WATSONVILLE — After eight months of attending school board meetings to encourage the Pajaro Valley Unified School District to bring back the ethnic studies contract it terminated in September, parents, students, teachers and other community figures supportive of the contract brought that same energy to a town hall hosted at Landmark Elementary School on Monday.
Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice, an ad hoc coalition formed last year, hosted a town hall in Landmark’s multipurpose room encouraging the board to bring back its contract with Community Responsive Education, which provided an ethnic studies curriculum for the district. The meeting drew approximately 70 people in attendance, including school board Trustee Jennifer Holm and Santa Cruz County Supervisor Felipe Hernandez.
In 2021, the board approved a contract with Community Responsive Education, a for-profit consultant firm founded by San Francisco State University professor Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales and other ethnic studies instructors, to offer an ethnic studies curriculum at the district’s three comprehensive high schools. However, when the contract came back for a one-year renewal at the Sept. 13 board meeting, the board did not vote to renew the contract but rather to bring back the item with another consultant.
When the matter went before the board’s Agenda Setting Committee on Nov. 2, the committee voted 2-1 to not place the item on a future agenda, with Trustees Georgia Acosta and Kim De Serpa voting not to put it on the agenda and Holm dissenting. The reason for rejecting the contract renewal apparently was due to allegations that the Community Responsive Education curriculum was antisemitic, a claim that Tintiangco-Cubales has denied. The claims appear to stem from a rejected framework that was presented to the California Department of Education, which Tintiangco-Cubales co-signed, that was criticized by the California Legislative Jewish Caucus for lacking meaningful discussion of the Jewish experience and antisemitism.
The issue has led to the public comment sessions at school board meetings largely being dominated by requests to restore the contract. Acosta said at the March 27 meeting that the board would be discussing it with new Superintendent Heather Contreras.
The town hall was organized by Gabriel and Lourdes Barraza, whose children attend Rolling Hills Middle School and Pajaro Valley High School.
“This is the first event in what we hope will be an ongoing movement to build community and bring power to all the people,” said Gabriel.
Gabriel said ethnic studies was important to teach in today’s climate.
“We want students to move on from their education, not only with practical skills to be able to work but with skills to change the world, and real ethnic studies is the framework that can make it happen,” he said.
Lourdes, a clinical psychologist who immigrated to the U.S. when she was 6 and attended district schools, said the curriculum is one she wished she had.
“This issue is important to me because I want my children to have information and knowledge that I had to wait to get until I went to the university,” she said.
The Barrazas then invited Tintiangco-Cubales to speak. She said seven consultants worked with the district to develop the FIELDS framework — which espoused the values of freedom, identity, empathy, literacy, dreams and solidarity — to be used by schools for their ethnic studies curricula.
“I think sometimes people want to think about ethnic studies and think about it as something that is hateful, and actually it is not,” she said. “Ethnic studies is so much about collective liberation.”
Tintiangco-Cubales elaborated by saying that collective liberation was not just about freeing people of color but freeing all people, including Jewish people, from oppression and exploring the intersections of different groups.
“That doesn’t mean necessarily that we study every single person in ethnic studies, but the goal is collective liberation,” she said. “I’m going to go a little bit further and say that ethnic studies, the fight is inside the classroom and outside the classroom.”
Tintiangco-Cubales said she her interest in ethnic studies came about by growing up Filipino in primarily white communities. In elementary school, she was teased for bringing fish and rice for lunch rather than sandwiches, and at American High School in Fremont, was disappointed she “didn’t have anything I learned about that had anything to do with me.”
“There was not one moment where we read anything by a Filipino,” she said. “There was no time when I felt like my story was important, I felt ashamed to be Filipino, and I was angry so I didn’t do well in school.”
Tintiangco-Cubales took her first ethnic studies class at Ohlone College in Fremont by professor Ramon Quezada, which changed her life.
“Not only was he teaching ethnic studies content, but he was such an amazing ethnic studies teacher because he was able to see me,” she said.
Tintiangco-Cubales then transferred to UC Berkeley, became an activist who fought for things like faculty tenure and received her bachelor’s degree in ethnic studies in 1993.
“My relation to ethnic studies is not an academic one,” she said. “It’s one that’s very, very personal.”
Tintiangco-Cubales also showed video of the Third World Liberation Front student protests at San Francisco State in 1968, which led to the school’s first Ethnic Studies College and paved the way for programs at similar universities. She said it was similar to the movements seen on campuses today.
“It’s inspiring,” she said. “That courage should also help us be more courageous.”
Omar Dieguez of Barrios Unidos spoke about his experiences being the first Latino student president at Aptos High School and pressuring the administration for a Chicano studies course in the mid-’90s, Bernie Gomez and Karina Moreno of MILPA collective talked about the school-to-prison pipeline, and students and teachers spoke about their experiences with ethnic studies.
“I gained another perspective, another window to the world,” said Maximiliano Barraza Hernandez, a freshman at Pajaro Valley High. “It sparked a curiosity that led me to meet a ton of wonderful people. My worldview has shifted dramatically since the start of the school year. I already knew a little bit about the oppression that minorities faced, but little did I know that the knowledge I held was just at the tip of the iceberg.”
