A federally awarded grant meant to support humanities education in California’s Central Valley, has been unexpectedly terminated last week, upsetting scholars and educators.
The grant, part of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Landmarks in American History and Culture program, was designed to help K-12 teachers from across the U.S. come to Bakersfield to learn about the area’s rich history of migration and labor.
The California Dream project was approved for funding in summer 2024, before the 2024 presidential election. However, organizers were suddenly told that the grant was canceled without any explanation.
“It’s shocking,” said Oliver Rosales, a professor at Bakersfield College and one of the lead educators involved in the program. “This is a federally approved grant that has already begun its work. The NEH has never been canceled like this before, not even under previous Republican administrations.”
The grant was canceled as part of a wider effort by the Trump administration’s Department of Education and NEH leadership to cut funding for humanities programs.
The California Dream program was one of the only NEH-funded humanities grants in the region.
“Teachers were already selected. Invitations were sent. People were making travel plans,” said Rosales. “Now we have to tell them it’s off.”
“This isn’t just about our program,” said Rosales. “This affects teachers, students, and communities that rely on humanities education. If the NEH can be dismantled easily, what’s next?”
Belen Carrasco, an educator at Curran Middle School for the Bakersfield City School District who participated in the 2023 California Dreaming program recalled her time in the program was an amazing experience.
“We traveled to historical sites in Kern County with educators from across the country. We learned about histories we hadn’t been taught before stories of struggle, resilience, and hope,” she said.
The program took Carrasco and her students to places like the Sunset Labor Camp in Arvin, the Filipino Community Hall and 40 Acres in Delano, and the headquarters of the United Farm Workers in Keene.
“Each site had its own story,” she said, “but what they all had in common was that they taught us about the real lives of people who lived and worked here, people whose stories deserve to be heard.”
Carrasco brought those lessons directly into her classroom. Inspired by what she learned, she developed a unit on Allensworth, a historic African American town founded in 1908, to guide students to compare it to Greenwood, Oklahoma, the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Her eighth graders wrote letters to Colonel Allensworth, and Carrasco read them aloud in the town’s historic church during a field trip.
One letter stood out to her. “This student, 13 years old, wrote about the town’s downfall due to systemic racism and lack of water resources. She made connections to Black Wall Street and even mentioned how Kendrick Lamar inspires youth today through his music. It was powerful.”
Carrasco explained that without programs like California Dreaming, these kinds of transformative experiences both for teachers and students become far more difficult to achieve.
So when she learned that NEH funding had been abruptly cut, terminating the program, Carrasco was devastated.
“I was shocked. And I was angry,” she said. “It felt like a direct attack not just on educators, but on history, on community, on truth. It’s not just a grant. It’s a lifeline for meaningful education.”
Despite the loss of funding, Carrasco will never stop teaching about Allensworth. She said her students deserve to know where they come from and that they deserve to know that they matter.
“We provide the food for the world here in the Central Valley but our stories are too often ignored. This program helped us reclaim those stories,” she said.
