Last year, Garcia-Medina worked at the Dallas Museum of Art as the McDermott Intern for School and Youth Program. After roaming the museum and checking out their collection, he noticed a dearth of Afro-Mexican history, politics and culture. Eventually Bernardo Veles-Rico, Manager of School Programs and Garcia-Medina decided to do something about it by creating a short curriculum dedicated to Afro-Mexicans without dismissing Black American history. They teamed up with the DISD Racial Equity Office and combined lesson plan requirements for Black American and Mexican American social studies courses for high schools. This curriculum, designed as a toolkit for African and Mexican American Studies, centers Afro-Mexican history, people, and culture and the intertwined histories of African American and Mexican American communities in the US and Mexico. This curriculum emphasizes the importance of documenting, preserving, and sharing stories that are often erased, and explores the roles that writing, art, and museums can play in these processes. In doing so, this curriculum aims to equip students of these courses with tools to address their concern for human rights for all. There will also be time for Q&A.
William Garcia-Medina is an Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas. His current dissertation is titled ”Making Black Public Humanities in South Florida: African Diaspora, Archives, and Public Histories”. In 2018, he obtained a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Kansas. In 2016, Garcia-Medina earned an MA in Curriculum and Instruction from Teachers College–Columbia University in New York City with a focus on historical literacies in elementary schools. He also has an BA and MA in history from the University of Puerto Rico-Recinto de Río Piedras. Garcia-Medina has also been contributing to Latino Rebels since 2015 and has made appearances on Latino USA and NPR. He has also published via Horn Books, Teaching for Change, The University of Mississippi Press and Contexto International etc. He tweets from @afrolatinoed.
This event is sponsored by The Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University. It is co-sponsored by Borough of Manhattan Community College and Columbus State Community College and co-promoted by Union Institute and University’s Social Justice Institute.
