By Julie Hernandez
Disenfrachisement has permeated the psyche of citizens on the border between the US and Mexico as a result of over a century of outside interests that have never lived here enacting policy that has denied residents knowledge about their history and culture. El Paso, Texas, also known as La Frontera, is uniquely situated in many ways. One of a few American cities on a national and state border, it is landlocked in the Chiuanuan Desert. Since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war between the US and Mexico, it is not just as an annexed region, but a conquered territory. While Spain exercised hegemony on the native peoples here from California to most of South America, it was during James K. Polk’s presidency that we saw Manifest Destiny truly take shape. Manifest Destiny encouraged the United States to declare war on Mexico in 1846 and ultimately sieze Mexico City in 1848.
I grew up here in La Frontera — the Borderlands. It’s about an hour to 2 hours in any direction to get to the nearest town, with El Paso being the only major city for miles. It’s about 16 hours from the west coast and another 14 hours from the gulf coast and just about 4 hours south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. We’re relatively isolated out here, and if you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss the fact that Juarez, Mexico is the city’s conjoined twin, with a militarized and literal line in the sand forcibly separating the two sisters.
A thick, metal fence crowned with barbed wire stands tall on the northern bank of the Rio Grande. You can see colorful neighborhoods and people going about their day in Juarez, so close as neighbors, yet so far apart. My hometown of the Borderlands is land-rich but cash-poor and susceptible to outside financial interests. Dialect, history, culture, and family is shared here. The current United States’ and Texas’ hegemonic division imposed upon the area divides people from themselves and their home.
In grade schools I saw little to no emphasis on the culture or heritage of the Frontera and there were heavy reminders about the state of Texas having jurisdiction over our educational institutions. The educational system emphasized East Texas cities like Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio that are 12-14 hours away by car.
While in school, my favorite subject was, is, and always has been history. We can learn a lot about where we were, where we are, and where we’re going. I think that it’s amazingly fascinating, and no other subject excites me more than the general topic of history does. The older I get, the more excited I get with the idea of being able to contribute to the human narrative of experience.
There were odd disparities in the sociocultural perspective of my history classes. The lessons they taught focused on US History, World History, and Texas History (which focused solely on East Texas). They focused on the colonial era all the way up to Reconstruction and promptly ended there. World history focused on ancient societies like Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. There were only small and brief references to the Maya, Inca, and Aztec societies. It felt as though the world revolved around the US experience and its position in the wider world with heavy ethnocentric ideologies.
I wish I had learned more about La Frontera and 20th century history. It’s so juicy with information, but that knowledge seemed so far out of reach. To this day I find it extremely frustrating that all the history that I’d learned up to graduating high school was so limiting. The pedagogy of the classes repeated and reiterated the same information year after year, and it made the world feel so small. I wondered “why do they skip everything else, and what are they keeping from us? What do they know that we don’t, and what do they stand to benefit from our lack of information?” These are the questions that keep me up at night and drive me to learn more.
Knowledge is power. Life experience, curiosity, interest, and circumstance motivate learning and engagement. This is how I learn and engage with the world around me. This methodology has served me well in my academics and within my life outside of school, but the wider world is more or less unforgiving when it comes to learning. I consider myself to have a balance of book-smarts and street-smarts. I didn’t grow up street-smart, but being sheltered allowed me to become book-smart. Delaying my education and living in the Bay Area for the last 10 years allowed me to become wiser and to work on expanding my “street” skills. It gets easier, and honestly, I never stop learning.
I’m an intellectual first and foremost, and a growing scholar second. I’ve always let my curiosity drive me, even outside of academics. An intellectual, in my opinion, is someone that never stops learning. A scholar is someone that shares what they learn (in a more direct sense, presents research and navigates the academic system in which to do so). I’m beginning my career as a scholar and it’s right where I need to be. Modes of teaching differ from an academic context/environment vs. real-world education ie. “trial by fire”. School offers a lot more theory and demonstration and evidence. Real-world education is tangible, immediate, hands-on, and “do or die”. However, one of the greatest lessons I learned is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. This lesson was taught to me in an academic setting and I began to apply it in my daily life. Through trial and error, I got to master going outside of my comfort zone. I began to explore the world with greater and greater confidence, and I began to lean into the inevitable awkward situations that challenged me to be better.
As a problem solver, and looking back on my educational history, I’m appalled at what school boards and state and federal legislators deem acceptable pedagogy in grade schools. Disenfranchisement leads to acceptance of the status quo and no change in the curriculum. Information has been kept from people about who they are and where they live. This is the problem that I experienced growing up in grade school.
My solution and my mission is to make the pedagogy of local history and information more readily available in grade schools across La Frontera. If you don’t feel connected to where you live, you’re more likely to consider it as worthless and let outside powers and influences, like policymakers and real estate companies that have no idea what it’s like to live on La Frontera make decisions about what happens to the land and people there.
My grandmother was also born and raised in the borderlands and her journey and work as an educator inspires me. Her experience with language discrimination in school in the 1950’s drove her to teach people about her culture. She retired from her dream job as a middle school teacher at a Spanish-immersion school in Ohio. I hope to inspire more teachers to do the work she did in Ohio for schools in the borderlands.
I am thankful that I was not disciplined nor shamed for speaking Spanish in my Texas grade school. If I’d had easier access to knowledge of my cultural heritage, I would’ve found that my family roots are deep in La Frontera and I’d like to think I would’ve been active in my community as a result. There’s nowhere else like it, and treating it like a dirty secret and commercializing the land hurts rather than helps the community that lives in the Borderlands.