Mexican American Studies Department Programs, Tucson Unified School District
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Mexican American Studies Department Programs, Tucson Unified School District
The Mexican American Studies Department Programs (MAS) provide courses for students attending various elementary, middle, and high schools within the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD). Some key components of the MAS program include student support, curriculum content, teacher professional development, and parent and community involvement. In the past, programs helped Chicana/o and Latina/o students graduate, pursue higher education, and score higher test scores. A study found that "100 percent of those students enrolled in Mexican-American studies classes at Tucson High were graduating, and 85 percent were going on to college." The program was targeted by politicians like Tom Horne, who wrote Arizona House Bill 2281 that was signed into law by the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer in 2010, which effectively banned the program. The ban was ultimately ruled unconstitutional in 2017. The ban of the programs also inspired educators in California and Texas to introduce ethnic studie ...
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Tucson Unified School District
Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) is the largest school district of Tucson, Arizona, in terms of enrollment. Dr. Gabriel Trujillo is the superintendent, appointed on September 12, 2017 by the Governing Board. As of 2016, TUSD had more than 47,670 students. As of Fall 2012, according to Superintendent John Pedicone (on the 9/14/2012 Buckmaster Show), TUSD had 50,000 students. District enrollment has declined over the last 10 years and TUSD lost 1,700 to 2,000 students per year for the two or three years prior to 2012. Area The district boundaries encompass Tucson, South Tucson, Drexel Heights, and Valencia West. Parts of Tucson Estates, Catalina Foothills and Tanque Verde are also within the district, as well as a few unincorporated parts of Pima County that do not fall within the confines of a Census Designated Place. TUSD is currently under a federal desegregation order to help balance district schools in terms of race and ethnicity. The district was established a ...
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Elizabeth Martínez
Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez (December 12, 1925 – June 29, 2021) was an American Chicana feminist and a long-time community organizer, activist, author, and educator. She wrote numerous books and articles on different topics relating to social movements in the Americas. Her best-known work is the bilingual ''500 years of Chicano History in Pictures'', which later formed the basis for the educational video ''¡Viva la Causa! 500 Years of Chicano History''. Her work was hailed by Angela Y. Davis as comprising "one of the most important living histories of progressive activism in the contemporary era ... artínez isinimitable ... irrepressible ... indefatigable." Life Martínez was the daughter of Manuel Guillermo Martinez and Ruth Philips Martínez. Her parents nicknamed her "Betita" for short. She grew up in a middle class predominately white neighborhood in Washington, D.C. because her father worked as a secretary in the Mexican Embassy. Her mother, Ruth Philips Martínez, re ...
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Luis Valdez
Luis Miguel Valdez (born June 26, 1940) is an American playwright, screenwriter, film director and actor. Regarded as the father of Chicano film and theater, Valdez is best known for his play '' Zoot Suit'', his movie '' La Bamba'', and his creation of El Teatro Campesino. A pioneer in the Chicano Movement, Valdez broadened the scope of theatre and arts of the Chicano community. Biography Early life Valdez was born in Delano, California, to migrant farm worker parents from Mexico, Armeda and Francisco Valdez. The second of 10 children in his family, Valdez began to work the fields at the age of 6. One of his brothers is actor Daniel Valdez. Throughout his childhood, the family moved from harvest to harvest around the central valleys of California. Due to this peripatetic existence, he attended many different schools before the family finally settled in San Jose, California. Education Valdez began school in Stratford, California. His interest in theatre began in the fir ...
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Roberto Cintli Rodríguez
Roberto Cintli Rodríguez is a columnist, author, and academic of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. On March 23, 1979, Rodriguez was taking photos on the corner of Whittier Boulevard and McDonnell Avenue in East Los Angeles for ''Lowrider Magazine'' and captured the assault of an innocent man by members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. The last photo Rodriguez took was of a police officer pointing directly at him. Soon after, the officers attacked him, confiscated his camera and film, and beat him so badly that he spent three days in the Los Angeles County Hospital. While preparing to leave the hospital, Rodriguez was placed under arrest for allegedly assaulting the officers with a "deadly weapon." Rodriguez suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and lost the ability to dream in the aftermath of the incident. From 1979 to 1986, Rodriguez sought justice in court for this incident, which involved two trials and eventually won his case. Rodr ...
