We have to get involved! Open Educational Resources to Address Police Violence Against Latinx in Spanish Language Education

 Tania Avilés Vergara

Introduction

Around the time that I started compiling this annotated bibliography, Adam Toledo, a 13-year old Latino kid, was killed by the police in Chicago. Before Adam’s death, I had the sense that acts of police violence against Latinx communities did not receive as much attention as the ones perpetrated against Black communities in the United States. 

With this concern in mind, I taught Spanish for bilingual students (traditionally called “Spanish for heritage students”) in the Spring 2021 semester at Lehman College, CUNY. While discussing a reading about the emergent Latinx movement led by Generation Z, I asked my students to what extent the Black Lives Matter movement might ally itself with the Latinx movement, considering that blackness has been a part of latinidad since the early history of slavery in La Española (today’s República Dominicana). While discussing this question, a student who self-identified as Afrolatina stated that the movement’s goals were different, because Black Lives Matter was specifically about police brutality while Latinx communities were not subject to this type of violence. After the class, I Googled the topic and several headlines came up, confirming my initial intuitions: “Why aren't more people talking about Latinos killed by police…”; “Police killings of Latinos lack attention, say activists…”; “We’re suffering the same abuses…”

Based on this experience, in considering current acts of police violence against Latinx people, my goal is to raise historical and present-day awareness about police violence against these communities within the context of Spanish language instruction. By embracing an interdisciplinary sociopolitical approach to language education (Leeman and Fuller 2020), I believe that addressing episodes of police violence against Latinx communities in Spanish language education will help students develop a critical understanding of the historical, social and linguistic issues related to speaking Spanish in the US. 

I believe it is our responsibility as community members and educators to amplify these stories but also, and more importantly, to shed light on the historic nature of current acts of state violence against Latinx people. Following Ed Morales (2019), the lack of attention to these episodes is anchored in a black-white binary, shaping race discourse throughout American history. Latinx communities, neither simply black or white, have been considered outsiders - despite their 500-year presence in the Northern hemisphere (1). One way to push back against the perpetual perception of Latinx people and their languages as foreign is to center Latinx history in the Spanish classroom -and to make it even more public and accessible through the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). As educators we can show, for example, that police violence against Latinx people has a relevant historical context - and therefore, that current acts of police violence are not isolated incidents, but are instead anchored in the fraught and ongoing dynamics of US racial history.   

As Aaron G. Fountain Jr. has expressed, “Much of this stems from Latinx history absence in school curriculum”. Inspired by his call and aligned with the CUNY OER initiatives attempting to “open” the curriculum, I offer guidelines, questions and open educational resources that Spanish language educators can use to address historical events of police violence against Latinx communities, while fostering students’ critical understanding about the historical roots of related contemporary acts. This bibliography takes as its starting point three historical episodes/ organizations that will help us understand the historical nature of police violence against Latinx communities: the Zoot Suit Riots (1943), the strike of the United Farm Workers (1966-1970), and the activism of the Young Lords political organization (1968). In order to center these issues in Spanish language instruction, I suggest ways to link together language and racial discrimination (to learn more about the raciolinguistics approach), and pose questions as starting points to highlight both the metalinguistic and racial dimension texturing these episodes and demonstrating the commitments of these pivotal activist groups.     

Before annotating the materials, I would like to briefly discuss the use of English in Spanish language instruction –especially in elementary and intermediate levels– to address police brutality against Latinx. As Del Valle (2014: 370) has stated, in order to push in the direction of content-based language instruction and develop students’ critical knowledge about the historical, social and political issues related to Spanish in the US, we need to intervene at the curricular level. Incorporating OER is one way to address this, but another would be to abandon the exclusive use of Spanish in the classroom. While addressing police violence against Latinx populations in a lesson plan, a unit or as an entire syllabi, I call on Spanish language educators to take advantage of our students’ multilingual repertoires in order to perform socially responsive pedagogies while fostering critical knowledge about this sensitive topic.   

Can the law work? by Pete Garcia in El Grito del Norte, February 28th, 1971

Source: Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980. 

I. The Zoot Suit Riots

The Zoot Suit Riots took place in June, 1943, against the backdrop of American involvement in WWII. For nearly a week, US servicemen and police officers harassed, beat and detained hundreds of Mexican American Youth in East Los Angeles. The riots were the result of racial tensions in Los Angeles, CA, between young white Americans, most of them serving in the US army, and Mexican-Americans who participated in the zoot suit fashion, i.e. an oversized suit tapered at the ankles and often worn by Black jazz musicians. Because of wartime restrictions, the zoot suits, which used large amounts of fabric, were seen as frivolous, wasteful, and unpatriotic. 

