Many Chicanx/Latinx students, including myself, never really learned our history in U.S. high schools. Growing up, I never really cared that my people were excluded from textbooks, maybe it was because I was always conditioned to think of U.S. history as the same thing we’ve always been told in every single textbook we looked at. For me, it was good enough to think that Cesar Chavez was included in a small section of my textbooks. It wasn’t until I started college and took my first Ethnic Studies course that I realized Chicanxs and Latinxs were excluded from textbooks and that it was problematic. After I took Survey of Chicana/Chicano History and Culture with Dr. Maes, my eyes were opened and I discovered all this rich history that had never been taught to me before. When I had this moment of joy because I learned so much, I imagined how other Chicanxs students would feel if they learned about our history.
Now that I’ve taken several …show more content…
history when it came to Mexicans and other Latinxs residing in the United States. “The Latino Threat Narrative” is alive and real and it can be seen through different methods. One way, as I described beforehand, is erasing Chicanxs from U.S. history. I think the U.S. education system does this because Mexicans have, “desire to remain socially apart as they prepare for a reconquest of the U.S. Southwest” (Chavez, p. 3). The U.S. is in a way, scared because here comes a group of people who refuse to assimilate into the country’s culture, and hold on fiercely to their roots. If Mexicans are already doing this without the knowledge of their history, I don’t think the U.S. could handle a group of people refusing to abide to their rules if they knew how much history they really have. That is why the U.S. feels so threatened when young Latinxs students ask to be empowered, because the U.S. wants to maintain the oppressive power structures they have