scholarly journals Texas Resistance: Mexican American Studies and the Fight Against Whiteness and White Supremacy in K-12 at the Turn of the 21st Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-84
Author(s):  
Josué Puente ◽  
Stephanie Alvarez

This essay recounts the efforts by various groups throughout Texas with a special emphasis on the Rio Grande Valley to implement Mexican American Studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. We offer a historical timeline of events that demonstrates how the Mexican American Studies course came into existence. We also detail the way in which some Mexican American Studies courses were implemented. In other cases, we describe the way different groups were able to offer professional development to teachers to help them incorporate more Mexican American Studies content in their non-Mexican American studies courses or provide the community with the resources on how to include Mexican American Studies at their school. The common theme throughout is an undeniable resistance and mobilization on the part of many, hundreds, of educators, students, and community members to ensure that the youth do not continue to receive a whitewashed education, to ensure that students receive a more accurate representation of history, culture, language, and literature. In essence, the essay details a very hard-fought battle against White supremacy in the schools at the turn of the twenty-first century in Texas in which Mexican American Studies emerged victorious many steps of the way.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-63
Author(s):  
Maritza De La Trinidad ◽  
Stephanie Alvarez ◽  
Joy Esquierdo ◽  
Francisco Guajardo

This essay contributes to the growing literature on Mexican American Studies in K-12 within the broader field of Ethnic Studies. While most of the literature on the movement for Ethnic Studies within Texas and across the nation mainly focuses on the impact of Ethnic Studies courses on students’ academic success, this essay highlights a professional development program for K-12 social studies teachers in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas entitled Historias Americanas: Engaging History and Citizenship in the Rio Grande Valley, funded by a federal grant. This essay provides an overview of Historias Americanas, the objectives and structure of the program, and the ways in which the program contributes to the discourse on Mexican American Studies in K-12. It also describes the frameworks that form the crux of the professional development process: place-based education and culturally relevant pedagogical frameworks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-35
Author(s):  
Lilliana Patricia Saldaña

This article traces how Mexican American Studies (MAS) scholar activists led and supported a statewide movement for MAS in Texas. As a Xicana feminist scholar activist, Saldaña draws from her retrospective memory and personal archive of organizational notes, movement documents, personal testimonies before the State Board of Education, and photos, to document her journey within this epistemic justice movement. In doing so, she narrates the processes of creation/resistance that led to change in a state that has historically excluded Black, Brown, and Indigenous histories from school curricula. As a scholar activist involved in various parts of this movement, Saldaña also examines the various interconnected layers of this movement—from local efforts in San Antonio, where she teaches, to statewide organizing—to chronicle the institutional and grassroots processes that led to this historic victory in Texas.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Louise D’Arcens

Abstract This essay focuses on the Polish film Cold War and the oeuvre of the French nationalist black metal band Peste Noire, examining them as twenty-first-century texts that disclose music’s capacity to solicit emotion in the service of ideology. Despite their aesthetic and ideological differences, each text demonstrates the importance of temporal emotions – that is, emotions that register a heightened sense of the relationship between present, past and future. Each text portrays these emotions’ ideological significance when attached to ideas of a national past. Dwelling on Peste Noire’s racist-nationalist use of the medieval past, the essay explores music as a medium for emotional performances in which white people appear to convey vulnerability while actually reconfirming white supremacy. Peste Noire’s idiosyncratic performance of aggressive vulnerability is a temporal emotion that self-consciously lays claim to a long emotional tradition reaching back to the French Middle Ages.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146954052110396
Author(s):  
Kevin P. Bingham

This article begins with two central ideas – that feelings of rage appear to be on the increase in present modernity and that one of the main sources of rage is directly linked to consumer culture and the retail experience it fosters. Although retail trade allows twenty-first century individuals to spend their money on material goods and experiences which provide structure and a sense of meaning and belonging, what it also causes is ambivalence, insecurity and anxiety. These are formidable feelings that cause irritation, frustration and anger to gradually fester until it accumulates into something violent that distorts the way an individual thinks, acts and treats other people. With these points in mind, what this article provides is a thorough sociological interpretation of twenty-first century retail rage. Veering away from existing interpretations of rage by drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s analysis and image of a one-dimensional society, what this article explores is the idea that retail experiences turn people into individuals who are bound and controlled by a consumer duty. As I contend, based on my unique position as a researcher turned retail worker, it is this administered, one-dimensional kind of lifestyle that cultivates rage. To support my argument and understand more comprehensively how and why retail breeds frustration and anger, I use a selection of narrative episodes to unpack three key sources of consumer rage in the twenty-first century. These sources have been labelled instantaneity, performativity and unfulfillment.


Author(s):  
Brian Lehaney ◽  
Steve Clarke ◽  
Elayne Coakes ◽  
Gillian Jack

If you want quick-fix solutions, this book is not for you. If you want to “dare to know” how to look at an organisation differently, harness the power of its knowledge, and create innovative and effective systems, then please read on! Knowledge management has been one of the most hyped phrases over the first years of the twenty-first century, and it has been mooted as the way forward for organisations to be dynamic, flexible, competitive, and successful. Despite the hype, and despite some individual successes, western economies and organisations may not have been greatly affected by this ‘all singing, all dancing’ solution to organisations’ problems. Has the impact of knowledge management been less than expected? If so, why? In order to address these questions, there are a number of others that must also be considered, such as: What is knowledge management? Why did it arise in the first place? Can it be simplified or categorised? Is it a fad? Is it theoretical? Is it practical? Why should I care about it? What can it do for my organisation? Does it provide a quick and easy solution?


Film Reboots ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
Erin Hanna

This chapter looks to Star Trek, a reboot that employed a time travel narrative to simultaneously cast the Star Trek universe as a new continuity and strategically recast iconic characters in a parallel timeline. The chapter asserts that the reinvention of Star Trek property as a twenty-first-century blockbuster required an investment not only in its narrative strategies, but also in a discursively reimagined audience, one that included both pre-existing and future fans. It demonstrates the way in which Star Trek highlights the intersecting logics of the film reboot and the mainstreaming of fandom in popular culture, both of which grow out of serial strategies designed to exploit new and established markets.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Insko

The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document