Myrna Santiago
Biographic Data
| ID | 661616 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Myrna Santiago |
| GIVEN NAMES | Myrna |
| FAMILY NAME | Santiago |
| SIGNATURE | SANTIAGO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Saint Mary's College of California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4701-3445 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Disciplinary skills are not enough
Background Drawing from research with 11th-grade history students, the authors illustrate how students’ racial/ethnic and language experiences influence their analysis of Mexican American discrimination. Latinx students’ experiences with white privilege helped them understand why 1940s Mexican Americans claimed whiteness to access better schools. However, students’ experiences with instruction for Emergent Bilingual (EB) students interfered with …
Mexican American Educational History
Mexican American educational history has become a vibrant field of study since the late 1980s. In the last seven years, however, it is notable that this research has inspired community-based efforts to preserve and publicly commemorate challenges to unequal education. In this commentary, we discuss the archival recovery of the Francisco Maestas et al. v. George Shone et al. case in Alamosa, Colorado; the excavation of El Colegio Altamirano in Heb…
In Memoriam
The Unintended Consequences of VAM
Using the nonparametric Mann–Whitney U-Test to analyze 128 survey responses from K-12 teachers, this paper considers how value-added measures (VAM) impact educators’ decisions to include Latinx topics in their social studies lessons. The authors found that VAM teachers are more likely to rely on district/state curriculum standards whereas non-VAM teachers rely on curriculum resources to incorporate Latinx topics. When compared to non-VAM teachers…
History is critical
This article discusses the false dichotomy between criticality and historical inquiry. We argue that adding “critical” to “historical inquiry” can be interpreted as something distinct, instead of integral, to historical inquiry. It can normalize the idea that historical thinking is not critical, which, in turn, upholds the illusion that historical inquiry research is not inherently ideological or political. It inadvertently reifies a false dichot…
Diluting Mexican American History for Public Consumption
Background/Context To adapt to increasingly diverse classrooms, some school districts are trying to offer additional curriculum that represents the diversity of their students. California, where half of school-age children are Latinx, is at the forefront of including Latinx histories in its curriculum. The state's 2017 California History-Social Science Framework claims to prioritize “engaging and relevant” history curriculum. Yet, as this article…
A framework for an interdisciplinary understanding of Mexican American school segregation
As a Mexican American school desegregation case, historians, legal scholars, and educational researchers have all explored Mendez v. Westminster’s significance. Each discipline, with its own modes of analysis, has constructed a distinct interpretation of the 1940s California case. However, in focusing on different aspects of Mendez, scholars tend to ignore complexities of the case that are fundamental to other fields. This is why I developed an i…
Redeeming the Revolution
It is impossible to read Redeeming the Revolution at this moment without thinking about the crisis in Nicaragua and whether there is anything in the Mexican example that might apply in terms of how revolutions die—and how they try to resurrect or redeem themselves. The argument Joseph U. Lenti makes in this fascinating book is that even though it was students who rose up to challenge the official discourse of revolution in Mexico in 1968 in light…
Teaching anti-essentialist historical inquiry
A narrative of racial progress abounds in U.S. history, making it difficult for teachers to present complex interpretations of racial/ethnic discrimination. Historical complexity challenges such simplistic notions of race/ethnicity and encourages critical thinking. Adding anti-essentialist historical content about Latinx communities is one way to complicate perceptions of race relations in the United States. When combined with historical inquiry,…
Extraction Stories
Refinery Town
A friend and I have been in conversation about the books he should write now that he is retired from teaching. My suggestion: short case studies for classroom use about relatively successful social movements. I say relatively because historians know there are no permanent victories, only processes that sometimes lead to improved conditions while new problems emerge. Refinery Town is one such book, useful for a course on urban studies, leftist pol…
Working on Earth
This collection of twelve essays is a welcome addition to the literature on environmental justice. The editors chose contributors grounded in environmental studies, half from literature and creative writing and half from disciplines as varied as journalism, political science, anthropology, history, cultural studies, and sustainable development. The chronology is contemporary, and while the geographic coverage focuses on the United States, there a…
Erasing Differences for the Sake of Inclusion
Mendez v. Westminster, a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation, is a new vehicle for including Mexican Americans into U.S. history classrooms. This study explores how a class of primarily Mexican American students, who because of their heritage might develop a personal connection to the case, made sense of Mendez. The findings suggest that Mendez is subsumed under the larger Black Civil Rights narrative and stripped of its unique a…
