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More from Aguilar:

Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 11:32:59 -0600
Reply-To: Nahua language and culture discussion <[log in to unmask]>
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From: "John F. Schwaller" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: NPR story
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I thought you all would be interested in this story: "NPR : Fifty Years After 'Brown v. Board of Education'"

This is a story from "All Things Considered" that mentions a charter school in Los Angeles where the students take Nahua names and also learn some Nahuatl. The reporter was Claudio Sanchez.

Just click on the headline or the audio icon to listen to the story. You'll need an audio player to hear it, and you can find the right one for your computer at . If you have any problems, please visit the NPR audio help page .

Here is a transcript of part of the interview where Nahuatl is mentioned:

SANCHEZ: The kind of voluntary school segregation that Alexander is talking about is thriving in some neighborhoods. This is Academia Semillas del Pueblo, Seeds of the People Academy, a privately run, publicly funded charter school housed in an old Masonic lodge in El Sereno, about 50 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

Mr. MARCOS AGUILAR (Principal, Academia Semillas del Pueblo): (Spanish spoken)

SANCHEZ: This morning, the school's 28-year-old principal, Marcos Aguilar, his all-Latino faculty and over a hundred parents are celebrating the school's second year in operation. Semillas del Pueblo is open to children of all races, ethnicities and religions, but the school clearly caters to Mexican families.

Mr. AGUILAR: (Spanish spoken)

Group of Students: (Speaking Spanish in unison)

SANCHEZ: Students learn English, Spanish and Nahuatl, an ancient language indigenous to Mexico and Central America. Math and science instruction revolves around the Aztec calendar. Students are grouped and assigned Nahuatl names printed on banners, each tied to a spear. Aguilar, who once taught at Garfield High, says segregation is not a concern here. Fifty years ago, he argues, the Brown decision created an expectation that once children of all races attended the same schools, they would be treated equally so they could all have a stake in the future of this country. But Aguilar says that for many minority children, Latinos in particular, that has not happened.

Mr. AGUILAR: When I was a high school teacher at Garfield High School, one of the largest high schools in the United States, most of the Mexican children there had lost a sense of identity, because its own administration and the general policy of the Los Angeles Unified School District is, in fact, to Americanize Mexican and African-American children in Los Angeles. And they would argue that that's good. I believe that that's not good.

SANCHEZ: What public schools are doing today, says Aguilar, is preparing Latinos for nothing more than minimum wage jobs. Here at Semillas del Pueblo, he says, Latino children and their families can claim their rightful place in American society on their terms.

Mr. AGUILAR: Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States or in the Declaration of Independence does it say that, because you come here, you have to now become an American. The United States is who is the immigrant here, not us.

John F. Schwaller
Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean
315 Behmler Hall
University of Minnesota, Morris
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Los Angeles; Sowing Home-Grown Education; Academy: Activists see dream of a charter school on the Eastside grow into a reality.
JOSE CARDENAS. Los Angeles Times. Jun 25, 2002. pg. B.3

As a college student, Marcos Aguilar joined a hunger strike to help establish a Chicano studies department at UCLA. The goal: to offer Mexican American students an environment and courses sensitive to their cultural background.
As a schoolteacher a decade later, his effort to found a charter school did not require such dramatic tactics.
But when he opens up a former Masonic Lodge in El Sereno as an elementary school for 160 children in September, the Academia Semillas del Pueblo will mark the second chapter in Aguilar's efforts to provide education that embraces the students' heritage.
The six founders of Semillas include Aguilar's wife and elementary schoolteacher, Minnie Ferguson, and UCLA history professor Juan Gomez Quinones--and others involved in the high- profile battle that led to the founding of the Cesar Chavez Center for Chicana and Chicano Studies.
"Organizing the charter school after having organized the Chicano studies center," said Aguilar, 32, "is kind of like picking up where we left off."
Academia Semillas del Pueblo--Seeds of the Town Academy--will be the first start-up, independent charter school on the Eastside under the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The academy presents the founders, dissatisfied with public schools, a chance to provide a quality education in a part of the city riddled with low-performing elementary and high schools.
Their "alternative, community-based and culturally sensitive" approach to education will focus on learning being "purposeful, social and transformative," said Aguilar, who last taught social studies at Garfield High School.
Highlights of the system include teaching four languages. Besides the English reading, writing and math standards required by law, Spanish, Mandarin and Nahuatl--an indigenous language once spoken by people throughout the Southwest and Mexico--will also be taught.
(snip)
To found the school, the academy's founders raised about $2 million in public and private funding over the last three years from sources including the state Department of Education and the National Council of La Raza.
As one of the requirements to get the charter approved by state and local school district authorities, Aguilar got eight like-minded teachers to commit to teaching at the academy. Distributing fliers and visiting community events, they've kept a list of parents interested in enrolling their children.
(snip)