A dispatch from Logan Phillips, an Arizona-based poet and activist with the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam, and longtime CultureStrike ally, about a small triumph at Pima Community College. Young people have campaigned successfully for in-state tuition for students who qualify for the White House’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a temporary reprieve from deportation that the Obama administration recently launched in response to massive grassroots pressure for immigration relief for undocumented youth:

Pima Community College, Board of Governors Meeting, February 27, 2013. Tucson, Arizona. Tonight the Board will decide whether or not to provide in-state tuition to students who receive work permits through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). Student and poet Alexia is called up first to speak.

After 60 more minutes of passionate and articulate comments from community members–all in favor–the Board voted 4-1 in favor of the measure.

Support for the measure was organized by ScholarshipsA-Z, an organization that provides resources and scholarships to students, families and educators in order to make higher education accessible to all regardless of immigration status.

Alexia works with the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam and Spoken Futures, Inc.

In a follow-up report, Logan writes that even this modest victory can be a breakthrough for young people like Alexia whose futures have been in limbo as they navigate the immigration crisis: “As problematic as Arizonan politics are, don’t write them off. The course towards the future is being charted here.”

UPDATE: now the TUSD has apparently backpedaled from its earlier procedural vote. This post has been amended to reflect the new backtracking, which reflects the old intransigence. Ah, the fun never ends in Tucson… (See Jeff Biggers’s story for a post-meeting breakdown.)

UPDATE II: It now appears that even the board members are having difficulty figuring out what exactly they voted for, with multiple interpretations from supports and detractors of MAS on the political and legal significance of the double vote on two ambiguously worded motions. Please see this helpful, though necessarily complicated, analysis of the aftermath at Tucson Weekly. The takeaway is that these issues are still unresolved and will be picked up when the new board resumes work next year, and the position of the federal desegregation plan on ethnic studies courses is finalized. The fact that this one meeting has elicited so many multiple interpretations and confusing conjectures is a testament to how polarizing this issue still is!

This week, the Tucson Unified School District–where so many of the battles over Mexican American studies have been fought out in recent months–showed signs that it was finally relenting just a little in its zealous campaign to resist the community’s efforts to resist the dismantling of its groundbreaking ethnic studies movement. Or did it?

Mainly it appeared to be a routine voting procedure that would set the district’s “unitary status plan”–part of a process of compliance with a longstanding desegregation consent decree for Tucson schools.

Tucson Weekly reported on what appeared to be a subtle shift that surfaced in two votes, both related to a resolution that opposed the inclusion of Mexican American Studies courses in the core curriculum:

Stegeman then brought the second motion regarding the objections; namely, the objection that the TUSD legal team filed last month against the MAS classes being returned as core curriculum classes for literature and social studies.

That resolution was defeated 3-2, with Grijalva, Cuevas and Alexandre Sugiyama voting no, and Michael Hicks and Stegeman voting yes.

But later, after most people in the board room left for the evening — it was a long board meeting that went past 11 p.m. after a long executive session — Stegeman brought the second motion on the objections up for a revote. Hicks asked to go into executive session and when the board came out the second motion returned to the board. This time, the board’s vote against the objections was unanimous — 5-0 against, with Hicks and Stegeman changing their vote.

Regarding the first vote, Campoy told the Range it was important became of the message it sends to Bury. “The court is going to know that the vote was 5-0, because let’s say it was a 3-2 vote or split, it wouldn’t have been as strong,” she said. “It’s much more likely the judge is going to back us.”

D. A. Morales at Three Sonorans quickly pointed to the vote as a win for pro-ethnic studies activists:

At tonight’s board meeting, Mark Stegeman moved that the District oppose this section. After it went up for a vote, Grijalva, Cuevas and Sugiyama voted NO, with Hicks joining with Stegeman; a clear racial divide if any.

What does this mean?

In a nutshell, it means that TUSD will stop opposing the return of MAS (or MAS-like classes under a different name) and thus MAS and Bilingual Education will be returning to TUSD in Fall 2013.

The WAR against MAS now ends *within TUSD* with the Peace Treaty known as Unitary Status Plan, but it is still up to us to rebuild what was destroyed after the weapons of MAS destruction were dropped upon Tucson.

