Giving Compass' Take:

• Araceli Cruz discusses the ongoing conflict over teaching Mexican-American studies in school and shares how her own education failed to help her and her classmates understand their history.

• How can philanthropy support the implementation of accurate and relevant history in classrooms?

• Learn how a coding school in Mexico is giving returning immigrants a second chance.

There is a battle brewing over Mexican-American Studies (MAS), which has been fiercely fought in schools throughout the West and beyond.

It may seem counterintuitive that a history class about Mexican-American heritage would be so controversial. After all, the country is inhabited by 56.6 million Latinos — 63.4% of which are of Mexican descent. So it would seem logical that school officials would want students to learn about their history. Then there’s the fact that a massive portion of the U.S. was actually Mexico for many years, interweaving the American and Mexican (and not to mention Native American) experiences.

Yet, teaching MAS to high school students has been a long and contested battle.

I am a Mexican-American Latina who grew up not far from Los Angeles, and, as a kid, I never really grasped the historical contribution of my community.

Years later, in late 2015, in the midst of the presidential election while researching deportations, I learned that my grandmother and her family were part of the Mexican Repatriation, an unofficial movement by local county agencies and private industries in the 1930s who made U.S. born people of Mexican descent go “back home” to Mexico. But Mexico wasn’t “home” to everyone. Nearly 60% of the nearly one million people of Mexican descent affected were born in the U.S.

Until that point, I had never heard of the Mexican Repatriation.

While I never learned about the Mexican Repatriation, a group of ambitious fifth graders from Bell Gardens, California, fought to learn about their heritage. In 2015, they petitioned to have the story of the Mexican Repatriation included in their curriculum, and won.

Read the full article about Mexican-American Studies by Araceli Cruz at GOOD Magazine.