By EGP Staff Report (Article courtesy of EGP News.com)

http://egpnews.com/2015/01/students-inspire-law-to-teach-mexican-repatriation-history/

A trip to Bell Gardens Elementary led Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia to introduce a bill that would encourage California schools to teach about the unconstitutional deportation of over one million U.S. Citizens and lawful residents of Mexican descent from California in the 1920s.

AB 146 asks that schools across the state use textbooks and include curriculum that discusses President Herbert Hoover’s depression-era Mexican Repatriation Act, under which Mexican American citizens were swept up in raids of churches, restaurants, workplaces and loaded into trucks and trains and deported to Mexico.

Garcia, who represents Bell Gardens, says Leslie Hiatt’s fifth grade class where inspired after hearing the Assemblymember talk about her recent trip to Mexico and Central America to learn about the plight of unaccompanied migrant children to America.

Hiatt and her students submitted the idea for the new state law during Garcia’s district-wide “There Ought to Be a Law” contest, which ended Jan. 16.

“I was pleasantly surprised that the students had prepared skits, poems, power point presentations and a book about the Repatriation Act,” Garcia said. “The students related how difficult it was for them to even find information on the repatriation, but as they dug and learned more, how impactful this history was to them on a personal level.”

Garcia said the state should include the repatriation in schools just like it has the Holocaust, Japanese internment and other violations of human rights especially since Latinos make up 38 percent of the state’s population.

As one of the winners of the contest, Hiatt and her class will travel to Sacramento in the coming months to testify when the bill is heard in the assembly.