However: The second measure ultimately proved to be largely symbolic as well as confusing–and shortly afterwards the TUSD clarified that it still opposed the inclusion of MAS in the core curriculum. Ultimately, the future of Mexican American Studies will effectively hinge on the decisions of the new incoming board. Biggers quoted local activist Miguel Ortega:

So long as our community continues to work from a position of barrio self-determination, so long as we continue to push our newly elected board members to find the courage to use their voices and advocate, so long as we as community members continue to resist a draconian vision for our kids’ future, 2013 will be the year the Mexican American Studies program returns to Tucson for good.

So in the end it was alas, too early to celebrate. Nonetheless, Three Sonorans didn’t see the harm in tooting the horn of the activists who are finally getting some vindication of their indefatigable organizing work on behalf of Tucson’s youth and students in every community across the country who care about building a more inclusive and just education system. Watch the clip of the meeting through to the end, when the dryness of the board’s parliamentary procedures concludes with a bit of hearty MAS cheer.

For more on the struggle to protect Mexican American Studies, see more posts in our series, Saving Ethnic Studies.

dignidadrebelde.com

SPECIAL EVENT: Jeff Biggers is giving a talk this Saturday in the Bay Area about the state of Arizona in the wake of the SB 1070 battle. At a release party for his book State out of the Union at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, he will be joined by San Jose-based poet Yosimar Reyes and Bay Award Book Award winning novelist Alfred Véa, along with CultureStrikers Favianna Rodriguez and Jeff Chang. Check out the details here.

When the national Banned Books Week kicks off on September 30, I plan to read an excerpt from Tucson-based author Leslie Silko’s acclaimed Ceremony novel, in the Rethinking Columbus anthology.

Recipient of a Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, Silko’s masterpiece is not only one of the great American literary treasures. It has profoundly influenced a generation of readers, writers and especially students across the nation.

And yes, Virginia, as part of the Rethinking Columbus collection, which has been taught in hundreds of schools from Alaska to Maine, Silko’s Ceremony excerpt in that anthology was unabashedly banished from the curriculum of teachers in the outlawed Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) last year.

Banished, banned, proscribed, removed — when I broke the story on Salon last year, the TUSD spokeperson Cara Rene attempted to spin the district’s hasty and indiscriminate actions as some kind of temporary measure of suspension: The books “will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage.” In truth, still awaiting a federal court ruling, the Mexican American Studies program and its curriculum lists of books, videos, documents no longer exist in these highly acclaimed TUSD courses. This is the duplicity at work: Silko may be taught in other classes, but her writing in Rethinking Columbus or the outlawed Mexican American Studies program remains a closed book.

Sorry, TUSD, but for those who believe in intellectual freedom for all students and teachers and readers, a partial book ban in classroom teaching is no less egregious than a total ban.

One photo I received from a high school in Tucson, on the day of the book confiscations, will forever haunt me. An administrator had reportedly written on the box: Banned books (please remove).

Once the rest of the national media weighed in, and outrage and public condemnation over violations of intellectual freedom and censorship came from virtually every major literary, library, publishing, academic and educational organization, TUSD’s bungling of the Mexican American Studies crisis and confiscation of books turned into a national disgrace. With only a handful of books in the school libraries for more than 50,000 students, TUSD’s rush to dismiss the story as rumor or save face looked even more ridiculous.

In celebration of the Librotraficante “book smugglers,” even the New York Times editorial board called out TUSD’s hypocrisy:

School officials say the books are not technically banned, just redistributed to the library. But what good is having works from the reading list — like “Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941″ and “The House on Mango Street,” by Sandra Cisneros — on the shelves if they can’t be taught? Indeed, the point of dismantling the curriculum was to end classroom discussions about these books.

So, this year for Banned Books Week, as I tour the country with my own book on the historical legacy of Arizona’s century-long battle for civil rights, State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream, I will begin my reading from Silko’s masterpiece as a reminder of Tucson’s still unfolding crisis over its banished books: ” “I will tell you something about stories… They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.”

American Book Award-winning author Jeff Biggers joins us on the East Coast to report on the situation on the ground of Arizona post- SB 1070. In his new book, State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream, Biggers diagnoses the root of the problem in Arizona’s past—attributing the 48th state’s current nativist anxieties to its turbulent entry into the Union and identity crisis as frontier country. With anti-immigration hardliners infiltrating local legislatures and copycat legislation spreading across 25 states, what happens in Arizona doesn’t stay in Arizona. Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Urrea states “Jeff Biggers has the unblinking gaze of the honed journalist, a novelist’s sense of image and story, and a prophet’s cache of outrage.” Don’t miss Jeff Biggers’s riveting account of the Arizonafication of the United States and what you can do to strike back against rightist extremism in a new civil rights movement.

