Muñoz: Teach about Latino history
When Carlos Muñoz Jr., the son of Mexican immigrants, was a child, “groups like yours didn’t exist,” he told the audience at the National Hispanic Caucus of School Board Members Luncheon. “We were invisible. I never had a Latino teacher. I never saw a social worker, lawyer, or other professional who looked like me. I felt like a foreigner in my own country.”
While that has changed, Muñoz, a professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley, said schools need to do much more to educate students about Latinos’ contributions -- and about “the struggle for human rights and social justice.”
“Our students must be taught that our indigenous ancestors were the original Americans,” that the civilizations in the Americas made important contributions to science, art, and culture, he said.
Students must be taught that “the first Europeans came as invaders and conquerors, not immigrants,” Muñoz said. And that despite the good things the Founding Fathers did, “they were slave owners and their vision of manifest destiny viewed the indigenous people as inferior and savages.”
He also said educators “must teach students to be critical thinkers and leaders.”
When Muñoz began high school, he was assigned to an industrial arts curriculum, a non-college track, even though he had been an honor student in elementary and middle school. When he graduated, he didn’t have the algebra, chemistry, or other courses needed for a four-year college.
Muñoz was inspired by Cesar Chavez, the leader of the National Farmworkers Union, when he became a leader of the Mexican-American student walkouts in Los Angeles 40 years ago.
More than 10,000 students took to the streets to protest racism, and Muñoz was arrested on a conspiracy charge that could have meant 66 years in prison.
It took years, but the California High Court ruled Muñoz was innocent on the grounds that the First Amendment protected his free speech rights.
Muñoz eventually earned a PhD and created the first Chicano studies department in the nation, at California State University at Los Angeles in 1968.
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