From Inquiry to Academic Writing A Practical Guide, 3rd edition

mARTÍnEz | REInvEnTIng “AmERICA” 265

questions about how you think the author develops her argument, para-

graph by paragraph. Then we discuss her work in the context of the three

key elements of paragraphs: topic sentences, unity, and adequate develop-

ment. As you read, pay attention to how, sentence by sentence, Martínez

develops her paragraphs. We also ask that you consider how she makes

her argument provocative, impassioned, and urgent for her audience.

F

or some fifteen years, starting in 1940, 85 percent of all U.S. elemen-

tary schools used the Dick and Jane series to teach children how to

read. The series starred Dick, Jane, their white middle-class parents,

their dog Spot, and their life together in a home with a white picket

fence.

“Look, Jane, look! See Spot run!” chirped the two kids. It was a house

full of glorious family values, where Mom cooked while Daddy went to

work in a suit and mowed the lawn on weekends. The Dick and Jane

books also taught that you should do your job and help others. All this

affirmed an equation of middle-class whiteness with virtue.

In the mid-1990s, museums, libraries, and eighty Public Broadcast-

ing Service (PBS) stations across the country had exhibits and programs

commemorating the series. At one museum, an attendant commented,

“When you hear someone crying, you know they are looking at the Dick

and Jane books.” It seems nostalgia runs rampant among many Euro-

Americans: a nostalgia for the days of unchallenged White Suprem-

acy — both moral and material — when life was “simple.”

We’ve seen that nostalgia before in the nation’s history. But today it

signifies a problem reaching a new intensity. It suggests a national iden-

tity crisis that promises to bring in its wake an unprecedented nervous

breakdown for the dominant society’s psyche.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in California, which has long

been on the cutting edge of the nation’s present and future reality.

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From Reinventing “America”: Call for a New

National Identity

Elizabeth Martínez is a Chicana activist who since 1960 has worked in and

documented different movements for change, including the civil rights,

women’s, and Chicano movements. She is the author of six books and nu -

merous articles. Her best-known work is 500 Years of Chicano History in

Pictures (1991), which became the basis of a two-part video she scripted

and codirected. Her latest book is De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views

for a Multi-Colored Century (1998). In “Reinventing ‘America,’ ” Martínez

argues that Americans’ willingness to accept a “myth” as “the basis for

[the] nation’s self-defined identity” has brought the country to a crisis.

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ELIZABETH MARTÍNEZ

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