TALAS E-newsletter – April 21

In You Sound Like a White Girl, Julissa Arce combines memoir and history to reclaim the Latino identity she pushed away as an undocumented immigrant in San Antonio.

For over a decade, Julissa Arce was quietly breaking the law. Arce was born in the Mexican state of Guerrero but lived in San Antonio with her parents on a U.S. tourist visa. When she was 14 years old, the visa expired, and she became undocumented. Out of necessity, she learned how to fit in and how to keep her status a secret. At 22, she landed a job at Goldman Sachs, securing the position with a counterfeit green card and Social Security number. Arce kept quiet about her immigration status, rising up the corporate ladder until she married a U.S. citizen in 2008 and became naturalized in 2014. 

The barrage of new state legislation aiming to control how teachers can talk about race and sex has become one of the biggest education stories of 2022. But new research on the connection between local and national political parties indicates that the laws could also become a Congressional fixture next year.

In a recently published article, political scientist Alex Garlick found that sudden increases in legislation at the state level are associated with more bills introduced in Congress on the same topic in the following legislative session. The correlation, which is particularly strong among Republican office holders and those within the same state delegation, suggests a consistent pathway of political messaging between state capitals and Washington, D.C.

When I was a special education teacher at Myrtle Grove Elementary School in Miami in 2010, my colleagues and I recommended that a Black girl receive special education services because she had difficulty reading. However, her mother disagreed. When I asked her why, she explained that she, too, was identified as having a learning disability when she was a student.

She was put in a small classroom away from her other classmates. She remembered reading books below her grade level and frequent conflicts between her classmates and teachers. Because of this, she believed she received a lower-quality education. She didn’t want her daughter to go through the same experience.

In the entryway of Graciela Garcia Elementary, visitors are greeted twice. Once by a huge multi-colored sign that says “Welcome” and again by one that reads “Bienvenidos.”

Another sign cheerfully declares, “Today is English day!”

All that is made explicit because Garcia Elementary is a dual-language school. Just a couple days after Thanksgiving break 2021, its teachers aren’t just trying to get students caught up on multiplication tables or grammar. They’re making up for months lost to the pandemic when students could have been making bigger strides with their second language, English, which they will need when they’re older and expected to take all their classes in.

All Francisco Maestas wanted was for his children to get a quality education. When his local school district in Alamosa, Colorado, insisted he send his kids to the so-called Mexican School, Maestas fought the district in court and won.