Spoken word poet, Denice Frohman, once said in a performance “The first time I read a book by a Latina author was in college. The wind in my chest stood up. It had been 18 long years of textbooks filled with everything but me. For the first time, my body knew a world that could hold it.”
I can’t begin to explain how much this has been a part of my life this past semester. This week, we watched a documentary on the east L.A. walkouts in my Chicano/Latino History class. For those of you who, like me a week ago, have not heard of the East L.A. Walkouts, or “The Blowouts,” they were a week of walkouts in 1968 where five major L.A. high schools protested the educational system that largely disfavored minority groups, and in this particular community, Mexican-American students. As a first generation Latino immigrant having been surrounded by first generation Latino immigrants my whole life, I mistakenly took my own experience to be the Latino experience in America for most of my life. Watching thousands of students, my age or younger, walk out of their high school, claiming a change to the system that saw them as manual labor even before entering high school, was extremely powerful and refreshing. It opened my eyes to the fact that Mexican Americans have had a history of strong of retaliation against the educational system in the U.S., and that we have come to a point where we could not take the injustice anymore. It makes me happy to learn about the Chicano movement, and the uprising of my people, while at the same time, it makes me sad to see how little has changed over the years.
History was my least favorite subject in elementary through high school, and I simply accepted this without asking myself why. I now realize it is because I learned about everything but myself and my roots. Identity crisis is a real thing for many immigrants in America, whether they are first, or fifth generation. It affects us all the same. I think that teaching minority groups the European perspective of history, and not teaching the other views is a big cause of identity crisis today.
This is not a post to complain about the messed up public educational system that teaches us what those in power want us to hear. This is a post to show people how invaluable education can be when it serves the right purpose.
Denice Frohman also said in her performance with Dominique Christina, “The biggest way to silence a mouth is to treat is as if none had come before.” I recognize the privilege there is to learning information that is not so readily available to others, and the responsibility that is brings. For many first generation students, I encourage you to seek out a wider scope of history than what is taught in high school, and to use it to make better sense of the world today.
Here is the link to Denice Frohman and Dominique Christina’s spoken word performance if anyone is interested in seeing it:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RHSqUyi6GUU
References:
Poetry, Button. (2014, June 19). Dominique Christina & Denice Frohman – “No child left behind”. [Video File]. Retrieved from: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RHSqUyi6GUU