Today Hispanic communities begin Dia de Los Muertos celebrations to remember with joy — not grief — their family members who have died. A team of teachers from Chicago’s Little Village community are striving to help their elementary students remember their Latinx heritage year-round with the help of a Fund for Teachers fellowship.

This summer Vanessa Viruet, Elizabeth Morales and Natalie Blondis Krzeminski (Spry Elementary used their $10,000 Fund for Teachers grant to document Mexican and Belizean cultural and historic sites to educate students on Afro-Mexican and Indigenous culture and counteract the negative impact that Mexican hegemony can have on students from these regions.

“Our school is located in a predominantly Mexican-American community in Chicago. Most of our student population is Latinx, yet we only celebrate our students during Mexican Independence Day with a school wide parade.,” wrote the teachers in their 2022 grant proposal. “The overt and covert racism through xenophobia that is felt has an impact on our student’s self-image, self-worth, and appreciation for their cultural upbringing. Many of our students combat societal pressure to assimilate and distance themselves from their native language and culture. As educators we must counter these direct and indirect attacks on our students’ communities, empower them, demonstrate to them that we do not place limitations on their capabilities due to their culture.”

Their fellowship included experiencing:

• Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology (pictured right), which contains the largest collection of ancient Mexican art;
• La Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s home and now musuem;
• Teotihuacan, the site where one of the largest empires of the pre-Columbian Americas flourished;
• the Mayan World Museum in Merida, along with a re-enactment of the ancient game Pok Ta Pok and local artisan markets; and
• the Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave was known as “Cave of the Stone Sepulcher” which had an immense spiritual significance to the Mayans, and it is evidence that Belize was once one of the major hubs of the Mayan Empire during Mesoamerican times.

“Through this experience, I learned that I am missing this connection to my own ancestors and history,” said Vanessa. “As Latinos, we have assimilated to American identity and lost touch with our roots. It is incredibly important to pass down traditions, healing practices, art, recipes and stories and to my students and my children.”

They will do this through a unit that explores pre-Colombian cultures through pottery and other art mediums, as well as creating a Latin Culture Night which will draw in talent and resources from the surrounding school community. A new storytelling unit will incorporate parents’ participation and invite them to share memories related to their upbringing. and they will put forth their best effort.

“My new Social Studies unit on Native American history in North America focuses on the importance of storytelling and how elders in native communities passed down knowledge, history, life skills, and entertained through storytelling,” added Elizabeth. “Students’ upcoming project will require students to ask an elder in their family to share an important story that was passed down to them from their grandparents or parents. Students will either retell their story through writing or draw a sequence of images depicting the story and then showcase these with the class.”

“Our goal through this fellowship is to teach in a culturally-responsive way that will help our students to feel stimulated and connected to what they are learning by having more opportunity to discover where they come from and their birth culture. When students feel an emotional connection to their learning it breeds creativity.”

We honor all celebrating those who have passed on by remembering their legacy, and also honor those (like these Fellows) committed to enriching the present and future of their students with an awareness of their past.

Nataliya Braginsky is a high school teacher at Metropolitan Business Academy in New Haven, CT, where she teaches African American and Latinx History, Contemporary Law, and Journalism, and co-advises the school’s Gender & Sexuality Alliance (GSA) and Youth Justice Panel. Nataliya is also a 2020 Fund for Teachers Fellow, member of New Haven Educators’ Collective, the Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective, as well as a facilitator of culturally relevant pedagogy and restorative justice workshops. She believes that, as a white teacher working within an education system that has its origins in white supremacy and that continues to perpetuate racism, educators—especially white educators—must take an actively anti-racist stance and make a lifelong commitment to their development toward this goal. 

To that end, Nataliya designed a Fund for Teachers fellowship to analyze Los Angeles archives, museums, and historic sites associated with the intersection of African American, Latinx, and Indigenous (AALI) histories to support a new state mandate to teach this subject in all high schools. The mandate was sparked by a growing movement led by youth of color who in 2019 successfully petitioned their legislators. While this legislation does not go into effect until 2022-2023, at Nataliya’s school they decided that this course was long overdue. Such a class is necessary in all schools, but is particularly significant in a school that is majority African American and Latinx.

Learn more about Nataliya’s work in curriculum development, culturally relevant pedagogy and restorative justice practices on her website.

photo courtesy of the New Haven Independent

In developing this course, Nataliya surveyed her students. A common request was for untold stories and histories, rather than what is typically taught in history courses. Understanding dominant-narratives while centering counter-narratives is central to the course Nataliya has developed. Another request from students was not to focus only on oppression. As one student expressed: “We barely know the good things, we need to shed light on how brave, strong, and powerful we really are. It’s important to understand our blessings, to have people to look up to who look like us.” While stories of resistance are an important part of the course, students also want to learn of African American and Latinx beauty, joy, and brilliance.

Nataliya is part of the fall 2020 Pulitzer Center Teacher Fellowship program on Arts, Journalism, and Justice. Read the unit she developed, “Writing Personal Narrative in a Political World” posted by the Pulitzer Center, including the publication of two students’ powerful personal narratives.

“In my search for an educational experience that could offer such narratives and resources, Los Angeles was consistently echoed as the epicenter of intersectional AALI history,” said Nataliya. “LA is particularly rich in lesser-known examples of these histories, and many that are not only rooted in resistance, but also in powerful creation. I found numerous historic sites, museums, and archives that showcase the very history my students are asking to learn. That a group of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people settled Los Angeles, for example, will be incredibly compelling to students.”

Los Angeles fulfills another of Nataliya’s needs as an educator, which is to collaborate. Connecticut is just beginning its collective work in teaching these critical histories, while LA has long led the struggle for intersectional ethnic studies in high schools. Learning from their experiences, sharing lessons and resources, and discussing the complexities of this content will support Nataliya as she continues to develop and improve her course.

Read Nataliya’s most recent article in the Washington Post: “The racist effects of school reopening during the pandemic — by a teacher” and “Not an ‘Achievement Gap’, A Racial Capitalist Chasm” for the Law & Political Equity Project.

Nataliya compiled destinations for her fellowship through talking with Los Angeles historians and educators, and through reading A People’s Guide to Los Angeles. After selecting relevant sites, Nataliya plotted them on this Google map in order to design a thoughtful itinerary.

Information and insights gained from these locations and those whom she meets will inform:

• Students’ creation of a pop-up Latinx museum at her school to accompany a pop-up Black history museum;
• Students’ presentation of final research papers at the school’s annual Social Justice Symposium; and,
• A more balanced and engaging curriculum with a more robust unit on the borderlands.

“Across AALI histories, students will have more stories to draw upon, not only of resistance to oppression, but also stories of creativity, joy, and success,” Nataliya said. “They will have more role models from whom to draw inspiration.”

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Nataliya earned a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, and an M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is most proud of the incredible work accomplished by her students, including:

• A Walking Tour of New Haven’s African American , Indigenous and Latinx History
• Black Is King Compendium
• “The Great Force of History:” The January 6th Syllabus

With any free time, Nataliya leads workshops designed to support educators working toward anti-oppression and liberatory education and writes freelance articles such as this piece about her family’s survival of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the lessons it offers for surviving the pandemic.

(Title illustration by Israel Vargas for the Mother Jones article “Digging Into the Messy History of ‘Latinx’ Helped Me Embrace My Complex Identity.”)