Bill signed encouraging study of Latino deportation
(Calif.) In 2005, California – via legislation – apologized for its role in mass deportations of Mexican-Americans that occurred during the Great Depression.
Late last week, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law that encourages state education officials to include this little-known event – estimated to have violated the Constitutional rights of as many as 1.2 million American citizens of Mexican descent – in K-12 history course lessons.
“With our state being the home to so many successful Mexican-Americans, our children and all Californians should be aware of the injustices that took place so long ago,” Democratic Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia of Bell Gardens, who authored the bill, said in a statement.
The signing of AB 146 comes as candidates vying in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign have made immigration reform is a hot-button issue. Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed to stop President Barack Obama from granting a reprieve to some of the 11.4 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the country is likely headed to the Supreme Court.
Garcia said her bill would encourage that “the ‘Mexican Repatriation,’ the unconstitutional deportation that occurred in California’s 1930s of over one million U.S. citizens and lawful residents of Mexican descent, be included in student history textbooks and courses of study.”
Prompted by the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic depression, the federal government – seeking to create jobs for what it termed “real Americans” – undertook a program of forcing an estimated one to two million people of Mexican descent living in California, Texas and surrounding states to return to Mexico, despite estimates that as many as half were U.S. citizens.
Throughout California, the Immigration and Naturalization Service conducted massive raids “on Mexican-American communities, resulting in the clandestine removal of thousands of people, many of whom were never able to return to the United States, their country of birth,” according to the state’s 2005 ‘Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program.’
Work to update California’s 17-year-old history-social science standards is underway but stalled in May when, overwhelmed with nearly 1,000 suggestions, the group tasked with the work – the Instructional Quality Commission – decided to delay the process until the necessary troop of academics and policy experts needed to sort through the submissions and make recommendations can be hired. That work so far has not been funded by either the Legislature or the governor.
Brown also signed several other education bills into law last week, including:
- AB 329 by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber,D-San Diego, makes instruction in general sexual health education mandatory in all K-12 school districts, expand the topics covered in the course and update curriculum content on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention education – required in schools since 1992.
- SB 695 by Sen. Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, requires that when the state’s K-12 health curriculum framework is next revised, the IQC consider including comprehensive information on sexual harassment and violence for grades 9 to 12 that includes instances that occur among peers and in a dating relationship, a discussion of prevention strategies, how pupils report sexual harassment and violence, discussion of the affirmative consent standard (yes means yes and lack of a verbal response does not indicate consent) and a discussion of legal aspects of sexual harassment and violence under state and federal law.
- SB 111 by Sen. Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield, which expresses the intent of the Legislature to provide up to $65 million in the 2015-16 fiscal year to public school districts on military bases in order to meet a 20 percent federal matching share requirement for school construction grants from the Office of Bill signed encouraging study of Latino deportation :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:
Donald Trump's mass deportation actually happened during Great Depression | MLive.com http://bit.ly/1Mb99uG
