The AHA and Advocacy within the Recent Texas Textbook Fight

As an insider for both the AHA Council and Texas State Board of Education Representative Ruben Cortez's ad hoc committee reviewing Mexican American Heritage, I have seen the importance of having a significant number of Latin@ and non-Latin@ Ph.D.s working together to produce significant intellectual assessments that helped propel the rejection of the proposed textbook. This intellectual work provided the foundation for advocates to utilize in their testimony in front of the Texas State Board of Education and to the larger public. Utilizing AHA standards for assessing the textbook increased the clout of the scholars' work that at times was dismissed because of the silent, but clear racist perspective of dismissing Latin@s Ph.D.s' rigorous assessments.