Cultivating Community Cultural Capital

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Written By Open Plaza

Dr. Angela Valenzuela and Patricia Núñez talk to El Librotraficante Tony Diaz about community organizing

Librotraficantes march for Mexican American Studies, 2013, San Antonio, The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Conference, left to right: Jesus Archuleta, Tony Diaz-El Librotraficante, Sonya Rose Hernandez, Eloy Gonzales; second row: Mario Castillo. Photo: Ezekiel J. Perez

 
 

The Tip of the Pyramid: Cultivating Community Cultural Capital (University of New Orleans Press, 2022) by writer and activist Tony Diaz, known as El Librotraficante, was published ten years after Arizona officials enforced a ban on Mexican American Studies. Diaz drove throughout the Southwest on his way to Arizona—with a caravan of Houston activists that included poet Lupe Mendez, Liana Lopez, Bryan Parras, and Laura Razo—after the state banned high school Mexican American studies programs, thus outlawing curriculums that consisted of books like The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros; The Months and Other Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes; Luis Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The Devil’s Highway, among others.

Diaz’s The Tip of the Pyramid addresses the power and importance of cultural and community capital as a source of “self empowerment of our gente.” In this episode of OP Talks, he discusses the new book with Dr. Angela Valenzuela, director of the University of Texas Center for Education Policy, and doctoral student and longtime educator Patricia Núñez. They also discuss his activism work with the nonprofit he founded, Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, and the mobilization of librotraficantes to fight bans on Latino authors and ethnic studies.

Diaz notes that, with the national politicalization of school boards and book bans still taking place today, the need to work on behalf of the Latino community remains urgent. He shares a story about visiting the Mesoamerican complex Teotihuacán in Mexico: While to some it is a tourist trap, for Diaz it proved to be a spiritual experience that made him feel both thrilled and angry. He remembers sitting on the steps of this ancient city, “having all these revelations in my mind” and thinking, “Wow, we have [been] brainwashed. I am standing on the proof of our gente’s power, beauty, intelligence, and this has been kept from me, and the fact that this structure here exists is testament to all that.” The media, Diaz laments, constantly fails to accurately represent the Latino experience: “The forms that exist, especially from corporate media and corporate publishing, do not fully convey our experiences and, in some cases, they just erase us.”

 
 
 
 
 

“Tony Diaz is impassioned about books and art and wants you to be impassioned too. Through his gift as an orator, he tells stories that awaken our people to their past and future.” 

—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

“For our new generation now, Tony Diaz had to write this political manifesto, one which spills over with love and pride—and standing up tall strength—for our Chicano history and new times.” 

—Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning

 
 
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Tony Diaz

Writer and activist Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante, is a Cultural Accelerator. He was the first Chicano to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. In 1998, he founded Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say (NP), Houston’s first reading series for Latino authors. The group galvanized Houston’s Community Cultural Capital to become a movement for civil rights, education, and representation. When Arizona officials banned Mexican American Studies, Diaz and four veteran members of NP organized the 2012 Librotraficante Caravan to smuggle books from the banned curriculum back into Arizona. He is the author of The Aztec Love God (Fiction Collective 2, 1998) and The Tip of the Pyramid: Cultivating Community Cultural Capital (University of New Orleans Press, 2022) is the first book in his series on Community Organizing.

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Patricia Núñez

Patricia Núñez Porras has been in education for twenty-plus years and currently works with the Austin Independent School District in Texas. Her career in education started early in Mexico as a pre-kindergarten teachers’ assistant. She holds a Master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in Curriculum & Instruction, with a concentration in Bilingual/Bicultural Education, and is currently a doctoral student in Cultural Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Certified as an Education Administrator with the Texas Education Agency, Núñez has worked as a bilingual teacher, an instructional coach, and an advocate for equitable access to high-quality bilingual education at local and national levels. Her greatest joys include collaborating on designing and co-teaching engaging units grounded in culturally relevant pedagogy. Núñez also stays energized, designing summer programs with themes like El maíz y el chocolate that sustain and revitalize languages, and highlight cultural assets and strengths.

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Angela Valenzuela

Dr. Angela Valenzuela is a professor in both the Cultural Studies in Education Program within the Department of Curriculum & Instruction, and the Educational Policy and Planning Program within the Department of Education Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves as the director of the Texas Center for Education Policy. Her research and teaching interests are in urban education from a sociological and multicultural perspective, with a focus on minority youth in schools, particularly at the K-12 level, culturally relevant curriculum, Ethnic Studies, and indigenous education. A Stanford University graduate, she has held appointments at Rice University, the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston, and most recently at the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Valenzuela served as co-editor of the Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and the Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and founded the education blog “Educational Equity, Politics, and Policy in Texas.” She is the award-winning author of Subtractive Schooling: U.S. Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (SUNY Press, 1999), Leaving Children Behind: How "Texas-style" Accountability Fails Latino Youth (SUNY Press, 2005), and Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth (Teachers College Press, 2016).

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