Today, Texas is the eighth largest economy in the world, yet it ranks 46th in educational spending per student in the U.S. Students continue to experience different educational opportunities and outcomes based on which neighborhood they live in.

In 1968, Edgewood HS students organized a walkout. 

As Texas continues to explore ways to provide a quality education for all, a new short documentary from our Know Your Neighbor program, The Walkout, looks back to 1968 when students at Edgewood High School took the problem into their own hands. Find out why they had to do it—and why knowing their story is part of knowing our neighbors today.

Source: Texas Tribune 

Before the school shooting, Uvalde was known for a 1970 Hispanic student walkout. Its aging participants fear its spirit and memory are fading.  When a popular Hispanic teacher didn’t get his contract renewed at Robb Elementary School in 1970, hundreds of students decided to boycott school for weeks in what they called a stand against pervasive discrimination.

Source: TSHA 

Excerpt: The resulting Operation Wetback, a national reaction against illegal immigration, began in Texas in mid-July 1954. Headed by the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Gen. Joseph May Swing, the United States Border Patrol, aided by municipal, county, state, and federal authorities, as well as the military, began a quasi-military operation of search and seizure of all unauthorized immigrants.

Poverty and lack of work drove my dad to seek repatriation in 1939. I cannot forget that my parents were seduced into accepting repatriation in 1939. It cost them the life of their young son. As soon as WWII broke out, my father was drafted and returned to the US to defend a country that wanted him out.

There is American history. There is Texas history. Then there is a history that few ever hear. The history of the Mexican-American. It is long, inspiring, heartbreaking, and full of struggles for equal access. People, long exploited for their labor, inhumanely treated, often deported without cause, and denied due process.  The relationship between the US and our southern neighbor is long and complicated. 

100 years ago, Mexican Americans saw racial terror

Historians and Latino activists say it’s time to acknowledge the terror experienced by Mexican Americans years before white mobs attacked and murdered African Americans in dozens of cities across the country in 1919. (July 26)