Ode to Teachers

Mora began publishing at a time when high schools and universities began adapting the work of previous multicultural literary communities within their curricula. In the 1960s and 1970s, movements like Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino, the “farmworker’s theatre” of migrant Chicano laborers, used the literary genre of theater as part of the cultural wing of the United Farm Workers and Chicano movements. The boxer, poet, and political activist Rodolpho “Corky” Gonzales likewise organized consciousness-raising movements such as the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, where he performed poems like Yo soy Joaquin, an epic poem addressing the struggles of Chicano people in the United States to gain equal rights and achieve economic justice. Many of the issues these movements raised were then adapted to the institutional contexts of schools, businesses, the media, and electoral politics in subsequent decades, where they were adapted to suit the demands of those new environments. A significant effect of this transition was a shift from the more socially-framed concerns of groups like the Chicano movement to more identity-based questions of equity in representation. One of the major sites in which this has played out has been in educational curricula and the push for more diverse readings lists. With its heightened focus on questions of literacy—along with the implicit background context of bilingual learning—and classroom pedagogy, Mora’s poem reflects this longer literary and social history.