Most of the OER about the topic are focused on the causes of the Zoot Suit Riots and the multiple ways in which these events were accounted in newspapers: 

The Stanford History Education Group has developed the lesson plan “Zoot Suit Riots” within the project Reading Like a Historian (learn more about the teaching strategies and goals). The lesson plan is an OER, although educators will have to register on the website to access the materials. The main question addressed is “What caused the Zoot Suit Riots?”. The lesson includes key pieces of historical information to contextualize the events, and requests students to analyze two different newspaper accounts about the riots: The LA Times and La Opinión. In the assignment, students have to research background information about the newspapers in order to understand their positions. 

Spanish language educators can assign as previous reading the piece by Antonio Franco, “Threads of the Zoot Suit Riots: How the initial explanations for the riots hold up today” (in particular the sections “Early Media Explanations” and “Explanations from Mexican Americans”) to better understand the stance the local newspapers took regarding the events. Later, students need to identify the causes of the riots, and identify supporting evidence offered by the sources. While reflecting on the causes, Spanish language educators can direct students’ attention to identity issues that might be explicit or implicit in the newspapers accounts, such as race, language, social class, etc. Moreover, educators can critically reflect on the role of the police and their behaviour during the riots, as described in the newspaper accounts. To finish, educators can add a post-reflection activity about the role of the press during the Zoot Suit Riots. 

Key questions:

1. What identity issues could have triggered the riots and violence, according to the newspaper accounts?
2. How would you describe the behaviour and attitude of the police, according to the newspaper accounts?
3. What role did the media play during the Zoot Suit Riots? 
4. What connections can we establish between the ways in which the media portrayed zoot suiters and the current portrayal of Mexican immigrants?  
5. What are the social responsibilities of the media in society? In what ways can the media contribute to foster racial equity? 

The Latino Americans 500 years of history project by Humanities Texas in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Library Association (ALA), developed a lesson plan (7-12) about the Zoot Suit Riots (lesson II) linked to the episode 3, “War and Peace” of the six-part, NEH-suported documentary Latino Americans. The lesson plan, which can be adapted for elementary and intermediate levels of Spanish, complements the analysis of primary sources with photographs and the documentary episode to build background knowledge (more photographs can be found in Calisphere by the University of California under the search term ‘Zoot Suit Riots’). 

The lesson plan includes a more diverse set of primary sources such as newspaper accounts, official declarations, oral history interviews and a letter to the editor. Metalinguistic aspects to be addressed in Spanish language education are the ways in which the zoot suiters’ identity and language use is portrayed in the media and by the zoot suiters themselves in the documentary. For example, in the primary source worksheet “Youth gangs leading cause of delinquencies” (Los Angeles Times, 1943), the fact that the zoot suiters’ parents did not speak English was identified as a factor leading to the formation of gangs (p. 12). On the other hand, Mike Villalobos, a zoot suiter interviewed in the documentary, highlights the use of Spanish as a mark of identity and solidarity among zoot suiters. 

Key questions: 

1. Why was speaking Spanish at home conceived as the source of gang affiliation in Los Angeles?
2. What was the function of the Spanish language among zoot suiters?  
3. Why does Mike Villalobos call their language “slang”? 

While reading the primary and secondary sources, students will encounter the term pachuco(s), used in the era to refer to Mexican-Americans. The term pachuco was the name given by outsiders to those who wore zoot suits and joined gangs (although not all those described as pachucos met the latter condition). Spanish language educators can address the history and social content of the term using the article “Diferencias en las denominaciones de la comunidad méxico-americana” by Alejandra Sánchez Valencia, section “Definición de pachuco”, pp. 122-125.

 The analysis of the Spanish word pachuco can be inscribed in a reflection about the intersections between language, practices and distinctive clothing in the case of Zoot suiters. In this reflection, educators might want to include photographs from Calisphere by the University of California (search for “pachucos”). In addition, “The Myth Still Lives: Pachuco subculture and Symbolic Styles of Resistance” by Lauren Becker offers a detailed analysis of the origins of the zoot suit style and its connection with the word pachuco.    