In Search of the Amazon
Book Review| December 01 2015 In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region. Garfield, Seth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013xi + 343 pp., $76.40 (cloth); $26.95 (paper) Myrna Santiago Myrna Santiago Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2015) 12 (4): 135–136. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3155264 C…
Robert F. Alegre. Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico
It is a felicitous sign of the times that gender shares the marquis with class and memory in a book about the all-male Mexican railroad workers. Robert F. Alegre makes a valiant effort to integrate women into the narrative, but since the workforce was male, the men are the core of the story and the women the periphery. Women were nevertheless important because the rieleras, as they called themselves, moved close to the center during times of cris…
Subterranean Struggles
It is tempting to resort to the old cliché that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” upon first encountering Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury's volume on extraction in Latin America. The editors are acutely aware of the possibility, explaining explicitly what is new about this cycle of mining south of the US border. As it turns out, there is plenty that is novel, despite the fact that mining (if not oil) has a 500-year history…
British Lions and Mexican Eagles
Paul Garner, Cowdray Professor of Spanish at the University of Leeds, has written a rich and much overdue business biography of Weetman Pearson, the British engineer and oil magnate who became Lord Cowdray in 1910 and viscount in 1917. Although his career involved engineering projects worldwide, Pearson’s work and fortune is linked to Mexico. In recognition of that fact, Pearson endowed a professorship at Leeds for the study of Spanish. It is bef…
Culture Clash
62 The Journal of American History June 2012 Oil revolutionized the world. In just over one century, the resource created an energy regime that changed transportation systems, war technologies, agricultural production, state politics, and, ultimately, the global climate. Petroleum is an American fable too. Highrisk investment, technological and scientific innovation, fierce competition, boom-andbust cycles, outsized personalities, environmental d…
Revolutionary Parks
Undoubtedly anyone who picks up Emily Wakild’s book will be totally ignorant of the fact that Mexico once experienced an extremely active period of national park creation. This is such a deeply hidden history that even Mexicans have forgotten about it. Such a lapse of memory is because the effervescence of creation lasted one administration, that of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 – 40). What makes this episode worth rescuing from the dustbin of history is…
The Huasteca Rain Forest
Northern Veracruz has experienced dramatic transformations in its landscape over the longue durée . Geological forces shaped it into the northernmost tropical rain forest in the Americas. Paleolithic humans appeared as early as 7600 BCE and tinkered with it, exploiting it for their own survival for thousands of years. Their ecological footprint was light enough until the communities grew and adopted agriculture. At that point, around 2500 BCE, th…
From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba
Reinaldo Funes Monzote has written a seminal book on the environmental history of sugar in Cuba. Written as a chronicle of the changes that the sugar plantation complex wrought upon the largest of the islands in the Antilles, the text is reminiscent of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the 1981 novel by Gabriel García Márquez that describes an assassination that everyone knew was going to take place but became inevitable nonetheless. The demise in t…
A Very Special Life Energy
The Ecology of Oil
An exploration of the social and environmental consequences of oil extraction in the tropical rainforest. Using northern Veracruz as a case study, the author argues that oil production generated major historical and environmental transformations in land tenure systems and uses, and social organisation. Such changes, furthermore, entailed effects, including the marginalisation of indigenes, environmental destruction, and tense labour relations. In…
Rejecting Progress in Paradise
Erasing Differences for the Sake of Inclusion
Mendez v. Westminster, a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation, is a new vehicle for including Mexican Americans into U.S. history classrooms. This study explores how a class of primarily Mexican American students, who because of their heritage might develop a personal connection to the case, made sense of Mendez. The findings suggest that Mendez is subsumed under the larger Black Civil Rights narrative and stripped of its unique a…
History is critical
This article discusses the false dichotomy between criticality and historical inquiry. We argue that adding “critical” to “historical inquiry” can be interpreted as something distinct, instead of integral, to historical inquiry. It can normalize the idea that historical thinking is not critical, which, in turn, upholds the illusion that historical inquiry research is not inherently ideological or political. It inadvertently reifies a false dichot…
Teaching anti-essentialist historical inquiry
A narrative of racial progress abounds in U.S. history, making it difficult for teachers to present complex interpretations of racial/ethnic discrimination. Historical complexity challenges such simplistic notions of race/ethnicity and encourages critical thinking. Adding anti-essentialist historical content about Latinx communities is one way to complicate perceptions of race relations in the United States. When combined with historical inquiry,…
