Raza Schooling, Nina Simone's Lost Songs

Williams conducts an elegant interview reflecting deep research and a thorough reading of Buchanan’s RIZE Press collection. The interlocutor’s copy sports as many sticky notes as the poet’s reading copy. Every reader’s copy will come to look like these, marked up to recapture reading the words a first time, and how the poet gets it right. The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is an important work.

The duo know Nina Simone’s story, her music, her domestic abuse, her activism, her skin color and why that matters. This they understand with love, and with research befitting their professions. Buchanan is an academic, Williams a writer, producer, and a notably successful actor.

Today’s audience rewards Octavia’s Bookshelf’s generosity for use of its space, buying copies of the featured book to have in hand. When the poet reads from her book, Buchanan and Williams make sure to cite a page number and most listeners read along with the words. 

Being here. Seeing the author. Hearing the words as the poet intends. Reading the words. This is the best of all possible words today.

The poet reads from her chair, or stands in the small space between herself and the front row. Williams remains seated throughout the colloquy, her exuberance, gestures, and energy focused on today’s homage to poetry and Nina Simone.

Shonda Buchanan writes with anguished empathy for Nina Simone. Simone’s life is marked with career peaks and boycotts, greedy exploitation, vicious spousal abuse, alcohol and pills, love, a daughter, her own house bought with her own money, a prodigy’s early career training as a concert pianist.  There are poems about these facts, achievements, sorrows.

Bought us a house, too, Mama.

In the white people's neighborhood.

Put paisley prints on white walls

so I could bang my head a little if I needed to.

Out In the West Texas Town of Del Rio... 

Guest Reviewer: Charles "Chuck" Braithwaite. 

Review: Esparza, Jesús Jesse. Raza Schools: The Fight for Latino Educational Autonomy in a West Texas Borderlands Town. Vol. 4. University of Oklahoma Press, 2023. (link to publisher)

As someone with an interest in how cultural identity has an impact on education, I was anxious to read Raza Schools, especially having lived in borderland communities in the southern Great Plains. 

Although Esparza’s focus is on the very edge of what some people consider the Plains, the story told is certainly relevant to all non-dominant ethnic communities throughout US America in that it details how political and social structures prevent some people from gaining access to educational opportunities, unless they take control themselves and create the resources necessary for their children.

The account of this case study has several important strengths. First, we get a detailed, chronological account of the challenges faced by the Latino community of Del Rio, TX, during their fight for educational autonomy: persistent racism and segregation; state and local government interference; economic hardships. 

Second, the author makes an outstanding case for using oral history and non-archived personal collections (yearbooks, photos, etc.) as data to corroborate official documents and records. 

Third, we get a picture of how, even when ethnic communities are successful, institutional intolerance and bigotry are so difficult to overcome.

We go from the 1600s to the present and see some remarkable changes in the borderlands when it comes to education. I was especially interested to learn about how the Latino community in the 1800s provided educational opportunities for their children in the absence of state provided education. These were called “escuelitas” – small, private, Spanish speaking schools, often held in homes.

The bulk of the book is the story of how a community came together to fight the forces of racism and provide an educational opportunity for their children when it was clear the local and state authorities would not be doing anything to help. 

Ultimately, the story has a sad, but not unexpected outcome with the forced merging of Latino-controlled schools into the white-controlled districts. This led inevitably to problems: loss of autonomy; cultural and social tensions with forced integration; language barriers for Latino students; fewer resources provided to the needs of Latino students.

I have a couple of complaints. 

Although the book does look at problems faced by the African-American community of Del Rio regarding education, and the author doesn’t shy away from discussing the tensions between these communities, I would have liked to see more discussion of this diversity and its impact on what happened in the classroom.  

Also, I’m concerned that readers may miss some of the nuances described in the chapter “When the Chicano Movement Came, Our Schools Went Away.” As someone who grew up in southern California and saw first-hand the tremendous contributions to our communities by La Raza, I would not want readers to get the wrong impression about the Chicano Movement.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in educational and ethnic history of the Plains. As one of Esparza’s informants explained, “that a Latino community could establish and maintain its own educational system along the borderlands at the height of Jim Crow is a history worth telling.”

About our Guest Reviewer:

Chuck Braithwaite graduated from San Gabriel High a couple kilometers from downtown Los Angeles. 

After 4 years in the US Navy, he earned a BA from the Univ of Calif, Santa Barbara, and an MA & PhD from the Univ of Washington. 

He taught speech & intercultural communication at New Mexico State, Arizona State, and for the past 21 years taught at the Univ of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he also served as Editor of Great Plains Quarterly. 

Dr. Braithwaite is now retired, living a couple of kilometers from the Pacific Ocean in Southern Calif.