Teaching Latino History in Seattle
Teaching Latino History in Seattle
By Andy Rafael Aguilera
This is the first of what I hope will be many posts by teachers of Latino history, about their experience and thoughts on teaching Latino history. I want to thank Andy Aguilera for his contribution. Andy is a teacher at the Lakeside School in Seattle. He would love to hear your feedback, and to begin a conversation with other Latino history teachers. You can reach him at: araguile@umich.edu, or andy.aguilera@lakesideschool.org. And if you want to write something for Latinos in Depth, too, drop me a line at geraldocadava@substack.com.
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My name is Andy Aguilera and I am a teacher at Lakeside School, an independent high school and middle school in Seattle, Washington. At Lakeside, I mainly teach Modern World History and United States history. This year I am also teaching the first ever Intro to Latinx Studies elective at Lakeside’s Upper School. As a first-generation Latino student and teacher, I wish I’d had the opportunity to take such a course as a high school student and undergraduate.
My goals in the classroom have largely been shaped by my own personal experiences, as well as the formal training I received in my graduate programs. I was born in Monterrey Park, California and spent much of my early childhood in South Central Los Angeles. Later, my mother, siblings, and I moved to Nampa, Idaho, a place where I began to learn the nuances of race and ethnicity. In the early 2000’s, the town was largely rural, but over the years has become a suburban area of Boise. As in other places across the United States, Latinos have always been an instrumental presence to the town’s economy and development. I later enrolled at Seattle University (SU), a Jesuit institution that strives for a “just and human” world.” After taking a “History of Mexico” course during my senior year, I realized I had no formal exposure to Latino history in my classes. What I knew came from my family’s history and migration experiences in Mexico and Los Angeles. This is what prompted me to pursue graduate studies in Mexican American history. I entered a Master of Arts program at Indiana University-Bloomington where I was finally introduced to Latina/o studies. After my completion of my MA, in 2015, I entered the doctoral program in History at the University of Michigan, where I will complete my degree this academic year.
I first applied at Lakeside School during the Spring of 2021, towards the end of a doctoral fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM. Even when I was in my graduate program, I was as passionate about teaching as I was about research. So, I took the plunge and applied to Lakeside’s open position as a history teacher. I immersed myself in the institution’s curriculum, culture, and mission. I was most intrigued by the clarity of their Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging mission statement. I appreciated that Lakeside worked towards “a curriculum with diverse perspectives, materials, and texts, in which all our students can see their backgrounds and experiences” and a commitment “to addressing biases, stereotypes, inaccuracies, and absent perspectives in curricular content.” Likewise, the history department had just concluded a departmental retreat to redesign the history curriculum following detailed student feedback. The department found that students yearned for a more diverse representation of marginalized communities that moved beyond narratives of suffering and violence. In short, they wished for more empowering perspectives that focused on resistance and liberation.
Lakeside, located in North Seattle, is made up of a diverse range of students from across King County. As of 2023, Lakeside’s students identify as “32% European American; 31% Asian American; 19% multiracial; 11% African American; 3% Latino/Hispanic American; 1% Middle Eastern American; and under 1%, respectively, Native American and Pacific Islander American.” Students are often described as bold, curious, and ambitious. As teachers at an independent institution, faculty have the flexibility to offer electives in their areas of interest and expertise. A few examples include the “History of Genocide” and “Queer United States.” The core curriculum and electives seek to foster what the school calls “Competencies and Mindsets.” Per their website, competencies refer to “what graduates can do, and mindsets as who graduates are – what they value, how they behave, and the frames through which they see the world.” The school solicits new electives every fall semester in preparation for course registration in the winter. One of my goals at Lakeside was to teach some aspect of Latina/o/x studies. I wanted students to consider the Latino experience to foster an increased understanding of each other and our communities. The course also aligned perfectly with my expertise and contributed towards the institution’s DEIB mission statement of cultural representation and inclusivity.
Unfortunately, in Spring 2023 I received the news that my course would not be running this school year, because only seven students registered. Sixteen was the number of students a course had to have in order to run. My initial reaction was confusion, frustration, and shame. I asked myself, and later others, “how can this happen?” Such an instance reveals the challenges ethnic studies courses face across the United States. In this instance, I learned that a combination of factors from low interest to poor promotion led to the course’s low enrollment. I argued that the course still held immense value for those registered to learn about the Latina/o experience, as well as broader issues of race. I also shared that the course contributed to broader issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at Lakeside, and would help students understand the Latino community in Seattle and beyond.
