"Navigating the Colonial Landscape: A Mexican-American Teacher's Journey in the American Education System"

I read this news today. "Texas Supreme Court clears way for state’s education agency to take over Houston ISD" , and like so many others that I read, I return to my time as a columnist in the early 2000s. Since 2020, I left the op-ed to take care of myself, my old dreams or build new dreams. Part of my history of failures and frustrations is due to my activism both in Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. And it's not that I became activist for personal victory, no, my woman's body thought I was a pot or a portal through which injustices towards others would see the light of justice. So I walked, with my grandmother's body inside mine and therefore misplaced from my place in the family and social constellation. The point here is that I reached menopause and its aches but the desire to investigate, think, read, write, conclude, and share did not go away. And this headline in the Houston portals and my recent experience within it, triggered my return to the old ways. My personal blog is my medium, so the thread continues here.I decided to write in English this specific piece, both Spanish and English are two colonial languages, that when placed in the United States, one is more oppressive than the other. 

My linguistic activism that concluded with the publication of my doctoral thesis in Spanish, a unique case in my field, in the state of Texas, opened doors for other Latin Americans to be encouraged to enter the UTEP doctoral education program. It closed doors for my entry into the academy in the United States. Universities in the United States can have their departments of great thinkers and critics of the system but to date, in my field, education I have not received any job offers; the reason is that I must write in English, and so here we go... I have sent my academic articles for publication... you will see them soon. "Texas Supreme Court clears way for state’s education agency to take over Houston ISD" I started my teaching career in 2002 in the El Paso Independent School District. I remember my first interview with Mr. V, the principal of Jefferson High; "Welcome to the world of teaching in the United States, here in El Paso, it's kind of a bubble where Mexicans and Anglos coexist very well." I was fortunate to find in the education path dozens of supervisors and colleagues whose purpose in life was to continue the ideals of public education. I can say that despite the demands of the Texas Education Agency to shape our professional practice from an Anglo perspective, most Mexican teachers, we keep the best of teaching practices in the Mexican style. "El gis y el pizarrón no rajan leña", we used to say when resources in poor schools in the United States were scarce. Through the Texas Education Agency is how we were evaluated. It is the agency with all the power in education in Texas and its commissioner is appointed by the governor in office. TEA has control over the "quality" in public education and the authority to decide operations in the districts, it does so through the Supreme Court of Justice, so its perspectives and decisions acquire legal character to fire or continue hiring both administrators and teachers. TEA is an agency founded on the premise of the failures of the Mexican educational system. It was founded as a result of the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, based on the first Anglo-American initiative, it took the land to build buildings based solely on its ideology. It is not surprising that the curse of the failures of the Mexican educational system has followed us almost 200 years later. The issue here is that, Mexican teachers in Texas, not content with facing discrimination based on gender, language, and race, still, and by heritage in the spoken words that if the United States is better than Mexico or if Europeans know more. As teachers, we lend ourselves to reproducing in the classrooms the rhetoric of the Anglo point of view. I arrived at the teacher preparation classes in the late nineties; it saddened me to hear that one of the reasons my colleagues decided to become bilingual teachers was that they themselves had suffered linguistic discrimination, "they locked us in closets when we spoke Spanish", "they fined us 25 cents for each Spanish word". The worst case I heard from the mouth of a parent of one of my students; "I remember that the History teacher in high school, back in the eighties, came dressed as the KKK at the end of the school year and told us it was better if we forgot even our name, then made us build cardboard hats to celebrate that we had another head. I didn't know anything until I married my wife who is from Chihuahua and a Spanish teacher here in El Paso, she slowly took away that hat and how foolish one can be with those ideas of not accepting your own identity. One of the administrative practices that I have questioned the most to date, besides standardized tests, is the "teaching observation" (Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System- TESS) for evaluating teaching abilities. Throughout my observations, I have obtained "proficient" and recently moved up to "accomplished". "In a moment I'll reach enlightenment" I often tell myself as a joke to mediate between my voices of victim and perpetrator. "It's not a joke, that enlightenment thing according to the West and its manipulations; during 2015 and while studying for my doctorate, I was invited to participate as an observer, I should supervise the future teachers using the TTESS measurement instrument; I attended a training where they projected a video on the criteria of unsatisfactory, satisfactory, proficient, and accomplished, etc. In the representation of the roles, the Anglo teacher was almost enlightened, the African American teacher was satisfactory, and the Mexican teacher was unsatisfactory, she taught mathematics to young Mexicans. The supervisors present, we put a complaint for stereotyping the teaching practice of Mexicans in Texas, we sent it to the head of the Education Department at UTEP. The complaint did not transcend, on the contrary, they evaluated my performance as a supervisor and then I went to complete darkness, I got 2 on the 5 scale. I resigned from my role as a supervisor, for two reasons, one, the first student I observed broke down crying as soon as she saw me enter the classroom; that intimidation is what I have always questioned, that perverted game of power that the administrations use so that the dominant Anglo point of view continues. I resigned from supervising and reproducing what I had criticized so much and in February 2016, the head of UTEP, accepted my resignation and sent me my last payment with the amount of $0.00, not only did she mock my critique, she gave zero value to my work; in a word, she neutralized any glimmer of power that I had achieved. It's not that I romanticize the use of power by Mexicans in the United States in some cases it can be worse, but in this specific case, the then-director was Anglo. My political identity is crossed by all my heritage and culture, from Mexican indigenous to Spanish, and in recent years, the English language and Anglo forms have gained ground in my way of thinking and structuring reality, there are things that I accept and even love about this culture and I must be very careful not to end up frozen or robotic by that enchantment, humor is one of those avenues that entertain and must be redirected to dimension the seriousness of the issue about this recent decision by the Supreme Court, where the Anglo-Saxon TEA prophesied that Mexican education is faulty and two hundred years later the thread continues through its cunning practices, now it will take charge of the district where I currently work, and I hope that by then, some university will hire me and I can look towards another less dominant horizon