Here is our plan for this week and next:

1. In preparation for our last and final collective discussion, read chapters 7, 8, and 9 in Racism on Trial and write-up your last and final “prep sheet.”  We’ll discuss these at our Tuesday class meeting, and follow it up with another discussion on the role of the Vietnam War in Chicano/Latino history.
2. On Thursday, we will have a short lecture and fill out course evaluations.
3. The due date for the group Digital History Page(s) is extended to no later than Monday, December  5th at 10:00AM.  The text must be emailed to me anytime before that deadline.  Images must be emailed as well, and the text must reflect where they are to be placed.  (Sunday night is much appreciated.)
4. During our last class on Tuesday, December 6th, we will look at the website we have created and discuss our final assignment, the individual Reflection essay (due no later than December 13th at 12 noon).

This week we will only meet once, on Tuesday, when we will have a short presentation on the Young Lords–a political organization and inspirational movement of Puerto Rican youth.  We will also have our regular collaborative discussion based on the “prep sheet” you bring to class.  The reading assignment is chapters 4, 5, and 6 in the book Racism on Trial.

We have only a two discussion opportunities left!  This is a great time for those of you who haven’t been as vocal to step up and share our perspective.

Be healthy. Be good.

We will also have time on Tuesday to do some information/citation swapping for our group research project and discuss some of the postwar changes to Mexican American political efforts via a lecture.

On Thursday, unless we have made a change in the due date, you will turn in your Individua Research Narratives and we will have a lecture and discussion on Chicano and Puerto Rican youth movements for change.

This assignment should look very similar to a traditional essay.  Is should be typed up (in accordance with our “Writing Guidelines” document), it should be organized and clear, and it should contain footnotes to document your research. It doesn’t have a particular length, but it should adequately represent your research up to this point.

Where it differs from a regular essay is that it does not necessarily have to be self-contained.  That is, since this will be merged with other narratives to form one, seamless piece of writing, your individual assignment does not necessarily have to have an intro and conclusion, unless that is required by the structure and format determined by your collective.

The assignment will be assessed in accordance with the last two criteria for the third course outcome:

• Evaluate multiple primary and secondary sources with respect to proof, argument, bias, and the context of production.
• Present findings in clear prose, using footnotes.

We’ll begin the week by reading and discussing the next few chapters in the book Migra!, by Kelly Lytle-Hernandez.  This week we read chapters 4, 5, and 6.  As usual, you should prepare your “prep sheet” and bring it to class.  We will work in our research groups again, this time spending a bit more of our collective effort on our large group discussion.

We will follow-up our Tuesday discussion with a short documentary on the famous court case Mendez v. Westminster.  This will begin to bring the WWII period and the era of social change of the 50s and beyond.  On Thursday we will further link those two eras with a lecture and activity.

I thought you might find this short video informative as you read about the historical formation of the US-Mexico border.  It is made and distributed by  wonderful human-rights organization in Arizona called “No More Deaths.”  They work to assure the survival of migrants who choose to cross the border via the desert, people’s who often die (at the rate of roughly one per day) of exposure, dehydration, and other preventable conditions.  As you will see, these human beings do not have an ally in some of our nation’s border agents.

Our class will also move quickly from here on out. You’ve already earned half of your final grade points (50 out of 100), not counting your prep sheets and weekly contributions to discussion. (After you get back your Research Report and PSE 3 assignments on Tuesday you will be able to calculate your current grade within some mathematical certainty.) Beyond our readings and discussion, we now have only three more assignments left, all of them related to the final project–your individual Research Narrative; your group’s Digital History Page(s); and a final Reflection Essay. It will be important for you to stay on task with your group in the weeks ahead.

Tuesday
We will return to our regular start-of-the-week class format as we have a collaborative discussion on the introduction and first three chapters of the book Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, by Kelly Lytle Hernández. You have a prep sheet due on the reading assignment and, as we discussed in class, I want you to pay special attention to the arguments she frames and the evidence, theories, and themes she uses to tell the story. We’ll follow our discussion with a short lecture on race and identity in the early 20th century.

Wednesday
The film “Precious Knowledge” will be screened at 6:00PM at Rose Hills Theater (Smith Campus Center, Pomona College). Following the film there will be a Q&A with the filmmakers. This is a powerful documentary on the present-day attack on Chicana/o Studies being waged in Arizona. The film speaks directly to the class research project and our class. Don’t miss out on your chance to be part of history in motion!

Thursday
We will have a lecture on Latinos and WWII today, and take some time out of class to discuss the film from the previous night. We’ll also review how you make footnotes for your Research Narratives and review our upcoming schedule relating to the project.