Key questions: 

1. What is in the name pachuco? What meanings/connotations are associated with the word pachuco? Elaborate, keeping in mind the Zoot suiter’s perspective and the outsider/ mainstream perspective.
2. To what extent was the pachucos' fashion style and language a political act? Do you identify tones of resistance in the Zoot suit fashion?  

We suggest expanding the contextual clues offered in the previous lessons with OER in US history to highlight the multiple causes and influences triggering the riots such as the Jazz Age (1919-1929), the New Deal policies after the Great Depression (1932-1941), the bracero program, and US participation in WWII (1941-1945). In addition, the unit “War on the Home Front: Politics and the Zoot suit” by Natalia Baldwin develops a background/content section that will help students understand the complex social and political issues of the WWII home front. In a similar vein, the OER article by Antonio Franco “Threads of the Zoot Suit Riots: How the initial explanations for the riots hold up today” complements the previous sources with detailed historical data about media portrayal and police violence. 

II. The United Farm Workers

During the 1960s, within the context of the Civil Rights Movement, the Filipino American labor organizer Larry Itliong, alongside Dolores Huerta and César Chávez, both Mexican-American activists, founded the United Farm Workers (1966, California). The union sought to organize migrant farm workers in California to request improvement of their labor conditions and legal protections, as farm workers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The union was committed to nonviolent protest and publicizing la causa (the cause) to raise national awareness about the working conditions in the grape farms in Delano. 

Most of the OER about the topic are focused on the strategies and development of la huelga (strikes) and the grape boycott: 

The Digital Public Library of Americas has developed a Primary Source Set, “The United Farm Workers and the Delano Grape Strike”, including photographs, an excerpt from an FBI report (more FBI reports are available in the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project), flyers and posters (all in English). Through this set of primary sources, it is possible to address multiple topics such as the working conditions of farm workers, the security concerns during the Cold War, the support by public figures such as Robert F. Kennedy, and the propaganda strategies. The open resource is a valuable starting point to immerse students in the strike motivations and development, although two aspects are missing: first, to contextualize the strike and grape boycott within the Civil Rights Movement and, most importantly, to highlight the police brutality that workers faced during the strike and boycott.

Regarding the Civil Rights Movement, two OER chapters on US history recognize The Latino Movement (Social Revolution), and The Mexican American Fight for Civil Rights (The Civil Rights Movement Marches on) as specific episodes within the broader movement. These readings are useful, as a starting point, to contextualize the Civil Rights Movement and to highlight the Mexican American activism within it. 

Many episodes of police violence against la causa were denounced in El Malcriado, the United Farm Workers newspaper, available online in the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project. The collection compiles print volumes, in Spanish and English, from 1965 to 1975, plus the Malcriado flyers. The primary sources, especially those in Spanish, are valuable to address police violence during the strike and boycott, since the newspaper amplified and denounced these acts. 

While the size of the archive can seem daunting, educators can start exploring the sources by language and year depending on the class level and pedagogical goals. Moreover, the PDFs have optical character recognition (OCR), making the search more manageable. As an example, El Malcriado 15 (1968), in Spanish highlights a protest in Delano against police violence in the area, as well as the case of Jesús Salas, who was arrested for protesting outside a Kohl’s store in Milwaukee. El Malcriado is also a valuable source to show the tensions among community members who supported the police instead of the farm workers’ movement (El Malcriado, 1965, no. 15). If educators are interested in offering a comparative perspective, the archive also includes notes from the New York Times (1965-2005) referring to the UFW. 

Key questions

1. Why do you think the United Farm Workers titled their newspaper El Malcriado? What was the role of El Malcriado within the movement? (before doing this reflection it is crucial to unpack the meaning of the Spanish word ‘malcriado’) 
2. How did community members talk about police brutality in El Malcriado? 
3. What pros and cons do you think the use of Spanish in El Malcriado had for the UFW? 
4. What strategies and/or action plans did the UFW take to resist and denounce police violence? 
5. What connections can we establish between these and current police violence episodes? 

Beatriz Barajas-Gonzalez provides educators with a powerpoint presentation highlighting key aspects of the history of Mexican migrant farm workers and César Chávez, which I consider very useful for educators to contextualize the episode. The presentation also includes corridos lyrics to analyze and discuss with students, among other primary sources. Although Barajas-Gonzalez’s lesson plans are for elementary school students, I believe these lessons are adaptable for introductory Spanish classes. For example, the “Corrido de la Causa” lyrics can be used as a reading combined with its musical interpretation, available in the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project. 

