Elizabeth Martinez’s Article.docx - ELIZABETH MARTfNEZ From...

ELIZABETH MARTfNEZ
From Reinventing "America": Call for a New National Identity
Elizabeth Martinez is a Chicana activist who since 1960 has worked in and documented different
movements for change, including the civil rights, women's, and Chicano movements. She is the author of
six books and numerous articles. Her best-known work is 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures (1991),
which became the basis of a two-part video she scripted and codirected. Her latest book is De Colores
Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century (1998). In "Reinventing 'America,"' Martinez
argues that Americans' willingness to accept a "myth" as "the basis for [the] nation's self-defined identity"
has brought the country to a crisis.
For some fifteen years, starting in 1940, 85 percent of all U.S. elementary schools used the Dick and Jane
series to teach children how to read. The series starred Dick, Jane, their white middle-class parents, their dog
Spot, and their life together in a home with a white picket fence.
"Look, Jane, look! See Spot run!" chirped the two kids. It was a house 2 full of glorious family values,
where Mom cooked while Daddy went to work in a suit and mowed the lawn on weekends. The Dick and Jane
books also taught that you should do your job and help others. All this affirmed an equation of middle-class
whiteness with virtue.
In the mid-1990s, museums, libraries, and eighty Public Broadcast- 3 ing Service (PBS) stations across the
country had exhibits and programs commemorating the series. At one museum, an attendant commented,

MARTINEZ
REINVENTING "AMERICA"
"When you hear someone crying, you know they are looking at the Dick and Jane
books." It seems nostalgia runs rampant among many Euro-Americans: a
nostalgia for the days of unchallenged White supremacy—both moral and
material—when life was "simple."
We've seen that nostalgia before in the nation's history. But today it signifies a
problem reaching a new intensity. It suggests a national identity crisis that promises to
bring in its wake an unprecedented nervous breakdown for the dominant society's
psyche.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in California, which has long been on the
cutting edge of the nation's present and future reality. 5 Warning sirens have sounded
repeatedly in the 1990s, such as the fierce battle over new history textbooks for public
schools, Proposition 187's ugly denial of human rights to immigrants, the 1996
assault on affirmative action that culminated in Proposition 209, and the 1997 move
to abolish bilingual education. Attempts to copycat these reactionary measures have
been seen in other states.