This one is overdue. We lost a great historian and scholar last week when Howard Zinn, famous for the People’s History of the United States, passed away at the age of 87.

ImmProf blog found and linked to an interview with Howard Zinn where he explicates his view on immigration:

“If you don’t have a vision, for instance, of a world without national boundaries, you are not in a position to really evaluate very specific things, like should Congress pass this immigration law, or should we pass that immigration law, should we restrict immigration this much or immigration that much. But if you have that vision of the kind of world that you want, then it becomes clear what your attitude has to be towards immigration, which is people should be able to move: there shouldn’t be such a thing as a foreigner, an alien, an immigrant.”

Borders are human-made, geo-political constructions that should neither necessitate the deprivation of basic human rights nor cast people as outsiders. In our world, they function as a specific form of colonial domination that necessitates the delineation of an inside and outside, the marking and categorizing of certain bodies as alien and foreign for specific political purposes such as the “national security” project.

I had the privilege of meeting Howard Zinn briefly during one of his lectures against the war(s) while I was still an undergraduate student. Zinn did what we can call subaltern history in the frame of the United States, counter-hegemonic histories from below. He deconstructed History, the hegemonic narrative of the vanguard, and filled pages, lecture halls and our lives with counter-narratives. For example, in the People’s History of the United States, the Vietnam War is told from the point of view of protesters, workers are the main focus of industrialism and slavery is written from the perspective of the enslaved.

There’s a lesson here for DREAM Act students from the life and work of Howard Zinn.

Who will write your history? And more importantly, how will you let it be written?

I am not going to write a blog post full of inspirational quotes about ‘coming out’ from Harvey Milk and yours truly. I won’t talk about the power of narratives and story-telling for the umpteenth time and bore you with it. Just read the following blogpost from a stranger in Tennessee:

So, I’ll say that I met with two kids, C. and H., who are here illegally and have been since they were very small children. They’ve just finished up high school and they now can’t go to college at in-state rates or get jobs or drive or come to the attention of the police in any way.

I guess I must have known that there was no path to citizenship for these kids, but until you’re sitting across from someone and looking in his face when he says it, it doesn’t really sink in. There is no line for these kids to get in. They’ve been in the U.S. almost their whole lives. There’s no “back to where they came from” for them to go to, because they come from here. But there’s no way for them to become U.S. citizens.

I mean, seriously, when you’re sitting at a table with a teenage girl who speaks with a thick Tennessee accent and she’s talking about being afraid of being deported…

I’m going to write something strong and knowledgeable about this at Feministe, but here?

I can’t do it.

Read the rest of it here and make sure to leave comments.

BYLINE: By STEVE LAWRENCE, Associated Press Writer

State Sen. Gil Cedillo is trying to shine some light on a shocking but little known episode in American history. He faces an uphill battle.

The Los Angeles Democrat is the author of a bill that would require public junior high and high schools to teach students about the deportation of about 2 million Hispanics, including 400,000 Californians, to Mexico during the Great Depression.

Elementary schools would have the option of including information about the deportations in social science instruction.

The deportation program was started in 1929 by the Hoover administration, supposedly as a way to get rid of illegal immigrants and open up jobs during the Depression. Most of those rounded up and sent to Mexico were American citizens or legal immigrants, critics say.

Cedillo calls it “an embarrassment to all Americans.”

“Those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” he said. “That would be another tragedy upon a tragedy. … The way to avoid that is through education.”

Cedillo’s bill is scheduled to be considered Monday by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

That committee shelved an earlier version of the legislation last year as part of an effort to hold down spending. A committee analysis said the bill could lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in state costs to reimburse school districts for a new mandate.

Cedillo said he might be able to “tweak the language regarding what’s mandatory, what’s optional or available” to get the bill out of committee.

Even if the bill clears the Legislature, it faces a possible veto by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who turned down similar legislation in 2006 that was introduced by then-Sen. Joe Dunn, a Democrat from Garden Grove.

The Republican governor says he has consistently rejected bills that require mention of specific events or groups of people in social science instruction.

“I continue to believe that the state should refrain from being overly prescriptive in school curriculum beyond establishing rigorous academic standards and frameworks,” he said in vetoing the Dunn legislation.

Schwarzenegger also vetoed a Dunn bill in 2005 that would have set up a fund to pay reparations to victims of the deportations. But the governor signed another Dunn measure that same year that officially apologized for the deportations.

The requirement for junior and senior high schools would kick in when the state Board of Education adopts new social science textbooks and curriculum frameworks. Cedillo said the board is going through that process now, which makes the bill timely.

On the Net: http://www.assembly.ca.gov and http://www.senate.ca.gov