In this piece, police violence is implicitly addressed in specific verses, such as “Nos mandaron a la cárcel esa compañía de ricos” (46) (“Those rich people incarcerated us”). Other lyrics allow for a metalinguistic reflection: “Veinte patrullas llegaron repartiendo unos papeles / Como estaban en inglés se los tiramos al suelo / hablan de leyes injustas que nos ha puesto el ranchero” (46) (Twenty patrolmen arrived distributing flyers / since the flyers were written in English / we threw them out/ the flyers talk about unfair laws imposed by the rancher”). 

Key questions

1. What connections can we make between English and the power represented by the police and law enforcement?
2. Why does the UFW choose music to critique authority? 

The strike and boycott required carrying signs and publicizing la causa. The United Farm Workers deliberately used posters and banners that included Spanish words and phrases. The photograph collection “Struggles for Social Justice” includes one image from pickets in the grape California fields, in which workers carry signs that read “Huelga” (strike). Felicia Viano, while researching the strategic use of art in the Delano Grape Boycott, documents a poster using ‘huelga’ as well as cartoons. These materials can be complemented with the Farmworker Movement Online Gallery available in the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project. 

Key questions

1. Why did the strikers use Spanish instead of English in their signs and graphic art? 
2. How do you think different audiences would have reacted to the use of Spanish? (think in the workers, the farm owners, the politicians, the broader national public, etc.)

III. The Young Lords

The Young Lords Organization (YLO) was first established in Chicago, 1968, and was led by activist Cha Cha Jiménez, who organized the group to fight local gentrification, police brutality and racism against the Puerto Rican community of Lincoln Park. A year later, the New York chapter (also known as the Young Lords Party, or YLP) was founded, including among its members Puerto Rican youth, other Latinx New Yorkers and African Americans. The YLP was active for approximately three years, supporting anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist politics, and fighting against inequality affecting Puerto Ricans and POC in El Barrio (East Harlem) and the South Bronx. 

In contrast to the previous cases in this annotated bibliography, OER and lesson plans about the YLP are scarce. 

The Activist New York website, in collaboration with the exhibition Activist New York at the Museum of the City of New York, explores the history of activism in New York City from the 1600s through today. The website offers lesson plans to support instructors interested in using primary sources to teach about social activism. Organized around topics such as Immigration, Gender Equality and Economics Rights, among others, the lessons include primary sources, vocabulary lists, document-based questions, timelines and background information. 

Economics Rights includes a lesson about the Young Lords’ activism against health inequalities affecting POC in the South Bronx. The lesson “Power to All Oppressed People: The Young Lords in New York, 1969-1976” will lead students to investigate the intersections between health and racial justice, and the creative strategies that the Young Lords used to demand proper health care for Puerto Ricans, African Americans and other communities of color. While introducing the Young Lords’ Health Activism (p. 5), Spanish instructors can direct the student’s attention to the linguistic discrimination Puerto Ricans faced in NYC and the role of Spanish in campaigns calling for improved health services. They can also use the current pandemic as a case study to reflect on the need of Spanish linguistic services in healthcare. 

Key questions 

1. Why were Puerto Ricans facing linguistic discrimination in NYC? What do you think was the justification for this type of discrimination? 
2. What type of linguistic services were the Young Lords requesting in their campaigns to improve health services for people of color?
3. What linguistic services are available today in healthcare institutions? Do you think the Young Lords activism had an impact on this issue?

While discussing the X-Ray Truck II (1970) (pp. 6-7), in the lesson “Power to All Oppressed People: The Young Lords in New York, 1969-1976”, Spanish instructors can add a research activity to delve deeper into the figure of Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827-1898), a 19th-century Puerto Rican revolutionary and antislavery physician, after whom the Young Lords renamed a health truck they seized. 

Key questions

1. Who was Ramón Emeterio Betances and why did the Young Lords rename the seized health truck after him? 
2. What ideals and visions might Betances and the Young Lords have had in common?

In the same lesson plan is the “Garbage Offensive” of 1969 (pp. 8-9), an activist event in which the Young Lords forced the NYC Sanitation Department to clean the streets in East Harlem (also known as Spanish Harlem). Here, Spanish educators can add one further question to direct students' attention to the police presence during the event. 

Key questions 

1. How would you describe the police stance in the image? (p. 9). 
2. Why do you think the police were present during the event? 
3. How would you describe the relationship between the community members participating in the Garbage Offensive and the police in the image? What do you imagine happened after?

