Stolen Education – Screening at Page Middle School

Join us for a screening of the powerful documentary, Stolen Education.
Hear the stories of students who were segregated by race and punished for being Mexican American.
Learn about how eight students who testified against injustice.
This is the untold story of how they changed education in Texas.
A Q&A with documentary creator, Dr. Enrique Aleman, will follow the screening of the film.

In 1956, Lupe was the first child to step onto the witness stand, raise her right hand, and swear to tell the truth in front of a federal judge. Seated in the courtroom were a handful of her classmates, two of her siblings, and residents of her small, South Texas agricultural community. Behind the defense attorneys’ table were her first and second grade teachers, her school principal, and the district’s superintendent — all of whom were White. As a 9 year-old second grader, Lupe had already been in first grade for three years, not because of her academic performance but because she was Mexican American. Administrators and teachers argued that their practice was necessary because — as they defined it in court documents and in testimony — the Spanish “retardation of Latin children” would adversely impact the education of White children. Mexican American students were relegated to a “beginner,” “low,” and then “high” first grade — a practice that was not uncommon across Texas and the Southwest. After almost sixty years, the case was never spoken about in the farming community where they lived. Stolen Education documents the filmmaker – and Lupe’s son – on his journey to recapture the remarkable story of the schoolchildren who changed education in Texas and to re-claim this forgotten part of Texas history almost six decades after the case.