What Do I Tell My Students? How Do I Protect Them?
As educators turn our thoughts toward the start of the school year, many of us are
focused on how to help our students understand the current wave of repression, how to
protect them and their families, and how to build solidarity, resilience and resistance. In
the next few issues of the CLES newsletter, we’ll feature interviews with educator
activists in different parts of the country with perspectives and ideas based on their work
on the ground.
For this issue, CLES communications team member Zainab Abdullah interviewed
Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, chair of the Association of Raza Educators (Los Angeles
chapter), co-founder of XOCHITL Los Angeles, founding member of the Liberated Ethnic
Studies Model Curriculum Coalition, and a proud member of Union del Barrio. She has been
a high school educator for 25 years and adjunct lecturer since 2018.
“The attack on Ethnic Studies is really an attack on the truth of what’s going on in the world. As I look at it, there are a couple of camps: You've got the people who totally understand what’s happening here and internationally, and they’re happy because it benefits them. They’re doing everything they can to keep that going forward, like with this big, ugly bill that just passed. And then there's a large population of folks who don't understand, maybe because they didn't take Ethnic Studies in school.
So it's very easy for them to fall into the trap of “people are stealing jobs” or “they don't belong here, they’re foreigners”—the ideology that whole peoples are inherently criminal, inherently primitive, inherently lazy. But once those people are exposed to truth and understanding, and have language to express it, then there’s hope. With no Ethnic Studies K-12, you get have to get a college degree to understand these things. They are very deliberately trying to keep this knowledge from people. And that’s ridiculous.” - Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona
Read this month’s feature “This Is a Modern-Day Indian Removal” An Interview with Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, by Zainab Abdullah here.
