How timely for the journal Critical Education to publish my article Wrapped Up in the Flag on the July 4, 2014 weekend. Writing about Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies program and the push for guns on campus taught me what being American means – an unquestioning embracing of liberal values through liberal talk, regardless of which side of the argument you’re on. “Both sides of the political continuum, assimilationists and pluralists, pro-gun and anti-gun activists, we all wrap ourselves in the flag.”
Wrapped in the Flag: Liberal Discourse, Mexican American Studies, and Guns on Campus Critical Education.
Published by frankie julia
I’m an educational anthropologist; I’ve worked and traveled in the US, Europe, east and southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America alone, as part of a team, and as part of a couple, a nuclear, and an extended family. My first big trip was just before I turned ten. I was the oldest grandchild, my grandmother was widowed, and we were good traveling companions. We stayed in the village in southeast Austria where my aunts, uncles, and cousins lived. This was in the 1960s. I followed my older cousin as she took the cows out to the pasture every day. Her world, without indoor plumbing or electricity, was a far cry from my own in the industrial northeast United States. I learned then that people in other places live lives that looked different from my own. I learned then that the differences, and also the similarities, were irresistibly fascinating. View more posts
Frances Julia Riemer, PhD 