Over the years I included in my curriculum at Portland, Oregon Franklin High School examples of resistance, set up simulations and activities where students challenged the system or took on the roles of change-makers. Still, I sent too many students into the world as cynical young adults when what I wanted was to empower students to become active citizens — thinking critically about society, identifying its problems and working toward solutions. I wanted to start this school year with one hopeful story we could return to repeatedly. I found it in Salt of the Earth, a compelling and dramatic film that demonstrates alliances, solidarity, and resistance.

Film is in public domain. View Salt of the Earth or download free online at Internet Archive.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching For Equity and Justice (Volume 1). For more teaching activities like “Salt of the Earth: Grounds Students in Hope,” order Rethinking Our Classrooms with essays, teaching ideas, compelling classroom narratives, and hands-on examples.

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Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

Thus, the book features lessons and readings on the history of the border itself — the product of a war pursued by a slave-owning president, James K. Polk, who misrepresented intelligence, lied about his intentions, and provoked and invaded a sovereign country. The line between Mexico and the United States appears a bit less sacred when looked at in its historical context.

As lessons on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) reveal, the line between us has become less of a barrier to investment and trade. But the huge number of migrants seeking to cross the border is inexplicable without analyzing the impact of this so-called free trade. “The NAFTA Role Play” activities in the book aim to lay the groundwork for students to connect these phenomena. The link between trade and immigration may be news to some in the United States, but not to observers in Mexico. Three years before NAFTA took effect, José Luis Calva of the National University of Mexico, predicted, “If the governments and legislatures of the three countries [Mexico, the United States, and Canada] agree to liberalize trade in agricultural goods, U.S. citizens should be prepared to receive some 15 million Mexican migrants. The Border Patrol will be unable to detain them, and even a new iron curtain, rising on the border at a moment when the Cold War has given way to economic warfare among nations, will buckle under the weight of millions of Mexicans thrown off their lands by free trade.” Prescient remarks. Students need to explore these kinds of connections.

“Reading Chilpancingo,” “The Transnational Capital Auction,” and “Border Improvisations” encourage students to consider how intimate details of people’s lives are framed by the imperatives of a global economic system. The jobs that people have or don’t have in maquiladora zones along the U.S.–Mexico border, the wages they receive or, for that matter, the quality of the air they breathe and the water they drink, are connected to investment decisions in a global game of profit maximization.

This is the kind of historical and contextual inquiry that students need to engage in if they are to avoid the immigrant scapegoating that distorts so much thinking these days. It is also the approach that informs the lessons in this book.

The Line Between Us is about more than Mexican immigration and border issues. It’s about imaginative and creative teaching that gets students to care about the world. Using role plays, stories, poetry, improvisations, simulations and video, veteran teacher Bill Bigelow demonstrates how to combine lively teaching with critical analysis.

One of the lessons is tied directly to Chapter 8 of A People’s History of the United States, “We Take Nothing By Conquest, Thank God.”

The Line Between Us is ideal for teachers, adult educators, and community organizers.

Reviews

This is exactly what we need — teachings on Mexican migration to the U.S., one of the most vital issues we face today. It’s about the momentous clashes of economics, politics, and race. The Line Between Us has the clarity and weight to guide us through these complex and perplexing concerns. —Luis J. Rodríguez, Acclaimed author of Always Running and editor of the online Chicano magazine, Xispas.com

A greatly-needed guide to help break down the growing divisions in this country. As the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, remembering how the next-door neighbor’s Anglo daughter was not allowed to play with me, I can only wish young people had been exposed to the thought-provoking information and ideas contained in The Line Between Us. —Elizabeth (Betitta) Martínez, Chicana activist, educator, and author of 500 Años del Pueblo Chicano/500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures

At a time when we are increasingly separated by perceptions of ‘us and ‘them,’ The Line Between Us helps us understand the global ‘us.’ The book invites students to connect the dots between social, environmental, and political issues, and discover our common ground across borders. Equally important, it goes beyond exposing tragedy and suffering, and encourages students to discover hope and courage in stories of resistance. —Medea Benjamin, Co-founder, Global Exchange and Code Pink

ISBN: 9780942961317 | Rethinking Schools

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Aided by a popular and progressive young teacher, Sal Castro, Paula Crisostomo and a group of young Chicano activists battle parents, teachers, bureaucrats, the police and public opinion to make their point. Along the way, the students learn profound lessons about embracing their own identity and standing up for what they believe in. [Producer’s description.]