Revolutionary Parks
Undoubtedly anyone who picks up Emily Wakild’s book will be totally ignorant of the fact that Mexico once experienced an extremely active period of national park creation. This is such a deeply hidden history that even Mexicans have forgotten about it. Such a lapse of memory is because the effervescence of creation lasted one administration, that of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 – 40). What makes this episode worth rescuing from the dustbin of history is…
Rejecting Progress in Paradise
The Unintended Consequences of VAM
Using the nonparametric Mann–Whitney U-Test to analyze 128 survey responses from K-12 teachers, this paper considers how value-added measures (VAM) impact educators’ decisions to include Latinx topics in their social studies lessons. The authors found that VAM teachers are more likely to rely on district/state curriculum standards whereas non-VAM teachers rely on curriculum resources to incorporate Latinx topics. When compared to non-VAM teachers…
Culture Clash
62 The Journal of American History June 2012 Oil revolutionized the world. In just over one century, the resource created an energy regime that changed transportation systems, war technologies, agricultural production, state politics, and, ultimately, the global climate. Petroleum is an American fable too. Highrisk investment, technological and scientific innovation, fierce competition, boom-andbust cycles, outsized personalities, environmental d…
Rejecting Progress in Paradise
The Ecology of Oil
An exploration of the social and environmental consequences of oil extraction in the tropical rainforest. Using northern Veracruz as a case study, the author argues that oil production generated major historical and environmental transformations in land tenure systems and uses, and social organisation. Such changes, furthermore, entailed effects, including the marginalisation of indigenes, environmental destruction, and tense labour relations. In…
A Very Special Life Energy
From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba
Reinaldo Funes Monzote has written a seminal book on the environmental history of sugar in Cuba. Written as a chronicle of the changes that the sugar plantation complex wrought upon the largest of the islands in the Antilles, the text is reminiscent of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the 1981 novel by Gabriel García Márquez that describes an assassination that everyone knew was going to take place but became inevitable nonetheless. The demise in t…
The Huasteca Rain Forest
Northern Veracruz has experienced dramatic transformations in its landscape over the longue durée . Geological forces shaped it into the northernmost tropical rain forest in the Americas. Paleolithic humans appeared as early as 7600 BCE and tinkered with it, exploiting it for their own survival for thousands of years. Their ecological footprint was light enough until the communities grew and adopted agriculture. At that point, around 2500 BCE, th…
Culture Clash
62 The Journal of American History June 2012 Oil revolutionized the world. In just over one century, the resource created an energy regime that changed transportation systems, war technologies, agricultural production, state politics, and, ultimately, the global climate. Petroleum is an American fable too. Highrisk investment, technological and scientific innovation, fierce competition, boom-andbust cycles, outsized personalities, environmental d…
Revolutionary Parks
Undoubtedly anyone who picks up Emily Wakild’s book will be totally ignorant of the fact that Mexico once experienced an extremely active period of national park creation. This is such a deeply hidden history that even Mexicans have forgotten about it. Such a lapse of memory is because the effervescence of creation lasted one administration, that of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 – 40). What makes this episode worth rescuing from the dustbin of history is…
British Lions and Mexican Eagles
Paul Garner, Cowdray Professor of Spanish at the University of Leeds, has written a rich and much overdue business biography of Weetman Pearson, the British engineer and oil magnate who became Lord Cowdray in 1910 and viscount in 1917. Although his career involved engineering projects worldwide, Pearson’s work and fortune is linked to Mexico. In recognition of that fact, Pearson endowed a professorship at Leeds for the study of Spanish. It is bef…
In Search of the Amazon
Book Review| December 01 2015 In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region. Garfield, Seth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013xi + 343 pp., $76.40 (cloth); $26.95 (paper) Myrna Santiago Myrna Santiago Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2015) 12 (4): 135–136. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3155264 C…
Robert F. Alegre. Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico
It is a felicitous sign of the times that gender shares the marquis with class and memory in a book about the all-male Mexican railroad workers. Robert F. Alegre makes a valiant effort to integrate women into the narrative, but since the workforce was male, the men are the core of the story and the women the periphery. Women were nevertheless important because the rieleras, as they called themselves, moved close to the center during times of cris…
Subterranean Struggles
It is tempting to resort to the old cliché that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” upon first encountering Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury's volume on extraction in Latin America. The editors are acutely aware of the possibility, explaining explicitly what is new about this cycle of mining south of the US border. As it turns out, there is plenty that is novel, despite the fact that mining (if not oil) has a 500-year history…
