Some stories hard to get in history books
Updated 4/5/2006 1:36 AM
By Kasie Hunt, USA TODAY
Most high school students in the USA probably don't know that tens of thousands of Mexican-Americans many of them legal residents or even U.S. citizens were forcibly sent to Mexico during the depths of the Depression. That's because few history books even mention it.
A USA TODAY survey of the nine American history textbooks most commonly used in middle schools and high schools found that four don't mention the deportations at all. Only one devotes more than half a page to the topic.
For social activists, textbooks are the most important vehicle for trying to raise awareness about controversial or sensitive periods in U.S. history "the issues that I didn't learn in school," says Greg Marutani, who heads the education committee of the Japanese American Citizens League. His group tries to increase awareness among students of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II by developing curriculum guides and holding seminars for teachers.
According to the survey, the nine textbooks devote a total of 18 pages to the internment issue, compared with two pages on the coerced Mexican-American emigration.
While textbooks are critical in shaping public understanding of issues, changing textbooks isn't easy.
"Most histories are designed to make people feel good" about their country, says John Womack, a history professor at Harvard University. He says people of Mexican ancestry were coerced into leaving the United States in the 1930s because many small border-state towns, hit with a scarcity of jobs, were "thoroughly racist." But he says it is difficult to put such negative comments into textbooks that states purchase for their schools.
Financial realities also make change difficult. "Once a textbook enters a classroom, it stays there for a number of years," says Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, because schools invest a significant amount of money in a set of books. Sewall says a list of the most popular high school textbooks changes "glacially."
Bureaucracy is another factor slowing the pace. Curriculum guidelines are written by state education departments, and each state maintains its own list of approved textbooks. No single agency can change textbooks. "There has never been a federal mandate on textbook content," Sewall says. "It's a state issue" that would have to be dealt with one state capital at a time.
Even if a state takes an official position on an controversial topic, actually getting the issue into textbooks can be complicated. In January, California formally apologized to Mexican-Americans for the Depression-era deportations. However, high schools in California unlike middle schools are not required to select books from a state-approved list.
The federal government provides funding for independent educational projects, which can have a trickle-down effect. In 1988, when Congress formally apologized to Japanese-Americans over internment and paid $20,000 per person in reparations, it also created the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. The fund dispensed $3.3 million aimed at raising public awareness of the issue.
Dale Shimasaki, executive director of the fund until it expired in 1998, says one law school's curriculum project assembled a legal text on the topic, and a project at the University of Arkansas created a curriculum now required for all of the state's seventh- and eighth-graders.
Shimasaki says a similar project could help Mexican-Americans raise awareness about the deportation issue. "The parallels are very striking and very eerie," he says.
The Japanese American Citizens League's Marutani says both groups still have work to do. "We have achieved what we need to if someone said to a high school grad, 'Can you name some examples where the U.S. government mistreated its citizens?' and they could answer correctly," he says.
Posted 4/4/2006 10:50 PM