A packed Union Building Ballroom jittered with anticipation as long-time teacher and civil rights activist Curtis Acosta took the podium Monday.
His presentation, titled "Pedagogies of Resiliency and Hope: Responding to the National Criminalization of Latino/Chicano Youth," kicked off DePauw's International Education Week, which continues through Saturday.
Acosta taught Mexican American Studies at Tucson High School in Arizona for 16 years until, in 2012, Arizona passed House Bill 2281, which shut down his program and countless other like it.
Sophomore Asucena Lopez introduced Acosta. She met him in Chicago earlier in the year. When her class about banned books began talking about the bill, she knew to give him a call.
Acosta set up a conference with her class through Skype.
"I thought it was selfish to keep him in my class," Lopez said. "So I decided to share him with the rest of campus."
She talked to professors and other organizations on campus and eventually raised the money to bring Acosta to DePauw.
Acosta started off his presentation by having the audience recite the poem "In LakEch" by Luis Valdez in unison, which is how he started off every class he taught.
The poem consists of verses which insist that loving one another helps in loving ourselves.
He then showed a video of the University of Arizona basketball team. At the end of the video the words "This is Arizona" flashed on the screen as sirens blared in the background.
"The sirens are ironic," he stated as an image of House Bill 2281 blew up on the screen, "because this is also Arizona." Numerous photos of streets lined with protestors filled the screen.
Other states have also passed similar bills, including the Hoosier state.
These states claim the bills are stopping racism, but the statistics of these classes suggest otherwise.
In Acosta's classes alone, 97.5 percent of the Mexican American students graduated high school. This is in contrast with the 44 percent national average for Mexican Americans. Seventy percent of his students are attending post-graduate school versus the 24 percent national average of Mexican Americans.
Instead of putting state money into programs like these that help Latino and Chicano youth, states are putting it toward prisons.
"The amount of money states spend on prisons is six times the amount they spend on education," Acosta explained.
Sophomore Amanda Volel expressed her concern about these facts. "We have a lot of work to do," she said.
"There is hope, though," Acosta said. He displayed a slide that said "This is 2013" and underneath, presented pictures of gay rights rallies and diagrams of the states that have legalized gay marriage.
His next slide, however, revealed how far the U.S. still has to go. Images of Trayvon Martin were exhibited and the audience let out a sigh of remorse.
"It is cases like these that are causing America to regress," Acosta said.
He explained what students can do to help make a difference.
"Stop being scared," Acosta said. "And remember In LakEch!"
Acosta has started up new classes that meet on Sundays, with no funding, in an attempt to make a difference in at least a few Mexican American students' lives.
"In the most regressive spots, we find the most hope," Acosta said. "This is our continent together: your history as well as my history. We must show the kind of courage our ancestors did if we want to make a change."
Many students found his words motivational, including Volel.
"There is a lot to be said about the honesty and love he had to share with his audience; it was revolutionary," Volel remarked. "The fact that he could do it in an hour was astounding."
Others felt it was a call to action, such as first-year Jacqueline Perez.
"How can we expect to make a change," Perez inquired, "if we are too afraid to make the first step?"