were banned in Arizona. So you can burn...
our books, you can ban our books, but the knowledge and the history and the struggle will always pop back up. It'll pop back up in Los Angeles. It'll pop back up in Amherst, Massachusetts. It'll pop back up in...
in Chicago and all over the country. And so students were able to write essays and study about these different events, and they posted their work around the school site, and they invited their community members, and then we had a display at the Southern California Library, and I was contacted by a journalist from Latino USA, an NPR program. And what was really powerful is they came to interview my students about the project and about their experience in ethnic studies, and we had achieved what we sought to achieve at the beginning, which was to change the hearts and minds of people by reaching a national audience. And I remember the faces on my students and how proud they were when they were speaking into the microphone and when they heard their words and their ideas over the radio. Right now in Los Angeles, we're currently engaged in a historic struggle to bring ethnic studies students to all high school students in Los Angeles.
My students recently wrote letters to the Los Angeles Unified School Board. According to the data from the California Department of Education, there's over 152,000 high school students in Los Angeles. Of those 152,000, only 691 are currently in an ethnic studies program. This in a school district that serves 90% students of color.
It's time to change. It's time to transform. It's time to offer ethnic studies classes, not just for the high school students, but for elementary and middle school.
Two days from now, Tuesday, November 18th, I'm going to be joined by thousands of other people in Los Angeles who are going to be rallying in front of the school board. And we believe that this is a historical moment. Similar struggles are taking place in Texas. The 9th District Court of Appeals will be hearing a federal court case that's been brought against the state of Arizona for banning the ethnic studies classes. And my message to you is that you and you can create ethnic studies programs by writing resolutions for your local school board.
You can go to your local community, your local school community, and you can encourage teachers and administrators to create these programs. If you're an educator, whatever discipline, whether it's science, math, or English, you can also create these programs. You can infuse ethnic studies pedagogy and ethnic studies curriculum into whatever academic discipline that you have. Our students need it.
Their success is determined by us offering this type of learning and this type of transformative and liberating experience. And I want to end today with a poem that I begin my class every day with. It's a poem that comes from...
The Mayas, it's a concept called in Lak'ech. It's thousands of years old to this continent that we live in. It's a poem written by Luis Valdez, who was a member of the United Farmworker Movement.
In Arizona, this is a poem that the government deemed illegal. In LA, this poem is popping up. And here's how it goes.
And it's at the heart of what an ethnic studies class is about. In Lak'ech, Tu eres mi otro yo. You are my other me.
Si te hago daño a ti, if I do harm to you, me hago daño a mí mismo. I do harm to myself. Si te amo y respeto, if I love and respect you, me amo y respeto yo. I love and respect myself. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.