Among its 500 pages, the textbook “Mexican American Heritage” states, “Chicanos, on the other hand, adopted a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society.”
This statement is one of hundreds questioned by an ad hoc committee, created by District 2 State Board of Education member Ruben Cortez, which led to the board’s unanimous rejection of the book on Nov. 18.
“Our ultimate goal is really about bringing Mexican American studies to the schools but the textbook became this huge fight,” said Christopher Carmona, coordinator of UTRGV’s Mexican American Studies program in Brownsville and a creative writing assistant professor.
Carmona served on the ad hoc committee, along with 21 other university professors from across the state, that reviewed the textbook.
“Back in 2014, Ruben Cortez … put forth a proclamation to create a stand-alone Mexican American studies course in the public school system in high schools,” Carmona said.
After it was denied, the state board issued a proclamation in 2015 seeking a textbook for the course. No books were presented until another proclamation was issued in 2016.
The only text submitted was “Mexican American Heritage,” published by Momentum Instruction LLC. Cynthia Dunbar, a former State Board of Education member, is CEO of Momentum Instruction.
When the committee first reviewed the text, they found about 140 factual errors, Carmona said.
He assisted in reviewing the textbook’s rhetoric and discussion questions at the end of each chapter.
“Those discussion questions are important because that’s where actual critical thinking skills are applied,” Carmona said. “A lot of those questions were based on logical fallacies. They were based on what we would call leading questions.”
An example he gave was the question, “Is Chicano Studies beneficial to Mexican Americans?”
Carmona said it was a question that was fine until the question that followed asks how Cesar Chavez challenges this view.
“What that does, when you put those two questions together, it makes you believe that he challenged those, which he never did,” Carmona said. “That’s just one example of what these questions were doing. It leads you to start to question what, actually, was not true.”
He said the committee “also found that the textbook, itself, was blatantly following a racist ideology.”
This ideology, Carmona said, mirrors that of scholar Samuel P. Huntington, who wrote a book titled, “Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.”
The thesis of Huntington’s book centers on the idea that Latinos are an “existential threat to the United States, to the American system [and] our system,” Carmona said.
In a preliminary hearing held in September, the first findings of factual errors were reported and Momentum Instruction was given a chance to revise the errors and resubmit the textbook.
“We were reviewing the publisher’s responses to our initial findings of errors,” said Emilio Zamora, a University of Texas at Austin history professor, member of the ad hoc committee and coordinator for the second review. “We found well over 400 errors during the second review of the responses through our findings of error. It was at a 48 percent error rate during the second review.”
A second ad hoc committee report, written by Zamora, noted the error rate increase and was presented to Cortez on Nov. 15.
The Rider requested an interview with Dunbar, but she did not reply.
For the 2018 Proclamation, the board asked authors and publishers to submit books related to Mexican American studies for the next academic year. A letter of intent must be submitted by Jan. 27.
Zamora is co-writing a textbook for this proclamation with Andres Tijerina, a history professor at Austin Community College.
“Three other authors are joining us; we haven’t selected them yet,” Zamora said. “It’ll be a history of Mexican Americans in Texas and it’ll have a supplement that will focus on historical figures and events in the history of Texas.”
