UCLA helps bring Oaxacan culture to L.A. classrooms

Report Issue

Please complete the required fields.

Your Name

Email

Reason (required)
This post contains broken linksPost has incorrect informationPost has spamCopyright IssueOther

Description

Submit

As students in Los Angeles return to school, some of them will find a new topic in their class curriculum, inspired by the efforts of the Latin American Institute at UCLA: the Indigenous history and culture of Oaxaca.

Building on a long history of outreach, the institute this summer held its first K–12 teacher workshop in Mexico, an immersive monthlong program that brought 18 Los Angeles–area teachers to Oaxaca, the southern Mexican state that is the ancestral homeland of many of their students. The teachers, in turn, will incorporate what they learned into their classroom instruction, providing a glimpse into Oaxaca’s rich and diverse Indigenous traditions.

“I cannot take my students to Oaxaca,” said Karina Villalvazo Bañuelos, who participated in the program and teaches at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights. “But I can bring Oaxaca to my students.”

The unique professional learning experience — originally developed by the institute’s outreach coordinator Verónica Zavala and former director Kevin Terraciano and funded in part by a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright–Hays grant — combined lectures, intensive Zapotec language training, guided excursions and meetings with Oaxacans from all walks of life.

Teaching about Oaxaca and Indigenous Latin American regions has taken on greater importance as the number of immigrants to Los Angeles from those areas has risen in recent decades. It is estimated that there are today some 200,000 Zapotecs — Oaxaca’s largest Indigenous group — who call Los Angeles County home. That has meant a a greater portion of Oaxacan-origin students in classrooms, particularly in the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose student body is three-quarters Latino.

“It was important that teachers witness how many of their students’ cultures differ from that of other Mexican migrants,” said Gaspar Rivera-Salgado director of the UCLA Center for Mexican Studies. “Indigenous students have a unique sense of identity, they speak their own native languages. The workshop enabled teachers to understand this context so they’re better equipped to address the diversity of their Mexican-origin students.”