By Marcelo Garzo Montalvo
North County San Diego high school districts have been working to prepare for the rollout of AB101 — the statewide Ethnic Studies requirement.
As an Ethnic Studies scholar from North County and an alumnus of San Dieguito Union High School District, I have some profound concerns about how this curriculum will be delivered in our communities.
My primary concern emerges from witnessing the persistent inexperience and unfamiliarity with Ethnic Studies as a legitimate and well-established field of study, a dynamic that can lead to the continual dilution and distortion of the aims and approaches of this unique discipline.
I ask that teachers, parents, board members, and administrators seek training in this groundbreaking academic field before making consequential decisions that shape this crucial new curriculum. The Ethnic Studies requirement should not be treated as a burden but as an opportunity to truly shift the paradigm of education in our communities.
As a long-term student and teacher of Ethnic Studies, I recognize, along with many of my colleagues, this historical pattern of dilution. As an educator, I have seen these same struggles play out in high schools, community centers, prisons and universities.
Ethnic Studies represents a fundamental critique of power, and thus, the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies has been shaped by a long series of compromises.
One of the most basic compromises perhaps begins with the fact that the term “Ethnic Studies” itself is actually a misnomer. That is, it is an inaccurate, perhaps misleading, term to describe the original project of the 1968-69 Third World Liberation Fronts at SFSU and UC Berkeley.
These student movements — eruptions of youth rebellion that were firmly rooted in global calls for decolonization and anti-imperial struggle — demanded interdisciplinary fields of Black Studies, Native American Studies, Asian American Studies and Chicano Studies.
Collectively, these fields were referred to as “Third World Studies,” a radical knowledge project that is defined by a comparative and critical engagement with white supremacy, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and other global structures of power, privilege and oppression. The high school Ethnic Studies requirement has no other origin besides these original student movements and their relevant demands.
In other words, Ethnic Studies is not simply the study of ethnicity and ethnic communities per se but instead must be understood as a field whose primary purpose is to develop a robust and interdisciplinary analysis of power.
Ethnic Studies should not be confused with parallel projects of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. It is not cultural competency, nor is it a depoliticized celebration of ethnic traditions. Of course, ethnic studies curricula include some of this content, but only insofar as they further and deepen an understanding of underlying structures of power.
To be sure, the Ethnic Studies requirement is not simply asking us to include more content about communities of color or to add more authors of color to the existing curricula. It is an invitation to reimagine the shape and purpose of education from the bottom up, bringing into question the pedagogies (ways of teaching), methodologies (ways of studying) and epistemologies (ways of knowing) that undergird dominant paradigms of education and schooling, from kindergarten to PhD.
Thus, as California rolls out Ethnic Studies requirements without a firm root, training, or historical memory of this lineage of Third World Studies, we run the risk of reproducing a sort of deception — of continuing to stifle and distort a path-breaking academic field that will undoubtedly shape the future of education.
Part of the promise of Ethnic Studies — and the positive impact that has been demonstrated both academically and socially — comes from the empowerment of students to become agents of change as they transform themselves and their communities through a socially engaged curriculum.
To do this, Ethnic Studies must remain pedagogically rooted in the three guiding principles of the 1968-69 TWLF strikes: solidarity, self-determination and relevant education. Student strikers explicitly derived these principles from their participation in the grassroots social movements of the time: the international movement against the war in Vietnam and revolutionary movements for Chicano, Asian American, American Indian and Black Power.
Each of these movements was, and continues to be, stigmatized, criminalized and targeted for their militancy and radicalism. They are dismissed, censored, silenced, erased, banned.
However, for those who support and believe in the promise of Ethnic Studies (especially in these uncertain times), AB101’s mandate must be understood as a truly unique opportunity, perhaps the only time in the history of California’s public schools statewide, to genuinely integrate and center these silenced voices, these perspectives “from below.”
Marcelo Garzo Montalvo, PhD is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at CSU San Marcos
*Editor’s note: The previous headline for this commentary, “Do ethnic studies right,” was selected by The Coast News editorial staff, not the author.