The Project
You should continue researching for our group project, both reading through the archives as well as scanning materials for our web site. The next assignment is the individual Research Narrative, due November 10th. This is simply a narrative based on your research. You might want to think about this as an essay with footnotes, if that helps. Your narrative should tell the story (or one or more parts of the story) which has been assigned to your group. Your narrative should be well-written and incorporate the evidence you have found both as quotes and in citations. You are encouraged to insert and/or attach any scanned images you find compelling and useful in your narrative.

See you next week! In the meantime, here is the trailer for “Precious Knowledge”:

A deportation program that is central to the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement strategy has led disproportionately to the removal of Latino immigrants and to arrests by immigration authorities of hundreds of United States citizens, according to a report by two law schools using new, in-depth official data on deportation cases.

The report also found that about a third of around 226,000 immigrants who have been deported under the program, known as Secure Communities, had spouses or children who were United States citizens, suggesting a broad impact from those removals on Americans in Latino communities.

The report, to be released Wednesday, is the first analysis of deportations under the Secure Communities program based on data about individual cases, which was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the University of California, Berkeley, law school and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.

The Secure Communities program has drawn intense criticism from immigrant communities and from some state and local officials, who have said it led to deportations of many immigrants who were not dangerous offenders and eroded trust between the communities and local police.

Obama administration officials have just as vigorously defended the program. On Tuesday, immigration officials said that the latest deportation figures show that Secure Communities and the Obama administration’s larger strategy are working, announcing that they had deported a total of 396,906 foreigners over the last year, a record number in the last decade.

The officials said that 55 percent of the immigrants deported were criminal convicts, including 51,620 people convicted of felonies like homicide, drug trafficking and sexual offenses. The results were an 89 percent increase in deportations of criminals since the beginning of the Obama administration, the officials said. Of the remaining illegal immigrants deported, the great majority were arrested soon after they crossed the border illegally or had returned illegally after being deported, officials said.

“We came into office focused on creating a smart enforcement system by setting a rational system of priorities, and we have done that,” John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said on Tuesday. “We said criminal offenders would be our highest priority, and lo and behold, they are the highest priority.”

Under Secure Communities, the fingerprints of anyone booked after arrest by local police are checked against F.B.I. criminal databases and also against Department of Homeland Security databases, which record immigration violations. Initiated in 2008, the program has been expanded by the Obama administration to more than 1,500 jurisdictions, and officials have said they will extend it nationwide by 2013.

In a random sample provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement of 375 deportation cases under the program that was analyzed by the law schools, researchers found five cases of United States citizens held by immigration agents, with no clear reason specified in the records. Although the number of citizens is small, their presence in the sample raised concerns because immigration authorities do not have legal powers to prosecute or deport Americans.

“If Secure Communities was working properly,” the report said, a match under the program “should never result in the apprehension” of a citizen. Based on the sample, the researchers estimated that at least 680 United States citizens had been held under the program. No Americans were ever placed in immigration detention, the report found.

Administration officials strongly rejected the report’s findings, saying they were not an accurate description of the program. “Any suggestion that we are knowingly arresting or detaining U.S. citizens would be false and a misrepresentation,” Mr. Morton said.

The officials said that some American citizens arrested by local police could be flagged in a Secure Communities match because the department’s fingerprint databases include immigration violations and also positive histories of immigrants who applied for legal status or naturalized to become American citizens. Immigration agents might hold a foreign-born person already arrested by local police while they were verifying the immigrant’s legal status or American citizenship, they said.

“Wherever we determine that someone is a citizen we don’t detain and remove that person, because we don’t have that power,” Mr. Morton said. But he added, “It would be irresponsible for us not to investigate someone who is suspected of a crime and has some record of being foreign born.”

The researchers said the presence of citizens among deportation cases indicated that the program did not have adequate procedures to avoid the arrest of Americans and others who could or should not be deported.

“The Secure Communities protocol too often is arrest first and investigate later, and that is not what the Constitution dictates,” said Peter L. Markowitz, a professor of immigration law at the Cardozo law school and an author of the report. The other authors were Aarti Kohli and Lisa Chavez of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute at the Berkeley law school.

“If this is the quality of due process with regard to U.S. citizens,” Mr. Markowitz said, “we should all be terrified with regard to immigrants who are targets of immigration enforcement.”

The report found that 93 percent of immigrants arrested under Secure Communities were Latinos, although Latino immigrants are about three-quarters of the illegal immigrants in the United States.

On Thursday, we will have a regular Thursday class with a lecture and informal discussion. You have one reading for that day, Digital Reading 9, which is available for you to download from the DR page above.

You also have to write your final Primary Source Exercise on the reading, which is due in class on Thursday. As you will notice when you see the reading, it is comprised of three primary sources on repatriation/deportation in the 1930s. Chose ONE of those sources on which to base your PSE3 assignment. If you are so moved you may address more than one, but it is not required.