📢
Welcome. Axios Latino is the newsletter that summarizes the key news and topics for Latino communities throughout the hemisphere every Tuesday and Thursday. You can subscribe by clicking
here
.
1. The topic to highlight: School financial danger
Many school districts in the United States are facing a funding cliff that could leave students learning English alongside other subjects in limbo.
Why it matters
: One in five U.S. K-12 students speaks a language other than English at home. A total of 10% of the American student population is enrolled in language development programs, according to TNTP, an education research and advocacy organization.
Previous research already shows that school closures during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic had a disproportionate impact on students who were also learning English.
Current situation
: In response to the disruption that the pandemic caused to public education in the United States, in 2020 the federal government began distributing billions of dollars to schools through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER).
Some of the school districts used the funds to provide key services to multilingual students or students whose first language is not English.
The latest
: But the ESSER funds expire in September. Several districts have not determined how to fund some of those multilingual initiatives when the money runs out.
Jazmin Flores Peña, an analyst at the national nonprofit group All4Ed, says the big question right now is what will happen when the funds run out. Although he emphasizes that some districts have some room for maneuver because the Government has planned some financial extensions.
"At the end of the day it's about what the districts will choose," Flores Peña tells Astrid Galván. For her, districts should maintain a commitment to multilingual or English language learners and seek additional sources of funding as soon as possible.
And although there are fears regarding the funds, the situation could also open new doors, according to Leticia de la Vara, director of policy issues at TNTP. The end of ESSER "presents an opportunity to rethink how we will fund this component of the education budget," she says.
Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios
Yes, but
: One of the alternative sources to ESSER is the so-called Title III, which is assigned to schools with a large proportion of multilingual students. However, Title III currently does not have enough funding to cover so many schools.
"It really depends on how school districts choose to act toward these students, and difficult decisions will have to be made," especially in schools where ESSER funds were used to hire more teachers, Flores Peña says.
How one district used multilingual education funds
Surry County Schools in rural North Carolina have used approximately $539,000 in ESSER funds since 2020 to hire more staff and pay for new technology for their multilingual students.
Overview
: About 12% of students in the Surry district's 20 schools are students learning English concurrently with their other subjects. The first language of most of these students is Spanish, although Vietnamese speakers using English learning programs have also increased, according to the district's director for federal programs, LuAnne Llewellyn.
He says that it is very important to take into account for multilingual programs the different cases of students, who arrive with varied levels of education and whose origins are equally diverse. For example, he emphasizes that some students originally from Central America in the district need to learn English, but having indigenous languages as their first language and not Spanish.
Up Close
: Surry County Schools took advantage of ESSER funds to hire three new multilingual specialists, so they were able to improve the ratio of students served per specialist from 95 students per specialist to 53 students per specialist.
Those specialists can now spend up to five work days a week with students from multiple schools.
In their own words
: The district's focus "goes beyond English language development" among this student body, Llewellyn says.
"We cannot consider all Spanish speakers as a single group. There is richness and many nuances due to their culture and previous experiences," he points out. "We have to keep this in mind when we work with our students and their families."
What to watch for:
Although ESSER funds were important for these improvements in Surry District, Llewellyn says the end of that funding will not be catastrophic because for months they have sought other sources of money at the federal and state level to support specialists that they hired.
2. Julia Alvarez on the stories that cannot be silenced
Ahead of the publication of her new book, Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez spoke with Axios Latino about the value of novels being accessible in more than one language from the beginning and how stories with diverse narrators and protagonists should prevail in the face of attempts to silence them.
Why it matters
: Attempts to ban or remove books in public libraries in the United States increased 92% in 2023, according to the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, which publishes annual data. The most recent were released at the end of this March.
Nearly half (47%) of those attempts to remove works from shelves were against books written by Black, Latinx, Asian or Indigenous people or who are part of LGBTQ+ communities, according to the report.
Courtesy of HarperCollins Spanish
Alvarez knows first-hand how these attempts are experienced.
Two of his novels —
How the García girls lost their accents,
about a family that escapes the Dominican dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo,
and
In the Time of Butterflies
, historical fiction about the Mirabal sisters who helped overthrow Trujillo—have been banned or removed from reading lists or challenged in schools in several US states because they have references to sexual themes.
In his own words
: "It is interesting that on the border there are attempts to exclude those who are seen as 'others', and that this is also increasingly seen on the shelves of libraries or bookstores," says Alvarez.
But he emphasizes that "stories are irrepressible" and that attempts to ban them hardly prevail over the benefit for reading communities of learning about lives other than their own.
It refers to a popular saying that is widely chanted in protests in Mexico and in demonstrations by immigrant communities in the United States:
they wanted to bury us, but they didn't know that we were seeds
.
Alvarez comments that in the same way, stories that make people uncomfortable or tell different lives cannot be silenced for long, remembering that during the Trujillo dictatorship, although there were attempts at censorship, "radio bemba" persevered, the community networks that were available. the realities.
