JE#2

This prompt is my motivation to learn everything that there is to know about all things Chicana/o, the border, and Tejas.  I remember sitting in my Texas History class in the seventh grade and feeling ashamed of my dirty brown skin when the teacher, Mr. La Chica (a Chicano with even darker skin), proceeded to teach us all about the Battle of the Alamo.  Until I took a Chicana/o Studies course, the Battle of the Alamo is always framed as a Mexican invasion of Texas, of the tyrannical General Santa Anna (I have never seen a different adjective used to describe him) and the Mexican army attacking the noble, brave Texans.  Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and Stephen F. Austin are Texas deities.  I remember Mr. La Chica saying that Mexicans should be ashamed of killing these heroes of Texas.  I felt that shame so deeply that I wanted to be Caucasian.  I will never forget that feeling of self-loathing.  Now that I have recovered much of my historical memory, I am passionate about knowing everything about Chicana/o history, particularly about El Paso and the rest of Tejas.  Of course, I did not learn anything in school that is in de Leon’s text.  I learned through family cuentos and my own lived experiences, (“Of course Omar got a ‘C’ in Language Arts, Mrs. GUN-ZAWL-ES.  Little Mexican boys never do well in Language Arts.”)  The exclusion of the landmark case Mendez v. Westminster is another example of how mainstream U.S. culture enforces historical amnesia.  It is a travesty that most K-12 schools do not teach the details surrounding this case.  This case preceded the universally known Brown v. Board of Education; however, because this country views the concept of race as a binary, textbooks sweep Mendez under the carpet as inconsequential.  This is similar to David Dorado Romo’s example of the case of Carmelita Torres in 1917.  She was the original Rosa Parks.  However, Torres remains obscure in the rubble of forgotten histories.