Promo Video

Walkout promo from Julian Rodriguez on Vimeo.

Historic Background from Democracy Now! (March, 26 2006):

The mass student walkouts this week across California and other states are not the first of their kind. In 1968, Chicano students in East Los Angeles staged a historic walkout in their high schools to protest academic prejudice and dire school conditions.

Students were forbidden from speaking Spanish in class or from using the restrooms during lunchtime. Schools taught a curriculum that largely ignored or denied Mexican-American history and Chicano students were steered toward menial labor and away from college by counselors and school officials.

In March 1968, the students decided to take a stand against the injustice and staged walkouts in schools across L.A. Many date the modern Chicano movement to the walkouts when some 20,000 teenagers took to the streets

Many of the students who participated in the walkouts went on to successful careers in politics, academia and the arts. One of them was Antonio Villaraigosa — he became the mayor of Los Angeles. Another was award-winning filmmaker Moctesuma Esparza, who was indicted for his role in organizing the walkouts. He is now executive producer of the HBO film about the 1968 protests simply titled Walkout.

Directed by Edward James Olmos and Robert M. Young | HBO

This film is currently available to watch on HBO Max and can also be purchased or rented from YouTube.

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Viva La Causa

The kit includes a 39-minute film on DVD and a 56-page teacher’s guide. Viva La Causa was produced for grades 7-12. [Producer’s description.]

Teachers can order this kit for free or download the free teachers guide.

Produced by Teaching Tolerance.

Watch Online

VIVA LA CAUSA from Profe Zawil on Vimeo.

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500 Years of Chicana Women’s History offers a powerful antidote to this omission with a vivid, pictorial account of struggle and survival, resilience and achievement, discrimination and identity. The bilingual text, along with hundreds of photos and other images, ranges from female-centered stories of pre-Columbian Mexico to profiles of contemporary social justice activists, labor leaders, youth organizers, artists, and environmentalists, among others. With a distinguished, seventeen-member advisory board, the book presents a remarkable combination of scholarship and youthful appeal.

In the section on jobs held by Mexicanas under U.S. rule in the 1800s, for example, readers learn about flamboyant Doña Tules, who owned a popular gambling saloon in Santa Fe, and Eulalia Arrilla de Pérez, a respected curandera (healer) in the San Diego area. Also covered are the “repatriation campaigns” of the Midwest during the Depression that deported both adults and children, 75 percent of whom were U.S.-born and knew nothing of Mexico. Other stories include those of the garment, laundry, and cannery worker strikes, told from the perspective of Chicanas on the ground. From the women who fought and died in the Mexican Revolution to those marching with their young children today for immigrant rights, every story draws inspiration. Like the editor’s previous book, 500 Years of Chicano History, this thoroughly enriching view of Chicana women’s history promises to become a classic. [Publisher’s description.]

About the Editor: Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez is a widely known Chicana writer, activist, and lecturer. Now director of the Institute for Multiracial Justice in San Franciso, she has published six books, most recently De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century.

ISBN: 9780813542249 | Rutgers University

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For one, the largest column on each page is reserved for the primary sources. The authors’ text, which provides a context for the primary sources, is in a narrow column. For another, the text begins with a description of the life for the masses of people in Europe before the conquest.

This counters the images students usually get when the stories are limited to the lives of the kings and queens. Finally, the bulk of the book describes resistance throughout the Americas to the invasion and the ongoing seizure of land and people. There are sections on African American resistance, Indigenous resistance, Central American resistance and resistance today. Illustrated with many engravings, prints, line drawings and photos.

ISBN: 0963102605 | Chicago Religious Task Force | Out of print (available used).

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Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed, writes in the foreword,

I opened a notebook, flipped to the first page of A Different Mirror, and began. Many hours later, as the summer sun had begun setting behind a thicket of campus trees, I was still there. I couldn’t stop. An endless succession of paragraphs had been underlined, hundreds of pages had been dog-eared, and my notebook was full of revelations, observations, arrows, and exclamation points. It was as if I had been thirsty my entire life and had finally been given water to drink. Takaki’s book was providing me with the tools I didn’t know I needed; it gave me a new historical framework with which to understand the landscape of American life.

