My thread last night was full of indignant rage because my friends & colleagues—as well as children in my Mexican American community—were under attack by reactionary literary traditionalists.

I don't regret my rant. But today I want to explore this issue from another angle.

1/

I grew up on the US-Mexico border (where I still live) in a Mexican American family. Because of my love for stories (instilled by Grandmother Garza), I learned to read by age 5.

Reading was at first positively transformational. Rewired my brain. Made schoolwork easier.

2/

I didn't notice the negative impact until it was almost too late.

None of the books I read—in class or on my own—centered my Chicano identity in any way. My community didn't exist in those pages. Instead, a homogenous whiteness prevailed.

Subtly, it was erasing half of me.

3/

By high school, I knew I wanted to go to college, though no one in my family had before. But I assumed that meant turning my back on my family's language, traditions, ways of knowing.

I accepted that reality without question.

Just thinking about it breaks my heart.

4/

During my second semester at Pan American University (spring of 1989), I took 2 classes that began to wake me up.

One was a world literature course, in which we read THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET (a book by Chicana author Sandra Cisneros, a US writer).

Whoa. We write books.

5/

The other was Intro to Anthropology, where we studied border folklore, recipes, Mexican legends ... & Mesoamerican mythology, which South Texas schools had never taught me about.

The awakening was painful. I was pissed.

But 13 years of brainwashing are very hard to shake.

6/

I was an English major. Most of my classes still centered the canon.

I became a teacher in my hometown while beginning my master's.

Tried teaching high school English like my English professors did.

Failed miserably. Didn't grasp why, despite what I was going through.

7/

Still grappling with my own identity crisis, reading more work on folklore and mythology plus whatever Chicanx literature I could find, I switched to a middle school.

There was an adopted textbook. I used it unthinkingly for that 1st year.

25 years ago. Seems an eternity.

8/

My third year came. I had a class of kids who just wouldn't, COULD NOT, read the stories in the textbook.

I was so frustrated. But through conversations with my wife, I had an epiphany. I had come to reading through the stories of my family & community. A bridge of sorts.

9/

I came to class, said "toss your homework," dimmed the lights & told them a story we ALL KNEW.

They were stunned. I'd never mentioned I was Mexican American. Never tapped into that shared identity.

EVERYTHING CHANGED.

My TEDx talk on this moment:

10/

Stories from our culture & region, stories that centered my students & their families—that was where I needed to START.

I helped those 30 kids FALL IN LOVE WITH WRITTEN LANGUAGE. Taught them to create literary versions of their family stories. Brought in literary mirrors.

11/

By the end of the year, some of them WANTED to read canonical works in the textbook and library.

But THEY came to that choice after I'd built a bridge for them.

They were equipped to defend themselves with critical lenses against harmful elements found in some classics.

12/

THAT IS WHAT I'M ADVOCATING.

Not "cancelling the classics," but teaching powerful, personalized literacy via liberation pedagogy and local funds of knowledge.

Shaping critical readers who are equipped to find purpose in literature and push back against erasure.

ONLY THEN—

13/

Only then should we point at the classics & say, "Here's what a particular group of people, flawed and guilty though capable of beauty, once lifted up as great literature. Read with care, if you choose to read. There's much to be loved and much to be feared in those pages."

14/

There is nothing controversial about this unless you are a staunch conservative who believes national, Christian values are best instilled through a curated canon

OR

you're a white liberal whose idea of quality has been shaped by a canon that deliberately excluded BIPOC.

15/

And white (plus white-adjacent) folks who have anecdotal evidence from your own lives ("CATCHER IN THE RYE made ME a reader, Bowles, you clown") clearly do not understand either logic or instructional differentiation.

You're armchair reading coaches. You know nothing.

16/

You've the right to express your unfounded opinions, of course. But others of us have been tasked with actually making millions of children (50% of whom come from communities of color) literate.

You'll forgive us if we choose to center THEM in the classroom and not YOU.

17/17