In May 2023, a group of San Antonio-based activists traveled to Austin, Texas, to lobby against legislation that, they claimed, “undermined civil rights.” The group, called Escuelita de Paz y Justicia (or Escuelita), was created by professional organizers to train San Antonio residents—including high schoolers, single mothers, and first-generation college students—in topics like “local organizing against neoliberalism” and “Latinx and Chicanx feminisms.” Its goal was to foster “social change from below.”
Escuelita racked up various expenses, providing stipends, food, transportation, and childcare. The money to cover those costs did not come “from below.” It was bankrolled by the “Democratizing Racial Justice” project at the University of Texas at San Antonio, itself funded by a $5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Through public records requests, I’ve obtained progress reports for Democratizing Racial Justice, which operated at UT San Antonio from 2021 to late 2024. The records tell a familiar story: the Mellon Foundation uses its $8 billion endowment to boost the careers of self-avowed scholar-activists. But the records also show how such grantmaking can become a political weapon, empowering a scholar-activism that spreads beyond the academy, including by using the university as a pass-through to fund on-the-ground organizing.
Democratizing Racial Justice promises to embody “antiracist and decolonial pedagogies.” Its faculty fit the mold. C. Alejandra Elenes, who became the program’s principal investigator shortly after it launched, employs “Chicana feminist epistemologies.” Sonya Alemán, one of the program’s faculty fellows, “draws on critical race theory and Chicana feminism to inform both her scholarship and pedagogy.”
Armed with $5 million—a hefty sum for any humanities grant—this UT San Antonio team was keenly aware that its work was at odds with Texas leadership. “[W]e are four scholars engaged in a grant-funded campus-community partnership aimed at cultivating racial justice using ethnic studies pedagogies in Texas,” wrote a group of Democratizing Racial Justice fellows in an article for Ethnic Studies Pedagogies. They described Texas as “a state actively entrenching white supremacist and neoliberal ideologies through legislation that attacks ethnic studies curricula, discredits race-based epistemologies and histories and diminishes labor protections.”
Per the progress reports, one of the project’s main activities was its “Ethnic Studies Educators’ Academy,” an annual gathering of higher education faculty to “engage with our racialized past and present, and envision racially just futures.” The academy was action-oriented. One participant, quoted in the progress report, praised it for “modeling scholar activism.” Another said that the takeaway was that teachers must “decoloniz[e] education” and dismantle the logic of racism, capitalism, and “heteronormativity.”
True to this aim, the academy’s main output—an annually published teaching guide—openly embraced a political label. As the Democratizing Racial Justice fellows put it in their summary of the project, “the progressive politics of ethnic studies pedagogies have long challenged the white Eurocentric and colonial curriculum power structures of U.S. mainstream schooling.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, their teaching guide notes that “heteropatriarchy,” racism, and white supremacy lie “at the foundation of U.S. society.”
Through its lessons and assignments, the teaching guides aim to inculcate overtly identitarian themes. One unit teaches that health disparities are driven by “colonization and Eurocentric ideologies” and aims to have students recognize the importance of “healing practices outside of Western-based medicine in communities of color.” For another assignment, almost half of the grade that students earn depends on whether they “show awareness that they are building on Black/Chicanx feminist thought.”
Such teaching flows directly from the project’s vision for higher education, which is explicitly political. In their 2024 article, the Democratizing Social Justice fellows said that their work “position[s] scholar activism as central to the role of the university.” And scholar-activists, they argue, “have long understood that universities are neither neutral nor outside the larger political arena and recognize themselves as agents of change in complex political processes.”
The other main component of the Mellon grant, the “People’s Academy,” put ethnic studies theory into practice. The People’s Academy created Escuelita, which, as a progress report states, planned “collective lobbying action in the State legislature in Austin to prevent the passing of a number of anti-rights bills.”
While the project was outwardly focused, it nevertheless bolstered academic careers. “The People’s Academy has had a tangible impact in higher education by strengthening and empowering Chicana/a/x or Latina/o/x junior and senior scholars,” the Ethnic Studies Pedagogies article said. “Two postdoctoral fellows on our team secured tenure track jobs at Hispanic Serving Institutions and in academic programs with a strong social justice component.”
Thus, as with other Mellon grants, Democratizing Racial Justice served as a career accelerator for fringe scholars. That includes Olga Estrada, who was a teaching fellow while pursuing her doctorate. Estrada describes her dissertation as an “autohxstoria-teoría”—which is a work of “(de)colonial methodology” that “merges story, theory, memory, spirit, and embodiment”—aimed at critiquing the “anti-erotic neoliberal academy.” While conducting this unique form of inquiry, she coined the term “Tlazolteotl Cycle”: “a queer eco-erotic process of filth, digestion, and transformation that reimagines how shame, rupture, and sacred mess become sites of rebirth and queer conocimiento.”
In its ideological goals, Democratizing Racial Justice was as clear as could be. For the professors who ran the program, and the activists who benefitted from it, the university was a tool for a progressive political vision, one that fit well with the mission of the Mellon Foundation. Texas’s universities should take care not to repeat the mistake—no matter how large the grant.