Latino Activists Declare Victory Over Texas Ethnic Studies Law
By Roque Planas, Huffington Post Latino Voices
They fought the law, and they won.
The Texas activist organization known as Librotraficante celebrated a victory last week over state lawmakers that wanted to put the squeeze on ethnic studies.
Conservative State Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) raised a fury among Latino activists and professors with a proposal to exempt ethnic studies and other college classes from counting toward the fulfillment of state history requirements, but gained little support for the effort. With just two weeks to go before the Texas legislative session winds to a close, Senate Bill 1128 has yet to get voted out of the Senate High Education Committee.
“Logistically speaking, it would be very difficult for it to pass at this point,” Logan Spence, a spokesman for Patrick’s office, told The Huffington Post Monday.
Opponents had railed against the bill, likening it to a law in Arizona that was used to shut down a progressive Mexican American Studies class in Tucson.
“This is a warning to all far right legislators in any State of the Union, if you attack our History, our Culture, or our books, we will defy you,” Tony Diaz, one of the leaders behind the Librotraficante movement, said in a statement Thursday. “And we will win.”
Patrick filed SB 1128 in response to a report by the National Association of Scholars, a nonpartisan group that some Latino scholars describe as conservative, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
The NAS study, “Recasting History,” argued that U.S. history courses at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University have shifted their focus toward race, gender and class rather than more traditional scholarly interests, like intellectual and military history.
The University of Texas at Austin opposed that interpretation when the bill was filed. In January, the university put out a statement saying the study “raises some important questions, but it also paints a narrowly defined and largely inaccurate picture of the quality, depth and breadth of history teaching and research at The University of Texas at Austin.”
The UT-Austin statement points out that scholars paid little attention to race, class and gender until the 1960s. “Rather than ‘diminish attention to other areas’ as the NAS report suggests, these areas of study have broadened the view on historical events and personalities,” the statement says.
Facing criticism for the bill, Patrick wrote a message on his Facebook in March, saying:
The reason I filed this bill is…
This article was first published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.
[Photo by The Brit_2]