Monday, September 28, 1998
Colorful curriculum broadens perspectives, cultural
understanding
ETHNIC STUDIES: Chicano studies program helps ease fight for
literacy
I don’t know if this anecdote is true or not. Several colleagues
have attested to its veracity, and I have heard other versions of
the tale. I like the story because it is a revealing academic
commentary.
Some time toward the end of the 19th century, a young English
professor at Harvard University had the audacity to include the
works of American authors in a literature class. I usually mention
that the reading list for the class must have included some as yet
unrecognized authors: Henry James, Herman Melville and Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Sometimes I add others: Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe,
perhaps Mark Twain. When news of the event reached administrators,
the outrageous professor was summoned to the dean’s office where he
was instructed to adhere to acceptable British authors of English
literature or face the consequences. Of course, the renegade
professor continued to include the unrecognized American authors
and lost his job. Whether the story is true or not is irrelevant;
if it did not happen to a Harvard professor, it must have happened
to someone else at another institution, in a different discipline,
at one time or another.
I prefer to think of him as a righteous and rebellious academic,
a young professor who followed his academic intuition and applied
an inescapable logic that led him to the discovery of American
literature. The dean must have been concerned with other matters,
probably faculty decorum, the image of the institution, or applying
traditional notions of what constitutes knowledge. The point is
that each was applying a different criterion: The professor arrived
at his decision following a critical path; the dean had
administrative objectives. The situation that ethnic studies has
confronted over the last quarter of the century is somewhat
similar. Scholars in Chicano studies have raised a number of
important academic issues, but the reaction frequently has been
solely administrative. Given space limitations, I can address here
only a few timely issues that are significant to Chicano studies in
today’s highly polarized political climate.
Chicano studies has as its purpose the analysis of all aspects
relating to the experience of people of Mexican descent living or
having lived in what is now the United States.
The creation of Chicano studies, as with many other areas of
academic study, grew out of necessity. Neither the Latin Americans
nor the Americans were able or willing to address the area
concerning Chicano studies. The research in Chicano studies,
however, has been impressive over the past few years: an array of
documents, newspapers, books, musical recordings, oral histories
and art works have been deposited in a network of national and
international libraries. A new generation of scholars and their
students, in a wide variety of disciplines, has helped establish
firm intellectual foundations for the field. Yet, during the past
few years, the Chicano studies agenda (also shared by other ethnic
studies fields) seems to have been preempted.
Indeed, central areas in Chicano studies such as the social
conditions of the inner city, education, the drug threat posed to
minority communities, immigration, bilingual education, racial
relations and ethnic diversity, among many others, have been
heatedly discussed in Congress and other halls of power. These
important issues, however, have acquired levels of discussion that
are often counterproductive: They have become the subjects of
antagonistic debates rather than problems to be solved. This
situation has produced disastrous results, as demonstrated in the
recent California educational initiatives.
The German writer Johann Goethe said that no one could aspire to
know his or her own language if one had not learned to speak
another one. This observation coincides with the findings of
scholars in Chicano studies who have advocated imparting knowledge
in both English and Spanish. Indeed, if the purpose of education is
to prepare citizens with the necessary tools to understand the
world they live in, knowing two or more languages should be a
prerequisite to all learners in California. The argument that other
languages impair the learning of English is untenable. Learning is
cumulative and builds on what is already known. Depriving a
language from a bilingual child is not sound academic practice: The
acquisition of knowledge follows a pattern of addition and
multiplication and not of subtraction and division.
If opponents of bilingualism felt these programs were not
meeting their objectives, a first step would have been to correct
the problem. Solving educational problems by elimination is
illogical. Should we eliminate math programs because they are not
meeting their objectives? Given the present state of California
public education, does anyone seriously believe that suppression of
bilingualism will translate into effective English literacy for
Chicano children? Does anyone seriously believe that the millions
of dollars raised by the opponents of bilingual education came from
concern with improving the education of children? The recent
debates on bilingual education were not about knowledge or culture
and certainly not about language. The objectives were economic,
political and social, and not academic, as they have been in
Chicano studies.
Chicano studies has been at the vanguard of the efforts to bring
education to those communities where drugs, unemployment, poor
services and bad schooling are real obstacles that confront
innocent children who deserve to be given the chance to become
competent and valuable citizens. It is much more productive to
educate children than to construct detention halls where convicts
are dehumanized and trained to return to society to commit more
crimes.
Chicano studies scholars have made important contributions in a
number of disciplines. The next challenge for Chicano studies is to
become truly interdisciplinary. Chicano scholars should address
issues such as immigration, demography, education, public policy,
health or law by integrating areas that today seem distant but
should not be: art, business, ethnomusicology, literature,
anthropology. Providing an example to the rest of society, we ought
to prepare future leaders who are sensible toward other cultures
and peoples. Only through the appreciation of the richness
available in human diversity will we help combat the plague of
bigotry and social intolerance that breeds ignorance and
poverty.
Now, imagine that our 19th century professor at Harvard had been
more than visionary and, following his intellectual intuition, he
had dared to include some Chicano writers among his readings. He
could have used Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel "The Squatter
and the Don" (1885) or maybe Juan Seguin’s "Personal Memoirs"
(1858) or perhaps "The Old Guide: His Life in his Own Words" (1897)
by Jose Policarpio Rodriguez, or else poems, short stories and
essays taken from one of the many newspapers published by Chicano
presses at the time. If he had only followed the logic of such a
critical path, he would still have been fired for the outrage but I
would now be reminding you of his genius and urging you to remember
his name and his prophetic gift.
Hernandez is an associate professor of Spanish and director of
the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.
Comments, feedback, problems?
© 1998 ASUCLA Communications Board[Home]