I had previously read books that outlined the histories of particular ethnic groups, but I had never encountered a book that put the experiences of so many different types of Americans in conversation with one another. Under Takaki’s guidance, I was able to trace the intellectual throughlines that shaped Jefferson’s conception of Black American inferiority and Roosevelt’s belief in Japanese American disloyalty. I was able to establish clearer connections between the ideas that forced Native Americans off their land and those that brought in Chinese immigrants to build railroads across it. I was able to more fully understand the parallels of Mexican immigrants who generations ago had arrived at the southern border of the United States, and Irish immigrants who generations ago had arrive in the ports of Boston and New York.

With that said, one of the great strengths of A Different Mirror is that it does not allow comparison to slip into conflation. Takaki is careful as he threads his needle through history. He wants readers to understand the connections and overlapping histories that exist across different groups of Americans, but he is careful not to suggest that those histories are the same. It is the historical nuance and cultural dexterity with which Takaki writes that allows readers to make their own connections throughout the text. . . . .

Today we find ourselves in a moment when teaching history fully and accurately is being misrepresented by many as an ideological project rather than an honest one. There are state legislatures attempting to prevent teachers from teaching the very history that explains why our country looks the way that it does today. There are school boards banning books that provide students with perspectives from voices that are already on the peripheries of our country’s collective consciousness. It is more essential than ever that we have books that explain the history of this country in clear and forthright ways — books that don’t shirk from a certain part of history simply because some people might find it unsettling.

ISBN: 9780316499071 | Back Bay Books

A splendid achievement, a bold and refreshing new approach to our national history. The research is meticulous, the writing powerful and eloquent, with what can only be called an epic sweep across time and cultures. — Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

The post A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

By not providing students with the tools to understand the historical continuities and changes in schools, we may be reinforcing beliefs that so-called student failure is rooted in individual students, families, and teachers — not in a legacy of structural and educational injustice. As I hear students’ anger about not learning this history until college, I also think about the millions of students who are not able to attend college and may never learn this history.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in an edition of Rethinking Schools magazine, “The Laptops Are Coming! The Laptops Are Coming!” (Summer 2008). For more articles and lessons like “Pump Up the Blowouts: Reflections on the 40th Anniversary of the Chicano/a School Blowouts,” order Rethinking Schools magazine, “The Laptops Are Coming!”

See Table of Contents.

Carlos Muñoz, Jr. (Painting and bio by Robert Shetterly from Americans Who Tell the Truth.) Carlos Muñoz, Jr. was one of 13 civil rights activists who were indicted for “conspiracy” for their role in the organizing of non-violent student protest against racial/ethnic educational inequality in the barrio schools of East Los Angeles in 1968. They each faced 66 years in prison. It took two years for the high courts of California to decide they were innocent by virtue of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; freedom of speech. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ethnic Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (1989, revised 2007). Muñoz played a prominent leadership role as one of the founders of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. Read more.

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A depiction of two panels from The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a mural by Judy Baca. Source: JudyBaca.com

Today’s border with Mexico is the product of invasion and war. Grasping some of the motives for that war and some of its immediate effects begins to provide students the kind of historical context that is crucial for thinking intelligently about the line that separates the United States and Mexico. It also gives students insights into the justifications for and costs of war today.

This activity introduces students to a number of the individuals and themes they will encounter in the chapter from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God.” The individual roles include:

• Cochise, Chiricahua Apache leader
• Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock, commander of the 3rd Infantry Regiment
• Congressman Abraham Lincoln, Whig Party, Illinois
• Doña Francesca Vallejo
• Francisco Márquez, Mexican Cadet
• Frederick Douglass
• General Mariano Vallejo
• General Stephen Kearny
• Henry David Thoreau
• Jefferson Davis, plantation owner, Mississippi
• María Josefa Martínez, Santa Fe, New Mexico
• Padre Antonio José Martínez
• President James K. Polk
• Reverend Theodore Parker
• Sgt. John Riley San Patricio Battalion, Formerly U.S. Army
• William Lloyd Garrison , Founder, American Anti-Slavery Society
• Wotoki, Miwok Indian, California.

The lesson includes a reading from Zinn’s chapter, “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God.” Here is an excerpt.

