Portraits of Latino Achievement: Latino Contributions to American History and Society

What historic challenges have Latinos in the United States faced, and how have they responded to those challenges?

This question guides our biographical writing unit in 7^th grade Spanish Language Arts.  Building on concepts learned in our previous narrative writing unit, about the history of Latino immigrants to the United States and their influences on popular culture, students investigate the lives of Latino-American leaders and their historic contributions to American society.  They also reflect on their own contributions and future career goals, as Latino youth in America, who are often faced with unique challenges through which they have to persevere.  Modeled after the Smithsonian exhibit OJOS:  Our Journeys, Our Stories, Portraits of Latino Achievement, this unit is as much about building students’ understanding of how Latinos have persevered to shape American social and political history as it is about building students’ visions for how they, too, can have a positive impact in our society.

The literacy portion of the unit is anchored on biographical writing in its multiple forms.  Students gather biographical information about a wide variety of famous Latinos in the U.S. as presented in several different formats.  The traditional biographies are found on the OJOS site, the American Sabor site, and on a site called biografiasyvidas.com.  They are also presented in children’s literature, videos, interviews, poetry, and told through the music of corridos.  Students practice writing their own biographies about an influential Latino.   They also review the many ways in which information can be presented, which will later serve to help them decide how to present a subsequent social issues campaign.

The unit also relies heavily on social studies topics in the form of analyzing the Latinos’ historic struggles for civil rights in the United States and their accomplishments. 

Students investigate the struggle for workers’ rights, learning about influential Latinos such as César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Luis Valdez, Juan Barco, and Francisco Jiménez, all of whom have roots in migrant farm work. 

They also investigate the struggle for students’ rights, learning about the challenges faced by Latino students—lowered expectations, tracking, racism, and English-only policies—and how the students organized to advocate for their learning.  These stories are told through investigations of the lives of Latinos such as Sal Castro, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, Reyes Lopez Tijerina, and Paula Crisostomo, all of whom have connections to bilingual education activism or politics. 

Finally, students learn about the history of Latino immigration to the United States, comparing and contrasting the experiences of their family (sometimes two and three generations back) with those of other immigrant groups.  We analyze the poem “The New Colossus” (in both English and Spanish), learn about Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and discuss how the country from which a Latino immigrant comes influences his/her experience in the U.S.  For example, how does being a Latino immigrant from Cuba, who is considered a political exile, compare with a Latino immigrant from México, who came here as a result of a guest worker program?  How does being a Latino from Puerto Rico, which is a commonwealth of the United States, compare with a Latino immigrant from the Dominican Republic?

Ultimately, the students will use this historical understanding of the diversity of the Latino experience in the United States to identify an area of research for their next quarter’s argumentative writing unit.  They will take a position related to a topic (workers’ rights, education, or immigration), research it, write an argumentative essay, and use it to create an action campaign.  This historical/biographical unit provides the perfect background knowledge for this type of analysis.