The Young Lords’ “13 Point Platform”(1969), a primary source in the same lesson plan, is an extract from the New York’s Young Lords newspaper Palante (Spanish for “forward” or “right on”). The primary source is crucial to understand the Young Lords activist goals, especially their radical internationalism and their stance regarding Puerto Rico’s independence struggle. The document-based questions do a great job in directing students' attention to the language use and tone in the piece. We suggest adding a critical reflection on the use of Spanish in the document along with other stylistic choices. Moreover, Spanish instructors can reflect on point six, “We want a true education of our creole culture and Spanish language”, and add questions regarding the role of Spanish in the Young Lords ideal society as it is described in their goals.   

Key questions

1. What is creole culture? Why do the Young Lords call their culture “a creole”?
2. What is the role of the Spanish language in the ideal society, according to the Young Lords’ 13 point program?
3. Do you think the “socialist society” described by the 13 point program is possible? 
4. What points of the 13 point program might still be desirable in our current society? What actions would you endorse to achieve these ideals?

The lesson plan by the Activist New York website might need more historical and background information regarding the origins and political influences of the Young Lords activism. The previous analysis of primary sources can be complemented with OER readings such as The Young Lords and the social and structural roots of late sixties urban radicalism by Johanna Fernandez. In her piece, Fernandez outlines the historical origins of the Young Lords organization, paying close attention to the social changes in urban settings caused by WWII. In addition, Spanish educators can assign the short piece Boricua Cultural Nationalism and Community Development Through the Young Lords Organization by Julia Aragón, in which she offers key pieces of context regarding Puerto Ricans in the United States, and the Young Lords connections with the Black Panthers.

To contextualize the Young Lords activism and community-based actions in New York City, Spanish instructors can assign a reading about the Civil Rights Movement available in the OER text U.S. History. Following Tommy Ender, we suggest questioning the previous reading as it implies that the Civil Rights Movement did not happen in New York. Moreover, although the chapter includes actors such as César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, there is a minimal representation of Latino Civil rights movement in the literature. 

Key questions   

1. Why do the Civil rights movement accounts erase Latino activism and organization in the NYC area? 
2. What new visions, experiences and actors did the Young Lords activism bring to the Civil Rights Movement?
3. What is the legacy of the Young Lords’ activism against urban poverty and racial justice in NYC? What can we learn from the Young Lords’ activism to fight against current issues of gentrification, health inequality and urban poverty facing Latinx communities?

To continue thinking...  

The three events covered in this bibliography are all anchored in crucial moments of 20th-century US history directly related to the country’s involvement in international conflicts such as WWII and the Cold War. At the same time that the US was solidifying its presence on the global stage, on the home front Latinx communities were increasingly perceived as a racial Other to be fought against, instead of as a constitutive part of American society. As a result, Latinx communities actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement, even if, as this exploration reveals, there is scant literature available about this participation, and especially regarding activism in NYC within this context. Nevertheless, throughout decades of racial and linguistic violence, Latinx communities and other people of color did forge interracial solidarity bonds to resist and denounce racial discrimination and inequality. 

I started this annotated bibliography thinking about the potential allyship between Latinx and African American communities. I realize now that allyship is not in the future but in the past and the present, and thus at the core, of US history. Our role as educators, then, is to point out these networks of resistance and solidarity as already-existing movements, which we can look to as examples for envisioning and enacting social and racial activism in the 21st century. 

My final call is that “We have to get involved” and amplify Latinx histories of violence in Spanish education, because, as I have tried to show, it is in language where acts of resistance take foremost place. One way to do this is by using the OER materials compiled in this selection: readily available, valuable work that engages with marginalized and underrepresented US histories. In doing so, we as educators can help students of all backgrounds develop not just linguistic but also historical knowledge, by providing new appreciations of the centrality of the Latinx experience within US history and by offering students opportunities to reflect on their own histories. 

So, let’s get involved in redirecting our students’ attention to issues of police violence and linguistic discrimination affecting Latinx communities. Only in this way might history be a resource for intervening in the present and, hopefully, opening the door to alternative futures.    

Tania Avilés-Vergara is a Ph.D candidate in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures, Hispanic Sociolinguistics track, at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation examines familial letter writing as a social practice among the lower ranks of Chilean society during its nation state building process (1879-1937). Tania is currently a PublicsLab Fellow at the PublicsLab, The Graduate Center, and an Adjunct professor in Lehman College, CUNY, where she teaches Spanish language, Advanced Grammar and Hispanic Linguistics.