Becas para Aztlán: Personal Narrative

Authors

  • Esteban Navarro

Keywords:

Becas para Aztlán, Chicano, La Voz Azteca, Additive Bilingualism, Primarily Language Education, Bilingual Education

Abstract

This narrative examines the writer’s participation in the Becas para Aztlán Scholarship Program, a Mexican government program that provided scholarships to Chicano students to study in Mexican universities. It discusses how a group of Chicano graduate university students, many who have ended up in leadership positions and careers as university professors, doctors of medicine, teachers, and several other professions, banded together to form a strong enduring union. It also recounts the author’s experiences in this international pedagogical journey and how this cultural, sociolinguistic, political and academic binational experience influenced and strengthened his professional teaching career with his own students over the last 34 years. It also details the writer’s participation and fortification of thirty years of Spanish language high school newspaper journalism in South San Diego. It explains how his students’ and his contribution to the maintenance of a Spanish primary language news, culture and literary publication, La Voz Azteca newspaper has been a part of additive bilingualism and established a formidable front against subtractive schooling policies. The narrative suggests that this form of transformational resistance has perhaps found a meaningful way into a part of the history of the struggle for Chicano/Mexican/Latino expression.

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Published

2020-05-21

How to Cite

Navarro, E. (2020). Becas para Aztlán: Personal Narrative. Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe, 34(2). Retrieved from https://bilingualreviewjournal.org/index.php/br/article/view/348