Texas board backs whitewashing Latino history http://ourlatinamerica.blogspot.com/2010/03/texas-board-backs-whitewashing-latino.html

The amendments even touched world history such as dropping “references to American “imperialism,’ preferring to call it expansionism.” Latin America was not spared from the TSBE’s ugly revisionism; the board deleted listing in textbooks Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero who was murdered in 1980 after speaking out against his country’s repressive government.

The whitewashing of Latinos and Latin America by the TSBE led to justifiable outrage by one of the panel’s members:Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”The TSBE’s decision not only affects Texas (with its notable Latino population) but other states likely to use the same textbooks as Texas. Thus the greatest losers of the “Texas Textbook War” (as one 24-hour “news” network exaggeratedly called it) are the hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren who will learn an inaccurate version of history.