Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines

Introduction: Anti-racist pedagogy, not appreciation

In the dominant structure, white children have been socialized into appreciating Mexican-American labor contributions. Giving thanks to Mexican-Americans, privately and publicly, is an American tradition with roots in the end of the nineteenth century. During mass immigration post Mexican-American war, numerous policies kept most Mexican-Americans constricted to the Southwestern part of the United States, taking part in narratives that primarily relate to farm labor. After the formation of the United Farm Workers in 1965 and the collective action seen through various strikes led by charismatic leaders, mainstream America began to understand the plea for equal working conditions as a need to be thanked. Limiting scholarship of Mexican-American plight in the classroom as multiculturalism, and therefore, appreciation, is racist – and no different from outright sharing ethnic slurs or insults – “because it collapses distinct cultures into one stereotypical racialized group.”¹

Systemic racism still runs the trajectory of labor conditions in this country. “Systemic racism is an ideology that attaches common meanings, representations, and racial stories into groups, which in turn become embedded within social institutions that serve to justify the superordination of white people and the subordination of non-white people.”² In modern labor discourse, Mexican-Americans are continually othered for working jobs that no American wants or stealing jobs for American workers. Outward racism manifests in xenophobia and bigotry. To this day, Americans continue to justify the denial of equal pay, rights, and conditions, as necessary, because of Mexican-Americans supposed biological difference. This unit was designed to examine the actual role of Mexican-Americans though labor discourse and with artists whose work “visually communicated in a manner that privileges subjugated knowledge and… makes visible nuances and experiences of lived colonial realities.”³ Routine classroom discussion, writing assignments, art projects, and a community art show all help students in deconstructing dominant narratives to beginning the very personal reflective work necessary in understanding the liberatory capabilities of a collective experience.

I am a social justice oriented middle school art teacher at a Title I school in San Jose, California, serving over 130 students per day. This unit is intended for any educator interested in weaving contemporary Mexican-American art and labor into an art classroom.

Rationale: Art at Hoover Middle School

Herbert Hoover Middle School is located in northern California, fifty miles south of San Francisco. In California, about 54% of students are Latinx,⁴  but at Hoover Middle School, more than 76% of the student body is Latinx. 33% of students are labeled as English Language Learners and 58% of students are from low-income families and qualify for Free and Reduced-Price Meals program. Hoover Middle School is home of the Two Way Bilingual Immersion program,⁵ a cohort of students that take a majority of their courses in Spanish only; as well as the English Language Development program,⁶ a program for students developing proficiency in English that have been in the United States three years or less.

Hoover Middle School is ranked below the national average in both math and English standardized testing. The school is known for their performing arts department. “With over twenty-five course offerings in dance, instrumental music, vocal music and theatre arts” ⁷ It is the only middle school in the district that offers Mariachi as an elective and Folklorico as an extra-curricular activity.

As the sole art teacher, all five sections that I teach have rolling open enrollment and as a result, an enduring theme is equity. 80% of my students are Hispanic, which is higher than the school average. Conversely, the band, choir, drama, orchestra, theatre, and dance programs serve below the school average percentage of Hispanic students. To enroll in art, students do not need advanced placement or auditions, unlike the other elective choices. Regardless, many students are not able to take an elective because they are enrolled in a remedial math or English language arts course.

Rationale: Limitations in traditional art education

The State Board of Education adopted the current California Arts Standards for Public Schools in 2019, which were intended to “enable students to achieve visual arts literacy and develop technical artistic skills.”⁸ Eluding a succinct definition, the Standards state that art literacy “occurs as a result of engaging in an authentic creative process through the use of traditional and nontraditional materials and applying the formal elements of art and principles of design; knowing an arts language to describe art; and discovering the expressive qualities of art to be able to reflect, critique, and connect personal experience to art.”⁹ This loose definition leaves much room for district flexibility in teacher instruction. The current California art standards are commendably nonrestrictive nor starkly problematic in intent. A larger problem lies in the fact that traditional art curriculums that teachers  typically employ do not address race with a liberatory lens, merely embrace cultural diversity; nor power inequalities present in historical and present ways of creating and interpreting art, merely an unquestioned reliance on canonical figures and practices. Traditional art curriculums do not explain why white people continue to “disproportionately occupy positions of power and benefit from unearned advantages produced out of the social and economic legacy of slavery and subsequent history of legalized racial oppression”¹⁰ present in art education.

This power is played out in the overemphasis on oil painting, marble/bronze sculpture, and monumental architecture; hierarchical distinction between art and craft; need for aesthetic response and sociocultural meaning secondary; mandate of prescribed ways of interpretation of art based on artistic “elements”; equating mastery in terms of realism and proportion; and that good art is made by individual geniuses, typically Christian European men.¹¹ A commonly uphold belief  is that only Greek tradition carried the human figure in sculpture to perfection. Any mention of South Pacific, Native Indian, Inuit, and African art is brief and often categorized as Primitive Art.¹² There  is no authentic critique of power of the neutrality in traditional art education nor the 2019 adapted standards. A curriculum that is actively anti-racist would not attempt to assimilate students into standards of overwhelmingly European origin and would hold dialogue on reducing racial inequality.¹³

To teach the artistic canon and offer no counternarratives, sends a message that artwork is only valued when created by a white male of European origin, and leaves out an updated, culturally relevant, dynamic way of seeing and thinking about art. To teach only European art movements, or to hastily group cultures outside of Europe in a “world cultures” art unit, devalues ongoing folk art and craft practices that exist already in students’ communities. Framing art as an elective, or a hobby; a luxury designed for students who can test out of remedial math or reading courses, sends the message that “the arts are not for young people of color to enjoy, let along envision as a future career.”¹⁴ Racially liberatory art standards would discuss the effects of colonialism and how it repeats itself in modern art practice. How does study of the European art “masters” memorialized in the art canon contribute ongoing subordination of oppressed people, specifically Mexican American? This unit poses many questions and provides art activities that students can come to imagine new ways of re-appropriating and re-framing subordination through labor.  This is not just for Mexican-American children, but a new way of interpreting and connecting art to life for all children.