After returning from the UCLA Latin American Institute’s summer program in Oaxaca, history teacher Marcos Santos brought his experience learning Zapotec into his classroom at East Valley Senior High School. As he introduced his students to the language, a student who rarely spoke in class began sharing Zapotec words of her own. The exchange gave her an opportunity to share her knowledge while creating space for connection, learning, and belonging in the classroom.
East Valley Senior High School is a Title I public school in North Hollywood with a strong immigrant community. For Santos, teaching in this community resonates with his own experience growing up. Santos moved to Pasadena from Guatemala with his family at age three and remembers learning English in elementary school. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Cal Poly Pomona before spending ten years as a navigation and communication systems specialist in the U.S. Air Force. His introduction to teaching came while teaching English in China, where he first experienced the joy of teaching. He later earned a Master of Arts in Teaching from USC and is now in his fifth year at East Valley, where he teaches history and sociology. His own experiences shape how he approaches his students and the histories they bring into the classroom. “I want them to leave my classroom knowing that their experiences matter, and I also want them to know that they belong.”
Through the Latin American Institute (LAI), Santos found new ways to bring Latin American history and culture into his teaching. That connection became especially meaningful during LAI’s summer program in Oaxaca. At the archaeological site of Monte Albán, learning about Zapotec history prompted Santos to think more broadly about connections across Mesoamerica. Having previously visited Tikal in Guatemala, he began drawing connections between the Maya world he knew through his own heritage and the Zapotec history he was encountering in Oaxaca. “Visiting Monte Albán was the pinnacle of our journey for me,” he says. The experience brought into focus histories that were “interconnected long before today’s national borders” and gave him “a deeper connection to history and more confidence in teaching it.”
In his classroom, that learning took on new meaning as students found opportunities to bring their own knowledge and experiences into the conversation. Most recently, Santos participated in LAI’s summer professional development program, More Than a Game: Soccer, Migration, and Community, where he began thinking differently about a sport already familiar to many of his students. Inspired by a presentation on football, race, and belonging in Costa Rica, Marcos developed a lesson that asks students to consider questions of national identity, racism, and exclusion. Using photographs, news coverage, and other sources, students examine the experiences of an athlete who is celebrated as a national symbol while also confronting racism. The lesson uses soccer to open a broader conversation about belonging and who gets to be recognized as part of a nation.
Creating opportunities for students to see themselves and their communities in history is central to Santos’s teaching. His current eleventh-grade U.S. History project, Community Ethnography: Mapping Our Meaningful Places, reflects that commitment. As part of the project, students identify places that hold meaning for themselves or their families and explore the memories and histories connected to them. By connecting familiar places and personal experiences to larger histories, Santos wants students to recognize that their own communities are worthy of historical study. “Their memories, relationships, and everyday places are part of the story we are learning to understand,” he explains.
Santos also finds creative ways to bring Latin American history into his U.S. History curriculum. During a unit on World War I, a question about Mexico’s neutrality leads students to explore the Mexican Revolution and consider larger questions about leadership and heroism. Students research revolutionary figures and ultimately take on their perspectives in a podcast, using historical evidence to defend their decisions.
For Santos, teaching Latin America is ultimately about giving students opportunities he wished he had growing up. “Our ancestors built civilizations with achievements every bit as worthy of study as those of the Greeks and Romans,” he says. In Los Angeles, those histories are also closely connected to students’ families, neighborhoods, and classmates.