Week 10 — Many Roads, One Federal Term: Movements and Communities 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Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI.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 9 of the term — place this week's movements and laws on the timeline, read one student's account beside the record, and explain the group terms to someone who has them wrong.

This week you met the Chicano movement, the Delano grape strike, the East Los Angeles walkouts, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central American experiences, the federal categories, and the group terms. 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 2's point that a federal category is the issuing body's category, not a biological group, on Week 3's line between immigrant peoples and colonized or incorporated peoples, and on Week 9's farm-labor and separate-schools threads.

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, and the cross-group threads trace one kind of law or movement across groups. 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 E6 excerpt comes from a student who joined a high-school walkout in the 1960s, interviewed in the 2000s. The student says they walked out in March of 1968; some had been punished for speaking Spanish in class; counselors steered them into shop instead of college classes; they wanted teachers who looked like them and classes about their own history; and the student's father, angry that day, later said he understood.

A coworker at an illustrative community clinic is drafting a flyer that says, "Latinos are one race, and they all came here as immigrants." 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:

On the separate-schools thread, Mendez v. Westminster came in 1946, and the East Los Angeles walkouts came in 1968. How many years apart are the ruling and the walkouts?
On the farm-labor thread, the Bracero Program ended in 1964, and the Delano grape strike began in 1965. How many years after the program ended did the strike begin?
On the law-and-case timeline, the Jones-Shafroth Act came in 1917, and the Voting Rights Act, with its Section 4(e), came in 1965. How many years apart are the two laws?
On the federal-categories timeline, the federal standards first paired the terms as Hispanic or Latino in 1997, and the combined-question revision came in 2024. How many years apart are the two revisions?

Beside each count, add one brief interpretation:

Problem 1: place the archive's E6 excerpt (illustrative) on the thread and name one thing E6 shows that the 1946 ruling leaves out, and explain that a court ruling against separate schools did not end unequal treatment inside schools.
Problem 2: name who began the Delano grape strike and who joined it, in that order, and explain why the strike was a cross-group coalition rather than one group's story.
Problem 3: explain that statutory citizenship makes a move from Puerto Rico to the mainland a move inside the country, not immigration, and say what Section 4(e) protected.
Problem 4: explain that from 1997 to 2024 Hispanic or Latino was asked as an ethnicity separately from race, and that the 2024 combined question has 5 + 2 = 7 minimum categories.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your coworker's flyer treats Latinos as one race with one history. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains that Hispanic or Latino is a federal ethnicity category whose members may be of any race, that Latina/o communities reached the United States by many roads (the 1848 treaty, Puerto Rican citizenship under the 1917 act, the 1966 law for Cubans, and the civil wars of the 1980s for Central Americans), and who uses which term, Hispanic, Latino, Chicana/o, or the debated Latinx and Latine. Name one limit, such as that the newer terms are debated and each person may prefer a different word or a national-origin name. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good message is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor who says everyone on one street must come from the same hometown because the shop signs share one language. Model message: "The signs tell you which language the shop owners chose, and that is a real clue worth noticing. But one street can hold families who came from many places, at different times, for different reasons, and one shared language can link very different histories. One fair caveat: a shop sign is not a census, so ask the people before you sort them."

Use that pattern for your coworker, 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 E6 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 years and the arithmetic shown, and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
your message to your coworker, explaining the ethnicity category, the many roads, and who uses which term, 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 E6 only as the course describes it, name people only by role, name groups as their members most commonly name themselves, and do not borrow a survey figure or a quotation 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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