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Week 9 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 9 — The Border Moved: Conquest, Contract, and the Courts on the Timeline — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 8 of the term — place this week's treaty, labor agreement, and court cases on the timeline, read one worker's account beside the record, and explain it to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its Article VIII, the 1930s removals of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the Bracero Program, and two court cases, Mendez v. Westminster (1946) and Hernandez v. Texas (1954). In this assignment you work four short problems on the timeline, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Community History Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 3's line between immigrant peoples and colonized or incorporated peoples, and on Week 6's reading of the 14th Amendment and its equal protection clause.

The task

The law-and-case timeline is the course's list of dated laws and events, each year taken from the issuing body's own page. The course's running archive is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection built for this course; its excerpts are identified by role and decade and are not real people's words. Its E1 excerpt comes from a farmworker who came on a bracero contract in the 1950s, interviewed in the 2000s. He signed his first contract in 1956; money was taken out for the food and the bunk; he went home when each season ended and came back for three more seasons; and he says he had papers from two governments.

A friend is building a family-history slideshow. Two of its slides say, "Great-grandma's family immigrated when California joined the United States in 1848," and "Great-grandpa came in the 1950s as an illegal farmworker, even though he had a contract." Your job is to answer the way an ethnic studies reader would, starting from a few plain dates on the timeline.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. On the law-and-case timeline, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo came in 1848, and the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. How many years apart are the treaty and the amendment?
  2. On the law-and-case timeline, the Bracero Program began in 1942 and ended in 1964. How many years did the program run?
  3. The archive's illustrative E1 excerpt says the narrator signed his first bracero contract in 1956, and the Bracero Program began in 1942. How many years into the program was his first contract?
  4. On the law-and-case timeline, Mendez v. Westminster came in 1946, and Brown v. Board of Education came in 1954. How many years apart are the two cases?

Beside each count, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: explain what Article VIII did for the Mexicans who stayed in the ceded lands, and why that makes them colonized or incorporated peoples rather than immigrants.
  • Problem 2: describe the Bracero Program in the course's words as a series of agreements between two governments, and name one hardship the Library of Congress records.
  • Problem 3: read E1 for one thing it says and one thing it leaves out, and compare it with E2, whose family moved north in 1943 inside the country and stayed.
  • Problem 4: name the court that decided Mendez v. Westminster (1946) and the court that affirmed it, and say what Hernandez v. Texas (1954) decided about jury service and the two-class theory.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend's slideshow gets both great-grandparents wrong. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains that in 1848 the border moved and the people of the ceded lands did not immigrate, and that a bracero contract was a legal agreement between two governments, not unauthorized migration. Name one limit, such as that a family story is checked against dated records before it goes on a slide. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good message is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a roommate who says a ballpark's team must have been founded the year the ballpark opened, because that year is carved over the gate. Model message: "The year over the gate tells you when this building opened, which is a real record worth knowing. But a team can be older than its ballpark; it may have played somewhere else first, under the same name. One fair caveat: the carved year is good evidence for the building, not for everything that happened before it."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Your reflection. After you check your draft, write two or three sentences on one of these, your choice: (a) which source, the dated record or the E1 account, changed your thinking more, and why; or (b) which word or phrase in your first draft you replaced, and what the new wording gets right.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

  • the four counts, each with the two years and the arithmetic shown, and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to your friend, explaining that the border moved in 1848 and that a bracero contract was a legal agreement between two governments, with one limit;
  • your reflection, on the option you chose; and
  • a one-line restatement of the years you used, so your counts can be checked.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counts, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe E1 and E2 only as the course describes them, name people only by role, state documented history plainly, and do not borrow a quotation, a figure, or a court holding from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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