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Matt De La Peña
Matthew de la Peña is an American writer of children's books who specializes in novels for young adults. He won the Newbery Medal in 2016 for his book '' Last Stop on Market Street''. Biography A San Diego, California, native, Matt de la Peña received his BA from University of the Pacific, which he attended on a basketball scholarship. He then received his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University. De la Peña wrote ''Mexican WhiteBoy'' in 2008, drawing on his own teenage passion for sports and Mexican heritage. The novel was banned from classrooms in Tucson, Arizona, starting in 2012, when lawmakers passed laws to remove materials containing "critical race theory," until 2017, when the court ruled the law violated the constitutional rights of Mexican American students. In 2016, de la Peña was honored with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) National Intellectual Freedom Award. In 2015, he wrote '' Last Stop on Market Street'' which won the 2016 ...
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Mexican WhiteBoy
''Mexican WhiteBoy'' is a 2008 novel by Matt de la Peña, published by Delacorte Press. De la Peña drew on his own adolescent passion for sports in developing his main character Danny, a baseball enthusiast. The novel, which is set in National City, California, uses Spanglish and has a bicultural theme. Plot Danny Lopez, the protagonist, is a shy and introverted young teenager from San Diego who attends Leucadia Prep. Danny is bi-ethnic, Mexican and white. He sometimes feels inadequate around both Mexican and white people because he is "a shade darker than the white kids" and "pale...a full shade lighter" than his Mexican family members. He also does not speak Spanish. The summer before his junior year, he goes to stay with his cousin Sofia and Uncle Tommy in National City, while his mom and sister move to San Francisco with his mom's new boyfriend. Throughout the summer, Danny becomes friends with Sofia's friends and the other kids in her neighborhood. While hanging wi ...
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The History Of The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun ''thee'') when followed by a ...
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Paulo Freire
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (19 September 1921 – 2 May 1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work ''Pedagogy of the Oppressed'' is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement, and was the third most cited book in the social sciences according to Google Scholar. Biography Freire was born on 19 September 1921 to a middle-class family in Recife, the capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. He became familiar with poverty and hunger from an early age as a result of the Great Depression. In 1931 his family moved to the more affordable city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, 18 km west of Recife. His father died on 31 October 1934. During his childhood and adolescence, Freire ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick-up football with other poor children, from whom he claims to have learned a great deal. These exper ...
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Pedagogy Of The Oppressed
''Pedagogy of the Oppressed'' ( pt, Pedagogia do Oprimido) is a book by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, written in Portuguese between 1967–68, but published first in Spanish in 1968. An English translation was published in 1970, with the Portuguese original being published in 1972 in Portugal, and then again in Brazil in 1974. The book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy, and proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. Dedicated to the oppressed and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. In the book, Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model of education" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. He argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. A ...
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Rethinking Columbus
Rethinking, reconsidering, or reconsideration, is the process of reviewing a decision or conclusion that has previously been made to determine whether the initial decision should be changed. Rethinking can occur immediately after a decision has been reached, or at any time thereafter. Informally, reconsidering a decision shortly after making it and before taking any action towards implementing it may be referred to as thinking twice or thinking again (most often phrased in the imperative, think twice or think again). In scholarship and academia In scholarship, arguments favoring new approaches to established ideas are often phrased as "rethinking" of those concepts, or as those concepts "reconsidered", suggesting that a different conclusion would have been reached if more information was available at the time the original concept was developed, or if certain ramifications of the original concept had been more fully thought out at the time of its conception. English professor Mark ...
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Rodolfo Gonzales
Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales (June 18, 1928 – April 12, 2005) was a Mexican-American boxer, poet, political organizer, and activist. He was one of many leaders for the Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado. The Crusade for Justice was an urban rights and Chicano cultural urban movement during the 1960s focusing on social, political, and economic justice for Chicanos.“The Crusade for Justice”, Blog, the1960bloggcu.wordpress.com Gonzales convened the first-ever Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in 1968, which was poorly attended due to timing and weather conditions. He tried again in March 1969, and established what is commonly known as the First Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. This conference was attended by many future Chicano activists and artists. It also birthed the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a pro-indigenist manifesto advocating revolutionary Chicano nationalism and self-determination for all Chicanos. Through the Crusade for Justice, Gonzales organized the Mexic ...
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