[Writer Isabel Allende speaks: "There is anti-immigrant sentiment in the US and in the world"]
To wit
: Alvarez's most recent novel was published this Tuesday, with the title
The Cemetery of Untold Stories
(or The Cemetery of Untold Stories, in English). In a certain way it can be thought of as a criticism of the attempts to silence certain voices, since in the novel several stories that were initially buried manage to be heard.
The story begins with Alma Cruz, a famous novelist who decides to use a piece of land in the Dominican Republic to make a "cemetery" where she buries the drafts of stories and biographies that she never published. But the protagonists of these stories do not remain underground.
Instead, those stories emerge from Alma's neighbors and her father, stories about massacres of Haitians, as well as the voice of the former Dominican first lady Bienvenida Ricardo Martínez, all of them disrupted in some way by the Trujillo dictatorship, which was in power from the 1930s to 1961.
"There is so much richness in having all these varied stories, in analyzing who hears them, and in thinking about which stories are told and whose stories face attempts to silence them," says Alvarez.
The fact that the book is published at the same time in Spanish is for Alvarez a recognition that, even if some novels are originally written in English like this book, "they are American literature but in the sense of America as a hemisphere, not just the United States." ".
Julia Alvarez Todd Balfour for Middlebury College; courtesy of Hachette Book Group
While some of Álvarez's works
have faced attempts to remove them from shelves and schools in the United States, globally they have been instrumental in bringing to light some of the issues that most plague women.
For example, the popularity of
In the Time of the Butterflies
helped spur a campaign to have the UN declare November 25—the date three of the four Mirabal sisters were murdered—as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against the woman.
3. Puerto Rico facing a dengue outbreak
Puerto Rico is struggling to contain a dengue outbreak that is also affecting much of the American continent, after having reached record numbers of infections last year, which even affected a few parts of the United States where the mosquitoes that normally do not reach they transmit the disease.
General overview
: The combination of the effects of climate change and the El Niño phenomenon have been generating good conditions of heat and humidity for the
Aedes aegypti
mosquito , transmitter of dengue and other diseases such as Zika or chikungunya, to spread further. according to the World Health Organization.
Brazil has had very high numbers of dengue contagion, as have Paraguay, Argentina, Peru and Colombia. In some of these places, such as Argentina or Uruguay, "there used to be no transmission" at these levels, warned the director of the Pan American Health Organization, Jarbas Barbosa.
Infections have been so high in Puerto Rico that the island had to declare the situation an emergency last week.
In numbers
: There have been more than 3.5 million cases of dengue in the American hemisphere so far this year, three times more than in the same period in 2023, which in total was a record year with more than 4.5 million cases and around 2400 deaths.
Up close
: Dengue is a particular threat in areas with hot, humid climates where lack of sanitation or sources of stagnant water can create breeding grounds for
Aedes aegypti
.
4. Summary of key news in Latin America and the Caribbean
1. The Congress of Peru
began a process this Monday to vacate President Dina Boluarte, days after her house and the presidential palace were raided in an investigation into possible illicit enrichment due to doubts about how she obtained a collection of luxury watches.
The preliminary investigation indicates that Boluarte would have obtained several of the Rolexes since she became vice president in 2021, and that her income does not explain where the money came from to pay for these luxury pieces.
Boluarte has denied that she is hiding anything, stating that the watches have been purchased since her youth, and has said that she will not resign in the face of attempts to remove her from office.
2. The arrest of
three Brazilian politicians
The murder in 2018 of councilor Marielle Franco has revealed corruption in some ranks of the Government, according to analysts.
Franco was an outspoken Afro-Brazilian advocate for housing and LGBTQ+ rights.
Those suspected of orchestrating his death are former police chief Rivaldo Barbosa, who was initially in charge of investigating Franco's murder and would have covered up the matter according to authorities, as well as the brothers Chiquinho and Domingos Brazão, who serve as a legislator and judge of the state court of Rio de Janeiro, respectively.
They have not spoken publicly but their lawyers deny the charges.
5. Circus arts
Decades of training are bearing fruit for Latin artists who are part of Cirque du Soleil's new production.
What's happening
: The show
Echo
, with a story focused on the relationship between humans and nature, will be presented in Miami until the end of this month, when the tour will move to Canadian cities.
The show features Latin circus performers like Lucas Suárez, who is from Argentina and is part of the
pole
aerial acrobatics team .
There are also Latinos behind the scenes as technical coordinators, chefs and cooks for the tour.
In his own words
: "This was my dream since I was a child so it is really a pleasure to have achieved it after training for so many years," Suárez tells Telemundo.
Thanks for reading us! We return on Thursday.
And thanks to Carlos Cunha, Eulimar Núñez and Alison Snyder for editing and helping review.
If you want to share your experiences with us or send us suggestions and comments, send an email to
axioslatino@axios.com
.
Do you want to read any of the previous editions?
Immigrant entrepreneurs in the US are driving business creation
Opening paths on the catwalks: Latinos who are giving something to talk about in fashion
They denounce the attempts of US candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to use nostalgia to seek the support of Latinos
Mexico City is running out of water and many are forced to ration it