"He would be telling me, 'I don’t want that kid touching my food! He could be full of bacterias!'" he recalled. Osman is Mexican-American, and he thinks the customer was reacting to his darker skin. He said one day a white customer came in and started making racist comments. He was upbeat despite some bad stuff that’s been happening at work lately. "I don't work today, and I just feel so relaxed and so happy," Osman sighed. It's a rare day off from his job at a fast food place. Osman Orta Aragon, a 16-year-old recent sophomore, met up with Frausto and me at Highland High School on a summer morning. "And we can play with that in class, but we also live with the reality that we’re looked at differently." "We can talk about güero, light skinned preto, dark moreno, brown," he explained. One of the first lessons, he said, deals with colorism – a widely-held prejudice that lighter skin is better. I kind of ride herd on them until they graduate."įrausto’s curriculum covers Aztec and Mayan cultures, the Mexican-American War, civil rights, all the way to contemporary Chicano activists and authors. "Once they’re in the class, I kind of step up! I track their absences and attendance in their other classes. "I’ll just stop stranger kids and say, 'hey, you’re gonna take my class next year.'" If he finds out a student is struggling in 9 th grade, they’re likely to end up in Chicano Studies their sophomore year. "I make it a practice of walking through the cafeteria every morning," Frausto said. So in 2012, Frausto started recruiting for his own Chicano Studies class. Two-thirds of their students are Latino and Hispanic, and they were looking for ways to keep them in school. In southeast Albuquerque, Robert Frausto and others at Highland High School were closely following the Tuscon saga. "They were developing a mindset that being Latino was not a deficit," she said, "that the students had strengths and that they could achieve." Torres Velasquez said all the teachers got in-depth training to debunk misconceptions about Hispanic students. "The achievement of Latino students kept rising and rising and rising, to the point where the gap was inverted," said Torres Velasquez, "until Latino students were actually doing better than their White and Asian American counterparts."įor the Tucson program to work so well, Dr. She said Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program, remarkably, closed the achievement gap there after just a few years. It was back before a ban on ethnic studies there made national headlines.ĭiane Torres-Velasquez is an associate professor at UNM’s College of Education and president of the Latino Education Task Force. Some schools have been experimenting with Mexican American and Chicano Studies classes to help kids succeed.Įnthusiasm for ethnic studies is starting to take hold across the nation, and advocates lean on a few successful case studies. But most Hispanic and Latino students in New Mexico public schools don’t get that experience, at least not in the form of ethnic studies. Research shows that when students see their own culture and history reflected in their classwork, they do better in school.
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