Refinery Town
A friend and I have been in conversation about the books he should write now that he is retired from teaching. My suggestion: short case studies for classroom use about relatively successful social movements. I say relatively because historians know there are no permanent victories, only processes that sometimes lead to improved conditions while new problems emerge. Refinery Town is one such book, useful for a course on urban studies, leftist pol…
Working on Earth
This collection of twelve essays is a welcome addition to the literature on environmental justice. The editors chose contributors grounded in environmental studies, half from literature and creative writing and half from disciplines as varied as journalism, political science, anthropology, history, cultural studies, and sustainable development. The chronology is contemporary, and while the geographic coverage focuses on the United States, there a…
Erasing Differences for the Sake of Inclusion
Mendez v. Westminster, a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation, is a new vehicle for including Mexican Americans into U.S. history classrooms. This study explores how a class of primarily Mexican American students, who because of their heritage might develop a personal connection to the case, made sense of Mendez. The findings suggest that Mendez is subsumed under the larger Black Civil Rights narrative and stripped of its unique a…
Extraction Stories
A framework for an interdisciplinary understanding of Mexican American school segregation
As a Mexican American school desegregation case, historians, legal scholars, and educational researchers have all explored Mendez v. Westminster’s significance. Each discipline, with its own modes of analysis, has constructed a distinct interpretation of the 1940s California case. However, in focusing on different aspects of Mendez, scholars tend to ignore complexities of the case that are fundamental to other fields. This is why I developed an i…
Redeeming the Revolution
It is impossible to read Redeeming the Revolution at this moment without thinking about the crisis in Nicaragua and whether there is anything in the Mexican example that might apply in terms of how revolutions die—and how they try to resurrect or redeem themselves. The argument Joseph U. Lenti makes in this fascinating book is that even though it was students who rose up to challenge the official discourse of revolution in Mexico in 1968 in light…
Teaching anti-essentialist historical inquiry
A narrative of racial progress abounds in U.S. history, making it difficult for teachers to present complex interpretations of racial/ethnic discrimination. Historical complexity challenges such simplistic notions of race/ethnicity and encourages critical thinking. Adding anti-essentialist historical content about Latinx communities is one way to complicate perceptions of race relations in the United States. When combined with historical inquiry,…
Diluting Mexican American History for Public Consumption
Background/Context To adapt to increasingly diverse classrooms, some school districts are trying to offer additional curriculum that represents the diversity of their students. California, where half of school-age children are Latinx, is at the forefront of including Latinx histories in its curriculum. The state's 2017 California History-Social Science Framework claims to prioritize “engaging and relevant” history curriculum. Yet, as this article…
History is critical
This article discusses the false dichotomy between criticality and historical inquiry. We argue that adding “critical” to “historical inquiry” can be interpreted as something distinct, instead of integral, to historical inquiry. It can normalize the idea that historical thinking is not critical, which, in turn, upholds the illusion that historical inquiry research is not inherently ideological or political. It inadvertently reifies a false dichot…
Mexican American Educational History
Mexican American educational history has become a vibrant field of study since the late 1980s. In the last seven years, however, it is notable that this research has inspired community-based efforts to preserve and publicly commemorate challenges to unequal education. In this commentary, we discuss the archival recovery of the Francisco Maestas et al. v. George Shone et al. case in Alamosa, Colorado; the excavation of El Colegio Altamirano in Heb…
In Memoriam
The Unintended Consequences of VAM
Using the nonparametric Mann–Whitney U-Test to analyze 128 survey responses from K-12 teachers, this paper considers how value-added measures (VAM) impact educators’ decisions to include Latinx topics in their social studies lessons. The authors found that VAM teachers are more likely to rely on district/state curriculum standards whereas non-VAM teachers rely on curriculum resources to incorporate Latinx topics. When compared to non-VAM teachers…
Disciplinary skills are not enough
Background Drawing from research with 11th-grade history students, the authors illustrate how students’ racial/ethnic and language experiences influence their analysis of Mexican American discrimination. Latinx students’ experiences with white privilege helped them understand why 1940s Mexican Americans claimed whiteness to access better schools. However, students’ experiences with instruction for Emergent Bilingual (EB) students interfered with …
Political science (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (13 works) · History (11 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · History (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · American Environmental and Regional History (5 works)