Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen
Introduction
The fight to establish and grow ethnic studies in the state where the field first emerged in the late 1960s, while maintaining fidelity to its core commitments, has been unceasing. More than a half century of grassroots organizing birthed ethnic studies in universities, and following the 2016 passage of AB 2016, a state bill which recommended the teaching of ethnic studies in public K-12 classrooms, California developed the nation’s first ethnic studies model curriculum as a resource for K-12 teachers. Now, California’s high school class of 2030 will be required to take an ethnic studies course in order to graduate. Yet the expansion of the field has provoked intense and ugly backlash–in particular, the Zionist targeting of “liberated” and “critical” ethnic studies and demonizing efforts to smear the anti-imperialism of ethnic studies as purportedly antisemitic. In a moment of amplified reactionary attack against ethnic studies, this article offers a window into a classroom that is unabashedly a liberated ethnic studies zone. It features student responses to an upper-division ethnic studies course in which we not only study but also contribute research, culture work, and analysis to the ongoing fight for ethnic studies.
The Struggle for K-12 Ethnic Studies in California
Over the past half decade, I have taught an upper-division course, The Struggle for K-12 Ethnic Studies in California, to nearly 3,000 students, many of whom have gone on to teach ethnic studies in schools across the state. At a time when there have been coordinated efforts to co-opt the field from the right, this course is organized around liberated ethnic studies as a curriculum that dares to imagine that ethnic studies can and should be taught in ways that are indivisible from movements for collective freedom. In entering the teaching profession in California at this current moment, these students are forced to confront what we study in this class: namely, the spectrum of coordinated efforts to dismantle ethnic studies and the protracted grassroots movement work that goes into maintaining the radicality of ethnic studies within K-12 schools. All too often the attacks against ethnic studies target individuals, oftentimes specific, highly successful teachers. It is for this reason that I organize this course to demonstrate to my students that the classroom can in fact be a movement space structured by a commitment to reproducing collective care for and responsibility to each other. Teachers and students are not alone.
In The Struggle for K-12 Ethnic Studies in California, my students and I trace the foundations of ethnic studies across time. We consider, for example, how texts like Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) served as a primer for those students who marched under the Third World banner in the late 1960s. We also examine how the Zionist backlash to the inclusion of Palestine in ethnic studies curricula has catalyzed the defense of ethnic studies in our own historical juncture, serving as a contemporary primer in the stakes of the struggle for liberated ethnic studies. In real time, my students and I follow the attacks against the field and its practitioners, including the current legislative battle to defund and censor ethnic studies.
Far from a struggle located in the past, the fight for ethnic studies is happening now. In my class, for example, we study the legal victory of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMCC), of which I am a longtime member, against a frivolous lawsuit brought on by self-identified Zionist teachers and parents in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) who alleged that the LESMCC would have harmed Israeli students or students who identify with Israel if it had incorporated teaching materials that are critical of Zionism. My students and I study how lawfare has been deployed as a tactic against ethnic studies as a movement, forcing practitioners into a defensive posture. At the same time, we consider and celebrate our victories, including Judge Fernando Olguin’s November 30, 2024 ruling that “it is far from clear that learning about Israel and Palestine or encountering teaching material with which one disagrees constitutes an injury.”
Even as my classroom serves as a space where we study past and present struggles, my students and I discuss the importance of not retreating into a purely defensive posture or allowing our realities to be defined in the terms dictated by power. How do we imagine the worlds in which we wish to live? How might we creatively and flexibly contribute to collective struggles? My course accordingly approaches assignments as a form of praxis relative to the movement for ethnic studies. My students undertake study, culture work, and research seriously but also in a spirit of play and imagination with an eye to advancing the struggle for ethnic studies in unexpected ways, including within the context of settler institutions that are designed to discipline and silence those who challenge the structural violence of the university. By fortifying the struggle through critical and creative means, student engagement with course materials is ethnic studies in action.
