Unity Framework

For the Classroom

Unity Framework: (n.) Culturally and Historically Responsive and Reflective Critical Literacy Lessons; (v.) sharing knowledge, from a place of love and respect, founded in the practice of unifying students and communities, based on similar experiences and common goals.

Mexican American Studies

Click here for the Mexican American Studies course
approved by the Texas State Board of Education

Click to download the PDF

"Pensamiento Serpentino"
by Luis Valdez

Click image to download

"Women of the Americas"
edited by
Georgina C. Pérez

Click image to read/download

The 4 Movements
of Harmony
Interpretation by
Georgina C. Pérez

Click to download

The Four Agreements
by Dr. Don Miguel Ruiz

Historic Mexican & Mexican American Press

The Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press collection documents and showcases historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles,San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s.
Click on the photo to go to http://www.library.arizona.edu/contentdm/mmap/

Student Portfolio (Interactive Student Notebook

Student Portfolios help students to systematically organize as they learn. Portfolios become a testimony of individual learning and are a record of each student’s growth. Portfolios are also beneficial to parents because they provide information regarding student’s progress in creative writing, illustrating, recording, critical thinking, and organization skills.

Interactive Notebooks are designed to utilize the students’ visual and linguistic intelligences; both types of learners will improve their creative writing skills by putting ideas into their own words, searching for implications or assumptions, transforming words into visuals and exploring varying perspectives.

La Tejana Pasionaria

Emma Tenayuca
1916-1999

"I was arrested a number of times.
I never thought in terms of fear.
I thought in terms of justice."

Born in 1916 in San Antonio, Texas, Emma Tenayuca lived at a time when Mexican-Americans were allowed few freedoms and fewer privileges. Her close relationship with a grandfather who read the newspapers with her and took her to rallies for the rights of the poor fed the young girl’s profound hunger for both learning and social justice.

At age 16, already determined to challenge injustice, she became involved in community organizing and was jailed and threatened numerous times. In a time when neither Mexican-Americans nor women were expected to speak out, she spoke out fearlessly, and was soon known as a fiery orator and a brilliant organizer.

By age 21, Emma was considered to be the most effective organizer for the National Workers’ Alliance. That same year, 1938, when the wages of the city’s lowest paid workers were cut almost in half, they decided to strike. The city’s 12,000 pecan-shellers, most of them women, elected Emma to lead their strike. In less than two months, the pecan-shellers forced the owners to raise their pay. The Pecan-Shellers’ Strike is considered by many historians to be the first significant victory in the Mexican-American struggle for political and economic equality in this country.

Emma was so articulate and outspoken, that the Workers´ Alliance replaced her when she was 22. There was only so much at that time for a woman -- a Mexican woman -- to be an ambitious and intellectual champion for justice.

In 1939, as Emma was giving a speech, an enraged mob attacked the San Antonio´s Municipal Auditorium. Fearing that she would be lynched, Emma was led away through a secret passageway. The mob threw bricks, broke windows, set fires, ripped out auditorium seats, and later that night, together with the Ku Klux Klan, burnt the city’s mayor in effigy for having defended Emma’s right to free speech. This event is still on record as the San Antonio’s largest riot.

Black-listed, Emma left the state for many years, suffering poverty, unemployment, and personal threats against her own safety. A voracious reader, she put herself through college, and never stopped searching for an answer to the injustices she saw around her.

In the 1960s, Emma returned to San Antonio and began a different phase of her life-long community service, becoming a reading teacher for migrant students. Emma always focused on empowering people in the most basic and humane ways: the ability to work, to eat, to feed one’s family, to read, to vote. The things she fought to achieve in our society -- social security, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, equal access to education, disability benefits -- were in her days called communist. Today, they are called social justice.

Yet among the people for whom she fought and spoke and went to jail, her name was whispered with a respect reserved for no other leader. They called her “La Pasionaria”. And they kept her story alive, even when so many others tried to erase it from history.

Listen to "Interview with Emma Tenayuca, 1987" http://digital.utsa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15125coll4/id/1172
Click on the photo to view http://video.pbs.org/video/1246558583
Teaching Resources https://zinnedproject.org/materials/thats-not-fair-no-es-justo/