1.2: Our Narratives

The Authors' Personal Connections to Ethnic Studies

Just as some students express being saved by Ethnic Studies, I too have been saved many times by my students. There have been instances when burnout would start to creep into my brain and heart, or I would begin to doubt my ability to teach relevant curriculum, fearful that I’ve failed my students. Somehow right at that moment, a student would send me an email sharing how rewarding or life-changing Ethnic Studies has been for them or a group of students would travel to San Francisco or Oakland to join a protest, influenced by examples of resistance and solidarity struggles we learned in class.

Such experiences or moments bring me back to my own introduction to Ethnic Studies as a community college student. Discussions and assignments in Ethnic Studies classes allowed me to explore my mixed zainichi Korean and Russian-Jewish heritage, bring to light the ways that my gender and class intersected with my race and ethnicity, and for the first time in my life, how I felt that I had a voice. Upon seeing students at UC Berkeley going on a hunger strike for Ethnic Studies in 1999, I knew that this was the discipline for me. Once I transferred, Ethnic Studies nurtured my passion for social change, as I was exposed to and especially energized by the written work of women of color like Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Leslie Marmon Silko, Chandra Mohanty, Leny Mendoza Strobel, and bell hooks. I began my own journey toward decolonization as a zainichi Korean who grew up in Japan and continued my student activism as one of the coordinators of Berkeley’s new third world Liberation Front center (aka Cross Cultural Center), which was one of the demands granted from the hunger strike.

Ethnic Studies exposes us to larger historical issues, broad socio-cultural topics, philosophies both inherited from our ancestors and rooted in our daily experiences, and the discipline helps us analyze and break down systems of power. But for many, the “magic” of Ethnic Studies is that it can help us process and understand internalized violence, trauma, and pain into love and introduce methods of transformation. Such methods can be applied in our hearts and souls, and also within our families, neighborhoods, communities, and workplaces. Ethnic Studies can also include celebrating moments of resistance, joy, and winning back the power that’s been taken from us.

My own experience as a student and my relationships with students have shown that Ethnic Studies is more than about what we learn in our textbooks, on Canvas, or within the walls of a typical classroom. Ethnic Studies is about what we do with that information. How do we translate what we read into the relationships we form? How might we take inspiration from historical moments of resistance and apply that to changes we want to see for our generation and within our own communities?

For all of us who contributed to this Open Educational Resource, this has been a labor of love. Teaching Ethnic Studies is not just a job to us, but ultimately a lifeline. Because it wasn’t long ago when we were students too, sitting in the classroom or talking to our teachers during office hours, starting to envision a future of possibilities for ourselves, our families and communities. In this section, the authors I collaborated with on this project will share their personal experiences around the impact Ethnic Studies has made on their lives.

Melissa Leal

I remember being an undergraduate student at a CSU and I was sitting in an Anthropology of California Indians Course. The instructor said that “Esselen” people and language were extinct. This was what most non-indigenous Anthropologists believed because a prominent scholar claimed this to be true a long time ago. However, I sat there as an Esselen student for a whole semester feeling invisible and in fact “extinct.” I hadn’t found my voice yet, but after that I took a course titled Native American Spirituality and Religion and the Professor of that course was familiar with my people. She acknowledged who I was. She was also a California Indian and because of those two experiences happening in my life at that time, I am who I am today. Ethnic Studies, and the presence of another California Indian, made me visible. Even more than that, it made me understand how important it is to have a voice in a system that systematically attempts to destroy us. I not only found my voice but I learned why I had lost it in the first place.

Tamara Cheshire

Oregon State University (OSU) didn’t have an ‘official’ Ethnic Studies department when I arrived, but they had one when I left. We also had a Native American Longhouse/cultural center which was why I went to OSU in the first place. You could major in American Studies with an Ethnic Studies emphasis in a specific core discipline area. Native American Studies chose me. I wanted to be a tribal lawyer, specializing in Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) cases because I had nieces and nephews that were taken away by the state and placed in foster care when they should have been placed by law with my mom and our family. There were no tribal law classes being taught, so I took as many Native Studies focussed classes as there were to take. It was the first time in my life that I had Native teachers (3 of them) and I finally understood that I could be a Native professor teaching Native American Studies.

But the courses I was taking were in danger of being canceled by the administration, so we organized and demanded the establishment of an Ethnic Studies department. We the students advocated for and rallied, non-violently protested, organized, facilitated a sit-in in the President’s office and adjoining hallway, marched around campus carrying signs and banners demanding ‘Ethnic Studies NOW!’ For two years we protested and employed similar strategies used in San Francisco during the Third World Liberation Front Strikes of 1968. They had succeeded, so we knew we would too. It was just a matter of time. We took action that faculty and staff could not because they did not have the power we did as students. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed taught us that the faculty and staff were vested in the organization for their livelihood, so we had to organize if we wanted to make change. I did research, met with Ethnic Studies scholars and activists in San Francisco, strategically created a plan to alert the media, wrote curriculum for Ethnic Studies courses, advocated for the hiring of full time Ethnic Studies faculty and for the creation of an Ethnic Studies department.