Students Reimagine Education and Rebuild the World
I invite my student to develop projects that rupture schooling as a site of settler colonial indoctrination and control (Smith, 1999). Instead, they ground their work in the class in decolonial ethnic studies concepts and content, which they wield as weapons and apply as medicine to make sense of the world and the ways we can enact our places within it. In their projects, students reach backward and forward, weaving individual and collective stories. Some speak truth to power, exposing the lies that prop up structures of violence. Others model what an education that serves the people looks like. Still others yet produce culture work, understanding their role as artists to be vital to transformative struggles.
In my classroom, my students’ open-ended final assignments are not bound by disciplinary strictures, but they are shaped by the expectation that their projects demonstrate criticality while approaching the core questions they pose in creative ways. This is how we both imagine and enact the worlds in which we wish to live. The four student projects I have included here animate course research, theories, and concepts yet in formats of their own choosing. For this final assignment, my students were tasked with creating political education or culture work that fortifies the struggle for ethnic studies. Here’s how four of them responded to that prompt.
Diego Díaz, “Living Breath”
Diego Díaz described his drawing, which depicts the act of giving breath, or life, as healing. His artwork portrays embodied ethnic studies resistance: breath rooted in the life-affirming compilation of ideas and images reflective of rasquachismo (Ybarra-Frausto, 2019) is how Diáz defines the beauty of Fanon’s decolonization as “violence and struggle that comes with overcoming colonial systems of power” (1963). “Living Breath” dwells on the internalization of landscapes that have been transformed by state violence into lethal geographies, including militarized borders and pesticide-laden agricultural fields, yet these death arenas are counterposed by images of fortitude and perseverance. Linking these sites are boundary-crossing monarch butterflies, a symbol drawn from migrant justice struggles and an expression of freedom that refuses the carceral logic of imperialist borders. Student projects like Díaz’s reflect both collective and individual healing. I was humbled listening to him explain his drawing in our class. He described it as a counternarrative to the myths and lies told about Latinx people that reworked the conventions of European art and an incorporation of popular culture to convey the realities of struggle and resistance (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).
Niko Magnussen, “You Are Not the Enemy”
Grounding “You Are Not the Enemy,” his four-minute film, in Frantz Fanon’s insight that “the educational system […] serve[s] to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably” (1961), Niko Magnussen transforms the landscape of UC Santa Cruz, with its streams, meadows, and distinctive architecture, into more than backdrop. Opening with a scene of cutting and self-harm, Magnussen, as the film’s central character, drips a trail of blood across campus settings, including the industrial stair railing in the Humanities building where the walls are covered with flyers. One from the “Department of Justice” reads, “You are the enemy,” with an additional ominous “Big Brother” message, “I shall not see myself in you.” As an oblique commentary on lethal state violence, this flyer also encapsulates the logic of imperial systems of education. With bystanders staring at him as he drips blood, Magnussen’s character turns his “stigmata” into a stain on the grounds and built space of the university itself. Attending a dehumanizing Zoom lecture on banking in which the instructor drills into attendees’ heads the “4 U’s of I”–”I am unique,” “I am useful,” “I am unstoppable,” “I am universally alone”–Magnussen’s character poses a question that turns “U” into “you,” or the other. ““What if they bleed the same as you do?” he asks, only for the instructor to dismiss his concern for the other as irrelevant. As both director and subject of the film, Magnussen plays with these subject positions, blurring “I” and “you.” Literalizing many course themes, Magnussen closes with a loving ethnic studies circle that demonstrates the deeply healing power of a core tenet of ethnic studies: “You are my other me” (Valdez, 1973).
