Latina Student: What About Our History?

As far back as third grade, Jayline Hernandez Gomez felt something was missing from her education. She learned about the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade; her lessons skipped over how America kept control of Puerto Rico by firing machine guns on protesters in the 1930s.

Arguing for a more inclusive curriculum, the New Haven Academy senior added her voice at Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting at King-Robinson School to the city’s ongoing debate about how schools can better reflect the new reality that nearly half of all New Haven students now identify as Hispanic.

That changing demographic has recently led to protests, op-eds and a split vote on Mayor Toni Harp’s final pick for the Board of Education.

Hernandez Gomez said that it’s more important to focus on what kids learn, especially about the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, than the race of the person who’d be teaching it.

“Although I come from an uneducated family background, my parents are not the ones who failed to educate me,” Hernandez Gomez read during a three-minute public comment. ​“My history classes failed me.”

“I have spent 10 years in New Haven Public Schools, and what I have learned barely counters the false narrative that Hispanic and Latinx people in America are uneducated, lazy, rapists and drug traffickers,” she went on. ​“My parents, though they never finished high school themselves, have taught me more about being an independent, successful and knowledgeable Puerto Rican living in the States than I have ever learned in school.”

Hernandez Gomez said that education was especially important to her because she feels like ​“a statistic.” Her mom first got pregnant at 16 years old, at a time when her father was incarcerated.

But she thanked them for teaching her how to cook arroz con pernil and juice quenepas, ​“how to carry ourselves, how to strive for more than average, and how to fight for what we deserve.”

She said that she wishes the school system had done more to allow conversation about what it’s like to be a teenage Puerto Rican in New Haven, where the cops tell them to get lost — an order that has resonances across the century.

“My school system prides itself on celebrating diversity, yet students only learn about Hispanic and Latinx history during Hispanic Heritage Month,” Hernandez Gomez said. ​“By third grade, the cruelties of American chattel slavery had been drilled into my head.” She switched to Spanish. ​“But I didn’t know why the Ponce Massacre happened in 1937,” when cops shot 200 Puerto Ricans marching for nationhood, ​“and why the police wanted to conceal it.” 

Yesenia Rivera, the only Latina voting member on the school board (along with non-voting student representative Nico Rivera) and the only one who understood Hernandez Gomez’s Spanish-spoken words, applauded.

“The curriculum,” Hernandez Gomez added, ​“did not include space for our current experiences and how they connect to America’s history of prejudice.”

Hernandez Gomez told the Independent later that she’d had to teach herself. She said she researched the Ponce Massacre on her own, as she wrote her junior thesis at New Haven Academy. She said she wished that history had been a part of her studies for the last decade.

But as part of her civics class this year, Hernandez Gomez committed to making that different for future students who come through city schools.

She said she’ll return to board meetings to talk about the curriculum and on the steps of government buildings to protest immigrant detentions, like Mario Aguilar Castañon, the Wilbur Cross junior facing deportation.

“To teach us our true history and add authentic and meaningful curricula about our heritage, our schools would have to acknowledge what occurs every day in communities like my own,” Hernandez Gomez said.

Her speech set off an impromptu discussion among Board of Education members about what teachers should be focusing on, especially in history and literature classes.

Mayor Harp said that, while a new state law requires electives on African-American and Latin-American history in high schools statewide, the district needed to make sure that every classroom was on board with a culturally responsive curriculum.

Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, a Black woman who serves as the board’s secretary, said she didn’t want a repeat of what happened to her own kids, who were asked, in elementary school, to fill out a worksheet that read, ​“Describe how your ancestors came to the United States and what obstacles they faced.”

“I had to explain a lot of things to my children,” Jackson-McArthur said, nothing that she sent them back to school with a picture of a slave ship.

Mayor Harp argued that it is important for public institutions to teach a range of perspectives.

“I would argue that it’s really not so much for the people of color, as it is for everyone else,” Harp said. ​“We basically allowed our advocacy for our own history to be seen as something that we do to make ourselves feel better. But the truth of the matter is this country really needs to understand the backs upon which it’s been built, in terms of all its people.”

“Because as long as we’re able to sort of sweep it under the rug, then we will continue to have color associated with poverty and lack of opportunity as we have today,” she went on. ​“We do it to have a stronger democracy, we do it to have a stronger America for everyone. ”

Hernandez Gomez sat through all of Tuesday night’s three-hour school board meeting, listening to the debate about how city schools could be more equitable.

She said administrators should prioritize making sure history and literature lessons include more diverse voices, before figuring out who’d actually be teaching those classes.

“We should focus on how the teachers care about the students, rather than race,” Hernandez Gomez said. ​“I think it does matter a little more about how much teachers care, because if she doesn’t care about my education, then there’s no point in going to school.”