Following the reading is a discussion on immigration reform moderated by Rinku Sen, the publisher ofColorlines.com and author of The Accidental American. Accompanying Sen and Biggers are Mozambican singer Chude Mondlane and journalist Aura Bogado, who will be talking about her experience on the UndocuBus, a tour of anti-immigrant states inspired by the freedom rides of the Civil Rights Movement. Brooklyn-based UndocuQueer artist, Felipe Baeza, will decorate the event space with prints from CultureStrike’s poster project.

Details:
Monday, September 24, 7:00pm
Performance Project
184 Eldridge Street
New York, New York 10002

This event is presented by CultureStrike, a project at the frontlines of the national arts movement around immigration. 

Jeff Biggers is the American Book Award-winning of The United States of Appalachia, and In the Sierra Madre. He has worked as a writer, radio correspondent, and educator across the United States, Europe, India, and Mexico. His award-winning stories have appeared on National Public Radio, Public Radio International and in numerous magazines and newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Salon, among others. He splits his time between Tucson and Illinois. His website is:www.jeffbiggers.com.

Rinku Sen is the President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and the publisher of Colorlines.com. A leading figure in the racial justice movement, Rinku has positioned ARC as a national home for media, research and activism on these issues. Over the course of her career, she has combined journalism and activism to make social change. Rinku is the author of Stir It Up, a primer on best practices in community organizing, and The Accidental American, a book about Moroccan immigrant Fekkak Mamdouh, who co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York in the aftermath of September 11. Rinku lives in Queens, New York. 

Chude Mondlane is a Brooklyn and Maputo-based vocalist, performer, community activist, foodie, and parent—nesting between the places where her heart lays: Mozambique and the United States. Find her on twitter @chudemondlane.

Aura Bogado is the community journalism coordinator and blogger for Voting Rights Watch 2012. Aura has reported in Spanish and English from Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and the United States. Her work has been published in Mother Jones, Newsweek Argentina, AlterNet, and The Huffington Post. With the support of the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, she conducted an in-depth examination on the consequences of immigration enforcement by local police in Arizona. Aura has worked as a national host and producer for the Pacifica Radio network.

Felipe Baeza attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement in New York City from 2005 to 2009, with a concentration on Printmaking and Drawing. His work has been featured in several group shows in Chicago, Illinois, and New York.

Julio Salgado

This summer, Tucson students, educators, and activist did something rebellious: they celebrated books. These weren’t just any books, of course. They were the books that had been deemed contraband by school authorities, vilified as tools of a curriculum that promotes ethnic hatred. In other words, they were works like Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, Mexican White Boy, the play Zoot Suit, and Like Water for Chocolate. Texts that aim to foster critical thinking, political curiosity, and other dangerous behaviors.

The idea that these books are “subversive” was a pretext for a crackdown on Mexican American studies in Tucson. And once the controversy was broadcast across the country, Americans of all backgrounds saw exactly what these programs threatened: an ossified conservative establishment that masks social control as education.

But the school authorities probably weren’t just annoyed that the books contained radical messages. It was who was reading them that was really troubling: it was Latino youth learning about the conflicts and cultural survival that have carried through history. This has triggered an official campaign of oppression, involving a state-led McCarthyesque investigation. This set off a wave of resistance through legal challenges and grassroots protests using creativity and humor, culminating in the youth-led Freedom Summer.

dignidadrebelde.com

Oddly, this culture clash coincides with a trend in education at all levels towards “multiculturalism” and “diversity.” This dissonance–studying ethnicity from a distance, versus critically thinking about ethnicity in our own lives–strikes at the heart of the paradox of diversity in public education. Its value is always measured in its benefits for the dominant culture, the one needing to be diversified. For those doing the diversifying, people and communities are subordinated to the objectification of difference. Culture is commodified in the classroom as it is in fashion, food, and music. American Apparel looks good on Latino farmworkers in an ad; but that farmworker’s family doesn’t look so good when they move next door.  The genre of “world music” becomes an arena for consumption of exotic sounds, but the indigenous artists don’t see, possibly don’t comprehend, the popularity of their product.

Educational programs sometimes reflect this historically entrenched pattern of simultaneously celebrating and marginalizing the Other.  This generally takes a more humane and well-intentioned format than Cowboy-and-Indian flicks–certainly, diversity initiatives in public schools stem from some educators’ genuine desire to broaden students’ minds. But there is still a fine borderline between embracing difference and pushing the Other to the segregated cultural margins.

