The Mexican American Community College Experience by Campa Blanca;

Author:Campa, Blanca;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

After completing her basic coursework at EPCC, she transferred to the University of Texas at El Paso, worked part-time at a small greeting card store, and decided to major in Speech Pathology.

One day, an incident at the card store changed her mindset and sent her off on an entirely new direction in life. A black gentleman in his late fifties, nicely dressed in dark pants, blue pinstripes, and a button-up shirt, entered the store looking for a card for a new “significant other” in his life. Rose led him to a selection of cards but before she could leave, the man asked, “Ma’am, which one would you like?”

She explained that “it’s not about what I like but about what you want to say. It’s a personal thing. It has to come from you.” The man then confessed that he could not read and Rose, somewhat shocked, offered to read a few cards for him and helped him pick the right one. Weeks went by but she could not get this moment out of her mind. She wondered what life would be like for adults who could not read or write. Her heart went out to this gentleman and other people who were illiterate, so she started tutoring at El Paso Community College. A few months later, she was offered a teaching job in the reading lab.

In recent years, Rose Galindo has worked closely with Myshie Pagel in developing creative curriculum for their ESL students. Professors Galindo and Pagel create assignments that challenge students’ ways of thinking and put them in the sometimes uncomfortable position of “critically” assessing a mainstream idea. For example, a common misconception among Hispanic students at EPCC is that racism is a unique, deeply rooted American ideology and that white Anglos have used color to oppress and sometimes erase the paths of African Americans in this country throughout history. To look at this history more critically and to place racism in a much larger, cultural context, the two professors studied and then assigned to their students “revisionist” works.

To illustrate this, their classes read segments of Jameelah S. Muhammad’s work in No Longer Visible: Afro Latin Americans Today (1995). The rather obscure book builds off of revisionist research of the late twentieth century. It argues that race dominated centuries of colonial and independent rule in Latin American countries and produced deep social divisions and traditions that remain common today.

The reading introduced topics, such as the Mexican government’s blancamiento (whitening) and other efforts to “improve the race” by diluting Indian and African ancestry through racial mixing. Students watched segments of the award-winning 2011 PBS series Black in Latin America by Henry Louis Gates Jr. to learn about the contributions of Afro-Mexicans and the lingering African past throughout the region. Gates vividly describes how Gaspar Yanga, an African who escaped servitude in the state of Veracruz, led one of the first slave rebellions and founded the first free black town in the Americas.

More than half a million African slaves were

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