Seattle’s Latino community emerged during and after World II because of wartime industry jobs. In later decades, Latinos took part in social movements at the University of Washington. During this time period, Latino activists founded pivotal organizations such as the Sea Mar clinic to serve the needs of the Latino community. In the 1980s, Central American refugees arrived as part of the sanctuary movement at the University Baptist Church. I really wanted Lakeside students to know these histories. After weeks of open dialogue, which also included an article in the Tatler, the student-run newspaper, and help from allies (administrators, colleagues, and students), we succeeded in getting the course to run for the 2023-2024 school year after all, with a fully enrolled class of sixteen students.
In May 2023, just a few weeks after our successful lobbying efforts, John Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and UnidosUS published a timely report on the representation of Latino history in high school textbooks and at K-12 institutions. The report found that “87% of key topics in Latino history were either not covered in the evaluated books or mentioned in five or fewer sentences.” As Viviana López Green, the senior director of the Racial Equity Initiative at UnidosUS states, “it's essential for our future workers, businesspeople, community leaders, and public officials to learn about the contributions and experiences of all Americans, including Latinos, the country's largest racial/ethnic minority.” I am committed to making sure that Lakeside students learn Latino history so they can go into the world prepared with the knowledge López Green describes.
In the first meeting of the class, I brought in my personal print of artist Brandon Maldonado’s “Birth of the Mexican #2”, which builds on his first version. Maldonado’s work displays an indigenous women clad in green, red, and white clothing. In on hand she holds a cactus rested upon by an eagle with a snake its in beak, a popular symbol of modern Mexico. In the other, she holds a small man who resembles norteño/a music bandmember popular across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Students embarked on a discussion of how, through these symbols, Maldonado articulated his notion of mexicanidad. After a fruitful discussion, I utilized Maldonado’s work to introduce a major theme of the course: latinidades. In Maldonado’s explanation of #2, he notes that it is a response to “those who refuse to recognize the aspect of Mexican culture that came from the Spanish.” For Maldonado, mexicanidad is a tension between indigeneity and the Spanish past, as well as reconciliation between the two. Héctor Tobar also writes about the complexities of Latino identity in his recently-published book, Our Migrant Souls: “to be Latin American, to be Latino or Latinx is to grapple with the promise, the beauty, and the dysfunction of an immigrant life.” My main goal in my Latino history course is to equip students with the tools to understand the complexities and diversity of the Latina/o experience.
So you can see how I’m going about it, I’m including below some of the foundational themes and materials from the first two weeks of my class. Discussions so far have been fruitful and enjoyable to observe. For instance, students grappled with the nuanced development of pan ethnicities (e.g. Latino/Hispanic), as well as debates surrounding “Latinx.” These conversations have set up a foundation to examine the complex history and formation of Latino communities in the United States. Later in the semester, I plan to incorporate local history in a community-oriented class project. My class will work with archival materials related to Seattle’s sanctuary movement to build a museum exhibit. Student projects will highlight the Latino experience in Seattle, while also potentially contributing to the recently opened Sea Mar Museum of Chicano/a/Latino/a Culture.
Sample Syllabus:
Unit 1, “What’s in a Name?”
Day 1: READING: Excerpt from Our Migrant Souls A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” by Héctor Tobar.
VIDEO: “What’s the Difference between Hispanic, Latino, and Spanish?” YouTube, posted by Bustle on July 14, 2015.
Day 2: Ramón A. Gutiérrez, What’s in a Name? The History and Politics of Hispanic and Latino Panethnicities” in The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2016).
Day 3: Alan Pelaez Lopez, “The X in Latinx is a Wound, Not a Trend,” Color Bloq (2018)
Bryan Bentacur, “Why I Hate the Term ‘Latinx’”, Inside Higher Ed, January 26, 2023.
Christian Paz, “Another Problem for Latinx”, The Atlantic, November 23, 2021.
Unit 2: Borderlands/La Frontera
Day 1: Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron. "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History" in The American Historical Review, Volume 104, Issue 3, June 1999.
Day 2: Excerpts from Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza.