Initiative aims to recognize contributions of Hispanics

Hispanic members of the State Board of Education will announce an initiative today on the UTB-TSC campus to require Texas’ public school curriculum to properly acknowledge the contributions Hispanics, women and native Americans.

State board members Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, Rene Nuñez of El Paso and Rick Agosto of San Antonio, will join historians, history professors and other experts at a 10 a.m. news conference in the courtyard of the Education and Business Complex at UTB-TSC to announce plans to push for an inclusive Texas curriculum.

The problem is well documented, said Julio Noboa, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College who helped organize the event, and whose book, “Leaving Latinos out of History: Teaching U.S. History in Texas” documents the extent to which Hispanics have been ignored.

“One of the most shocking omissions is that in all of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills curriculum for U.S. history, the term Hispanic, Latino, Mexican or Mexican American is never mentioned,” Noboa said.

Another example is the American Civil Rights Movement, which lists only the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and makes no mention of United Farmworkers Union founder Cesar Chavez, or William C. Velasquez, whose Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project registered thousands of Hispanic voters across the Southwest “and changed the whole political dynamic,” Noboa said.

“Henry Cisneros is not mentioned either, and he obviously should be mentioned,” Noboa said, pointing out that the former San Antonio mayor and president of Univision is a direct beneficiary of those same Southwest voter registration drives.

Every subject area has its own Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. Noboa said the goal of the initiatives to be launched today is to require the TEKS for each subject to recognize the contributions of Hispanics, women, native Americans and all other minorities.