After reading the proposed Mexican American Heritage textbook for Texas students last week by Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle, I can without hesitation state that it is obscene and extremely offensive. And beyond being unfocused, incoherent and a badly written book, it is also an intentional assault by non-experts and ideologues against the spirit and psyche of Mexican American students.
It is also a very familiar narrative that has been employed by the state in the decade-long battle over Ethnic Studies in Arizona, a battle that should culminate with a Tucson trial in early 2017, focusing on whether the state’s 2010 anti-Ethnic Studies bill was racially motivated or not (Yes!). The book actually reads like the “clash of civilizations” narrative that former Arizona State Education Secretary Tom Horne has peddled throughout all these years.
Akin to Horne, the authors have conjured up a narrative that corresponds to their “Americanization” ideology; one that sees Mexican Americans at best, as “illegals” and as coming from violent and backward cultures and as peoples that continue to be in the way of Manifest Destiny and also their City on a Hill. Nowhere in this 500-page poorly researched book is there anything remotely positive about the rich culture and history of Mexican Americans. Their only salvation: full assimilation.
The final report of the Ruben Cortez Ad hoc Committee, presented to the Texas State Board of Education at their Sept. 6 meeting states: “the proposed textbook is really a polemic attempting to masquerade as a textbook.”
It found the book to be riddled with at least 140 factual and interpretive errors, plus errors of omission. Beyond this, Riddle and Angle actually make Mexican Americans tangential in their own story as they inject irrelevant and countless anti-communist diatribes into their book. As the Responsible Ethnic Studies Textbook (REST) Coalition observed: “The text mostly addresses U.S., Latin American and world history and fails to connect the relevance of these broader fields to Mexican American history.”
Ironically, while University of Texas at Austin professor, Emilio Zamora, a member of the ad hoc committee, conveyed that the authors will use this report to “fix” the book, though no one actually believes it is fixable because the problem is the flawed narrative itself.
