Colorful curriculum broadens perspectives, cultural understanding

Monday, September 28, 1998

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.

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