Frederick Douglass wrote in his Rochester newspaper the North Star, January 21, 1848, of “the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.” Douglass was scornful of the unwillingness of opponents of the war to take real action (even the abolitionists kept paying their taxes):

No politician of any considerable distinction or eminence seems willing to hazard his popularity with his party . . . by an open and unqualified disapprobation of the war. None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks; and all seem willing that the war should be carried on, in some form or other.

Where was popular opinion? It is hard to say. After the first rush, enlistments began to dwindle. Historians of the Mexican war have talked easily about “the people” and “public opinion.” Their evidence, however, is not from “the people” but from the newspapers, claiming to be the voice of the people. The New York Herald wrote in August 1845: “The multitude cry aloud for war.” The New York Morning News said “young and ardent spirits that throng the cities . . . want but a direction to their restless energies, and their attention is already fixed on Mexico.”

It is impossible to know the extent of popular support of the war. But there is evidence that many organized workingmen opposed the war. There were demonstrations of Irish workers in New York, Boston, and Lowell against the annexation of Texas. In May, when the war against Mexico began, New York workingmen called a meeting to oppose the war, and many Irish workers came. The meeting called the war a plot by slave owners and asked for the withdrawal of American troops from disputed territory. That year, a convention of the New England Workingmen’s Association condemned the war and announced they would “not take up arms to sustain the Southern slaveholder in robbing one-fifth of our countrymen of their labor.

This lesson was published by Rethinking Schools in The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration.

For more lessons like “U.S. Mexico War: “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God,” order The Line Between Us with role plays, stories, poetry, improvisations, simulations and video edited by Bill Bigelow.

See Table of Contents.

Classroom Stories

As educators across the country are faced with the daunting challenge of moving their instruction online in the midst of the global pandemic, many teachers are brainstorming innovative ways to implement interactive lessons with students. Bethany Hobbs is one of those educators.

Read more to find out how Hobbs taught this lesson online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I teach at an inner city school, an incredibly diverse school. The lesson on the Mexican American War and the role play are incredibly effective in helping students understand the role of racial bias in the history of U.S. Foreign Policy.

Students really appreciate the opportunity to read and reflect on Zinn’s chapter, and appreciate different points of view about the war during the role play. My Latino students appreciate the approach, one that all too often in their education has not received the attention it deserves. This lesson took on new forms and even greater importance at our school, with the organization of a Hispanic Union, and it informed our celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and current events, like the debate on immigration policy.

Many of my 12th grade students today in Government class still look back to this lesson as a foundational moment in their learning about the history of US/Mexico relations. (They) see that the border issue today has a much longer history and wider context than they originally may have realized.

—Edward Zupcic

High School Social Studies, Portland, Oregon

I received the Zinn Education Project materials and I immediately flipped through the book and taught the U.S. – Mexico War lesson. It was so wonderful to see a group of usually unmotivated students engaged in the lesson that I called in another teacher to see this group of students actively involved in the activity.

—Sarah Treworgy

Middle Social Studies Teacher, Lynnwood, Washington

I use lessons from the Zinn Education Project because they are relevant, factual, and inspiring. Lessons like The U.S. – Mexico War shed light on aspects of our shared American heritage that are often overlooked. These lessons give a voice to great Americans who are too often forgotten.

Even though my students don’t quite understand it yet, I can see that a close examination of people’s history empowers my students to use their own voices.

—Suzanne Arthur

High Social Studies Teacher, Salt Lake City, Utah

I used the US-Mexican American War lesson by Bill Bigelow of Rethinking Schools that is posted at the Zinn Education Project website. By playing one of the characters in the role play, I really enjoyed how it gave me a chance to talk to students I don’t normally get to talk to, particularly some of the quieter students.

—Toby Remmers

High School Social Studies Teacher, Fremont, California

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A field worker from the age of five, Jessie knew poverty, harsh working conditions, and the exploitation of Mexicans and all poor people. Her response was to take a stand. She joined the fledgling United Farm Workers union and, at Cesar Chavez’s request, became its first woman recruiter. She also participated in strikes, helped ban the crippling short-handle hoe, became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, testified before the Senate, and met with the Pope.

Jessie’s life story personalizes an historical movement and shows teens how an ordinary woman became extraordinary through her will to make change happen, not just for herself but for others. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9780892552856 | Persea Books

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