Teatro Campesino and Ploicy Debate or My Freshman Year of College

My freshman year of college I was on the Long Beach Speech and Debate Team. I was more involved in debate at the time, but Long Beach's debate squad was not a traditional debate team, for lack of better words. Policy debate as it is understood by most people is a fast paced evidence laden debate. However, the Long Beach team was a critical debate team, meaning that when team's that had a lot of money to keep their policy debate files fresh we would read poems and play hip, or even performing drama.

The resolution that year was the largest and most vague resolution to date.

(2003-2004) Resolved: The United States federal government should enact one or more of the following:
* Withdrawal of its World Trade Organization complaint against the European Union's restrictions on genetically modified foods;
* A substantial increase in its government-to-government economic and/or conflict prevention assistance to Turkey and/or Greece;
* Full withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation;
* Removal of its barriers to and encouragement of substantial European Union and/or North Atlantic Treaty Organisation participation in peacekeeping in Iraq and reconstruction in Iraq;
* Removal of its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe;
* Harmonization of its intellectual property law with the European Union in the area of human DNA sequences;
* Rescission of all or nearly all agriculture subsidy increases in the 2002 Farm Bill.

See, I told ya! It was a monster! The difficulty of this resolution is that any team would be within reason to run a policy change on any of the planks of this resolution. My debate partner and I chose the Farm Bill plank. Through all of our research we noticed that the 500 page Farm Bill never once addresses farmworkers, you know the people that pick our food. My debate partner Alexis is Latina, and I grew up in an agricultural area of California and had to see the effects of farming serfdom. We felt that we would assault the Farm Bill for its omission of the people that literally work in pesticides and are despised by most of the United States. We decided the best way to argue the resolution was to argue that the Farm Bill purposely excluded farmworkers because it was in the best interest of agriculture to not have the discussion. We incorporated critical race theory and agricultural exceptionalism. We also did a performance of Luis Valdez collection of Teatro Campesino. Teatro Campesino roughly translates into the Farmworker's Theatre. During the first La Raza movement of the late sixties the movement wanted to mobilize the farmworkers in order to unionize. However, a significant portion of farmworkers had worked their entire lives and could not read pamphlets, so in order to get the message across they performed plays in Spanish and English that spoke to the plight of the farmworker. They were performed on the back of truck beds in fields and used as a means of resistance to the hegemonic powers of big business farming. We performed a short play in our debate rounds. My debate partner played a farm worker and I played a farm boss. I wore a "cowboy hat," and a pig nose. At the end of the short play my pig nose was taken off to reveal that I too am a worker that had bought into the system of oppression.

I was nineteen when I was reading all of this. I had felt a connection to it but I could not wrap my head around why I felt so passionate about this issue. I think very few white people read critical race theory (CRT) and understand it. I guess I always operated under the assumption that if we allow one time of oppression that it allows for the rationalization to oppress other types of people. When reading the racial identity development chapter it reminded me of my freshman year of policy debate. I always had a deep feeling of frustration towards racial inequity, I just never realized that I had the unique ability to change the status quo, until someone opened my eyes. I began college in the conformity stage because I never even thought to explore a different cultural heritage before going to college. I always said things like, "I'm white. I don't have a culture." As if that was a truly adequate response to issues of culture and race. I think after my coming out experience and being more attuned to how hegemony functions in the greater society I can say that I see myself in the synergistic articulation and awareness phase (of course I would have the hubris to assume I am at the best point, right?). I am constantly learning about different people and their experiences. I structure the classes I teach in that way and I live my life trying to learn about how other people live. I think there is a naive assumption that the way some people grow up as the norm. For example, many people like to say things like, "When we were growing up it wasn't like it is today." Despite that being an obvious statement there is the assertion that all people from a particular time grew up in the same way, which simply isn't true. At any point I think as educators it is our responsibility to help students address not only their place in the world but to help them understand others' place in the world as well.