Hazel Vermillion, “We Were Never Meant to Be Silenced”
In “We Were Never Meant to Be Silenced,” a powerful reflection on the ways in which the rigidity of traditional curricula and the imperative to follow orders have structured schooling within racial capitalist systems, Hazel Vermillion opens with a meditation on obedience as a form of social submission. “They taught us silence,” she states. “‘Sit down,’ ‘Be quiet,’ ‘Take notes,’ like silence was part of the curriculum, like obedience was the lesson.” Filmed in her home with the sounds of everyday life in the background, her spoken word poem transforms this extramural space into an arena of powerful political education. In her piece, she calmly rages at how she and other students have been denied critical tools to transform the system: “They taught us grammar but never the language of power.” Yet she, through spoken word, models a politics of refusal: “Every time someone refuses silence, the system cracks.” Delivering a scathing critique of settler schooling strategies in a steady, undramatic tone, Vermillion lays bare the structural nature of inequality, stating: “Some students inherit opportunity. Some inherit surveillance. Others are taught leadership. Others are taught compliance. And then society calls the outcome ‘earned.’” She closes, “Something changed when I entered an ethnic studies class. Education sounded different. Not obedience. Critical consciousness. Not silence. Dialogue. Not memorization. Liberation.” Rather than create “workers for unequal systems,” education, she states, should empower people ready to “transform the world around them.”
Camila Zuniga, “La Prensa”
Camila Zuniga’s collage, “La Prensa,” blurs past and the present movements for ethnic studies, visually showing how organizing against genocide is a throughline linking student organizing against the U.S. war in Vietnam that left an estimated three to four million people in Southeast Asia dead to the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people. The title, “La Prensa” (or “press”), evokes the print media of the past and the function of side-by-side story columns that invite juxtapositional thinking and connection-making. The collage also reconstructs how students and faculty have confronted the oppressive systems that uphold sites of schooling. Images in this collage include the historic struggle for Black studies at Merritt College, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, in Oakland; the San Francisco State College strike that birthed the field of ethnic studies; contemporary student-led struggles that call for education, not deportation; and the student intifada that rose up against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The collage’s central “trunk” is a call to action where Zuniga challenges us to “identify internalized and external colonial ways of thinking that need attention.” Here, she leverages Cammarota’s (2016) finding that praxis requires youth to transform their second sight into critical consciousness for the movement for K-12 ethnic studies.
Conclusion
Together, my course, my student projects, and their reflections are testament to the power of ethnic studies as a socially transformative, liberatory curriculum. Students who have taken the course share that by studying past and contemporary movements for ethnic studies, they feel an urge to act to upend the ways in which schooling denies their communities the possibility of imagining life conditions that benefit the greater whole, indeed, denies them liberation. Many are galvanized to become high school ethnic studies teachers and most leave as fierce advocates for liberatory ethnic studies that is unapologetically critical of racial capitalism and colonialism. But beyond resisting what must be dismantled, students also begin to imagine and build the worlds their communities deserve—worlds grounded in justice, self-determination, and collective care.
Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen, Ed.D., is a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego. She is co-chair of San Diego Unified School District’s Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee and an author of the University of California A-G Ethnic Studies admissions criteria. She is a lead author of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium. Her research centers decolonial education, multilingual/multicultural students, and ethnic studies. Dr. Gallagher-Geurtsen was a bilingual public elementary school teacher and a migrant education teacher and began her education learning from multilingual communities of color in San Diego, San Jose, New York City, and Utah.
References
Cammarota, J. (2016).The praxis of ethnic studies: transforming second sight into critical consciousness. Race Ethnicity and Education, 19(2), 233-251, DOI:10.1080/13613324.2015.1041486
Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles, et. al. v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Curriculum Consortium, et. al. CV 22-3243. 2024. https://www.liberatedethnicstudies.org/lawsuit-dismissed.html
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Maldonado-Torres, N. (2016). Outline of ten theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality. Foundation Frantz Fanon. Retrieved from http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/
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Ybarra-Frausto, T. (2019). Rasquachismo: A Chicano sensibility. In J. A. González, C. O. Chavoya, C. Noriega, & T. Romo (Eds.), Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (pp. 85–90). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478003403-018
Valdez, L. (1973). Pensamiento serpentino: A Chicano approach to the theater of reality. Cucaracha Publications.