Conclusion: Labor in liberation for Mexican-American students
This curriculum unit only addresses a portion of the complex history of Mexican-American labor in the California. It barely skims the surface of the scholarship that exists on Mexican-American labor in California after the US-Mexican War. It only provides a background for the numerous labor movements that originated with Mexican-American workers. The use of discussion and counternarratives discussed in this unit are not to share that Mexican-American history is American history, but to take an anti-racist approach that “challenges the essential underpinnings of the [education] system, which has historically been grounded in White male privilege and seeks to deconstruct domination couched in the language of detachment and universality.”68 David Hockney and citrus crate labels are comfortably rooted in the canon in this way.
Instead of celebrating the inclusion of Mexican-Americans, this unit is based on the idea that by dissecting assumptions about the roles Mexican-Americans played in history, and teaching for transformation, instead of assimilation, is the first step in dismantling white supremacist ideology in labor. Talking about labor is not for students to merely compare and contrast histories, but to begin working towards decolonizing their own fundamental beliefs by rehumanizing oppressed groups of people. Artists Ramiro Gomez, Juana Alicia, and Judy Baca are known for their “documentation of the human experience [that] must take account of the conditions and the perspectives sustaining such conditions into the investigation and recording of our collective struggles and how we understand or define them. To do this work, [students] must participate fully in such public debates about structural oppression and submit its unique insights to discussion and action.”69 Gomez, Alicia, and Baca confront power by offering a narrative that is not only subordination and teachers support their work through mediating discussions. I believe this work begins with a teacher that is devoted to teaching a people’s history, holding space for students to unpack uncontested narratives where “being White is viewed as a ‘normal’ state of being which is rarely reflected upon, and the privileges associated with being White are simply taken for granted,”70 and, ultimately, when students of color feel like they can educate others.
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