Ethnic studies contract causes a rift in PVUSD – and a community group.

A conversation with Maximiliano Barraza Hernandez, an outgoing ninth-grader at Pajaro Valley High School, feels like going to an introductory college course in what some on the right might dismiss as “wokeness.” As he wraps up an ethnic literature studies class, he talks about social issues like the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration and how the patriarchy negatively affects men. “It’s this endless cycle where men hurt other men and they are traumatized, and the cycle keeps going,” he says.

I’m talking to Barraza Hernandez and his younger sister, eighth-grader Ixel Barraza Hernandez, because they and their parents have become leaders of an emerging movement in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District (which includes part of North Monterey County).

Their dad, Gabriel Barraza (who is Mexican American), emphasizes the importance of the curriculum in a majority-Latino district. “If you close your eyes and picture someone as American, you are not going to picture someone who looks like me,” he says. But his vision is for more than inclusion – he also reflects on growing up in a community steeped in racist language toward Black, Chinese and Filipino neighbors. “We all have that capacity to carry this inside of us. What makes you different is that you make the decision, every single day, to not be that way,” he says.

Their mom, Lourdes Barraza Hernandez, notes that her children’s learning has far outpaced her own growing up, first in Mexico then in Watsonville. “I attended K-8 schools here, but I never had a class like that,” she says. “When I went to college, I thought that racism was something from the past. It wasn’t until I went to Occidental that I got smacked in the face with racism.”

This family might be unusually sophisticated in their discussion of structural racism. But in many ways, they represent the future norm after California’s ethnic studies curriculum requirement takes effect. Per 2021 legislation, high schools in the state must begin offering one semester of ethnic studies for the Class of 2030, meaning such coursework must be offered by the 2025-26 school year. Many districts, like PVUSD, are ahead of that requirement. But exactly what to teach and how to teach it remain flashpoints of controversy.

In PVUSD, it became controversial two years into a three-year contract with the Oakland-based firm Community Responsive Education, which had been hired starting in 2021 to guide teachers and administrators in developing and implementing a framework for teaching ethnic studies. But CRE founder Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales – who’d also been hired to chair the committee developing the California Department of Education’s model curriculum for ethnic studies – came under fire for the model curriculum’s failure to completely and accurately depict the historic and ongoing struggle of antisemitism. (According to news reports at the time, the original 600-page curriculum made only two mentions each of the Holocaust and antisemitism, compared with 317 mentions of Chicanos, 303 of Mexicans and 236 of Black people. In the model curriculum adopted in 2021, I count 58 mentions of antisemitism and 15 mentions of the Holocaust.)

The controversy led the PVUSD board to abruptly vote not to complete year three of the district’s contract with the firm.

It’s also had the unintended effect of mobilizing dozens of students and parents to form a new coalition engaged in school district matters. What began as Zoom meetings among about a dozen people has developed into repeat rallies at PVUSD board meetings of students and parents asking for a chance to weigh in on the CRE contract. As of May 20, it’s evolved into a coalition called Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice, which held its first in-person town hall meeting, featuring Tintiangco-Cubales as a guest who presented to some 75 people in the audience.

I expect the coalition to run candidates, engage in a coming bond measure and more.

“They ignored the community, and they created this mini movement,” Gabriel says.

He adds that ethnic studies was never meant to be confined to the classroom, but to have real-life application: “Thank you for helping us to put it into action.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com.