I did all of this while taking Difference, Power and Discrimination (DPD) courses. These courses were Ethnic Studies courses but because there was a resistance by the administration to have Ethnic Studies on campus, faculty allies had devised alternative names. I read books by Freire (as mentioned before) about liberation; Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, many publications by Paula Gunn Allen and Rayna Green, and From Margin to Center by bell hooks. My Professor Annie Popkin, a long-time social justice and women's movement activist, helped me process my own experiences with systemic racial oppression. In the 1960’s she traveled to Mississippi to participate in Freedom Summer and shared that personal experience with us, her students.

Ultimately, we were victorious in our demands and the Ethnic Studies department was formed in 1996, a year before I graduated with my Masters of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. My thesis was on Cultural Transmission in Urban American Indian Families, focusing on cultural resiliency and the mother and child relationship; supporting the importance of keeping Native children with their families. My thesis was dedicated to my Mom who passed away while I was at college. We held ceremony for my Mom a year after her passing. The experience and knowledge learned from forming an Ethnic Studies department at OSU has been useful in the establishment of an Ethnic Studies Department at Folsom Lake College.

Mario Alberto Viveros Espinoza-Kulick

My experience in Ethnic Studies started as an undergraduate at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). Working with community members, students, and faculty in Ethnic Studies offered opportunities to connect with my Purépecha heritage and pride in being a queer, mixed-race Chicanx person who is a product of African and Mexican migration. For my senior project, I founded a program dubbed Know Your Status to alleviate the stigma experienced within HIV-positive communities by hosting professionals to speak about HIV education and provide access to free on-site testing for college students. The project created a lasting partnership between our campus and the local non-profit, Access Support Network. The program continued for multiple years and pushed the institution to provide access to HIV testing and relevant educational resources.

Our work in the classroom inspired my peers and myself to advocate for justice and equity for our communities, including creating the group SLO Solidarity to demand recognition of the racism on campus and that administrators develop policies, resources, and services to address the needs of historically underrepresented groups. This led to the creation of new initiatives for transfer students, undocumented students, students of color, and first-generation college students, which continue to this day.

After completing my BA in Comparative Ethnic Studies at Cal Poly with a minor in Indigenous Studies in Natural Resources and the Environment, I earned my MA and PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Health Policy Research Scholar with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to return to San Luis Obispo, California as an Ethnic Studies instructor. I now work as a full-time faculty member at Cuesta College, where I earned my first two AA degrees and became the first in my family to graduate from college. As the inaugural Ethnic Studies faculty at Cuesta, I helped to create the new Ethnic Studies department and curriculum, and now get to co-create the same types of spaces for students that nurtured my development and growth as an advocate for racial justice, decolonization, and liberation for all.

Ulysses Acevedo

I’m lucky to say that I’m a community college (CC) transfer student. Without CC I don’t think that I would have had access to higher education. I did most of my undergraduate general education at Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC). It was there where I experimented with pursuing different majors, such as a path towards civil engineering, then architecture, then computer-aided drafting. I was pursuing these fields for the wrong reasons: because these careers promised good salaries and because my father pushed the idea that a career in these fields would help advance my career in the construction company where I was working. But I quickly realized that I did not have a passion for any of these fields.

A friend suggested that I take a Mexico History course with professor Laura Larqué. I was fascinated to learn from my professor, devoured the books, and engaged with my assignments. I was hungry for the knowledge about my people that I was not offered in my K-12 education. I was a CC student during the height of the war in Afghanistan. At the same time, there were many attempts by army recruiters to enlist me to the war and my community faced the backlash as a result of the rise in nativism. I chose to stay in college. Soon after, I became deeply involved on campus (and off campus) in a student group called Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (M.E.Ch.A.). During this time I witnessed how my Ethnic Studies professors and counselors were active in supporting student groups on-campus and simultaneously involved in community organizing work off-campus. The reason I pursued being an Ethnic Studies instructor at the community college level is to hopefully be an example of community-engaged scholarship for future generations.

Teresa Hodges

I was first exposed to learning about race and ethnicity in a high school sociology class. Upon entering college, I went to Summer Bridge, a program that helped students from underrepresented backgrounds transition into college, and we took a course on Contemporary Issues in education. We learned a lot about racism in schooling and society. It was taught by Ethnic Studies graduate students. It was the first time I felt like it was ok to think about race in public. After that, I thought I would major in sociology but the coursework taught nothing about people of color so I took Ethnic Studies. Ethnic Studies helped me, a mixed Black and Filipina girl, as one of 200 Black students on a campus of 16,000+ and one of 33 first year incoming Black students. This matters because I felt so isolated in my classes sometimes when I wasn’t taking Ethnic Studies. I spent so much time in student organizations because I felt sanctuary and community. A lot of my friends were Ethnic Studies majors or took courses. Ethnic Studies validated me and made me feel valued. It taught me that you can do something when something isn’t right. Because of Ethnic Studies, I am able to help promote critical consciousness, action and change that not only serves my students but also our communities. I think it’s important that students feel the change within themselves too because they’re a part of the liberation too and it helps give them agency in their pursuits.