So while Mexican American studies is demonized in Tucson, the idea of diversity and cosmopolitanism is vaunted, at least on paper, according to the guidelines for high school social studies curricula:

This course focuses on the study of world cultures through an examination of different peoples, their history and environment. Students will analyze how political, cultural, religious, and social beliefs interact to shape patterns of human populations, inter-dependence, cooperation, and conflict.

And outside Tucson, learning about “non-Western” cultures and societies is a standard component of many K-12 curricula, and some schools go even further. In New York, a Chinese language academy has been hailed as a bastion of multicultural learning that can help students become “globally competitive.”

At Khalil Gibran International Academy, via flickr

But there are limits to diversity. When an Arabic-themed public school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, opened a few years ago, catering to families of all backgrounds, a massive nationwide backlash erupted, with right-wing activists decrying the school as an indoctrination zone for jihadis in training. The smear campaign did not prompt the media or officials to rally in defense of the school community against racist attacks. Instead, the principal was forced to resign amid political pressure–not because the opposition represented widespread public concern about KGIA, but because a paranoid fringe simply shouted loud enough.

Skewed perspectives on diversity color the institutional culture of schools. Foreign languages are treated as an academic asset, but excessive foreign-ness, among poor people of color, is shunned. There’s a trend of establishing culturally centered charter schools, like a proposed bilingual Chinese immersion school (complete with a martial arts curriculum)–to encourage a more transnational and  ”holistic” experience. Yet school systems systematically limit the prospects of students who are labeled “English language learners,” treating them as educationally stunted, though they’re gifted with the languages that make native-born children fumble. A student’s experience with a study abroad program is considered a prized credential on a college application,  but if you’ve come from abroad, even if you navigate fluently between two cultural spheres, your duality renders you suspect–possibly  in danger of “removal” if your cultural border-crossing is not government-authorized.

The lesson here is that even in an era when we’re encouraged to learn about and appreciate cultural difference, officialdom’s acceptance of actual diversity hinges on who is doing the teaching, who is doing the learning, and whether the overarching balance of cultural power remains safely with the white mainstream.

Difference is to be studied and occasionally celebrated in the classroom, but it is above all to be managed. And when students and teachers of color begin to use education as a tool for reclaiming a suppressed heritage, they challenge the gatekeepers of cultural hegemony. And for all the talk of diversity, one thing that must never be diversified, never be shared across social boundaries, is power.

To read more about ethnic studies in Tucson, see our series, Saving Ethnic Studies.

Sean Arce/Precious Knowledge

When history becomes a political project, how do we rescue it from the clutches of oppressive power? Ethnic studies scholar Rodolfo F. Acuña explains the blindspots in our conception of United States history.

What Americans just don’t get is that most people see history differently than they do. In order to break this down, every semester I show Robert Wuhl’s HBO special “Assume the Position 101.” Wuhl proposes that U.S. history is Pop Culture and he discusses different events in American history and its American take.

The first myth that Wuhl explores is that of the Founding Fathers. If they were as smart as American exceptionalists say why, Wuhl asks, does the first sentence of the U.S. Constitution read?

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

 Wuhl roars, “more perfect!?” How can something be more perfect? It is or it isn’t. According to Wuhl, it is a “grammatical fuck-up.” He goes on to show how American history is constructed from myths. Wuhl says that when the truth contradicts the legend, the truth has to go. Wuhl gives the example of the film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” When the Jimmy Stewart character tries to explain to the local newspaper editor that he did not shoot Liberty Valance, the editor won’t hear it, packs up to leave and says “…when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

This is true about most aspects of American history: Columbus discovered America. Thanksgiving Day showed the friendship between the colonists and the Indians. The colonists fought against the tyranny of the British, and even as a child I learned the story of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree that was treated as the truth.

How many people still believe the myth that the United States won World War II by itself? Americans forget that Russian suffered around 26 million casualties versus just over 400,000 for the United States.

Americans consider themselves a generous people and look at the criticism of rest of the world as ungrateful. They cite the Marshall Plan as an example of this generosity. According Americans, it saved post war Europe from economic disaster, forgetting the financial benefits reaped by American capital.

Many Africans and Latin Americans take issue with the myth of American generosity.

From 1890 to the present there have been at least sixty U.S. military interventions into Latin America and this does not include the Indian Wars, the annexation of Florida in 1819, the Texas War 1836 and the Mexican American War of 1845-48.

Americans are surprised to learn that these narratives are part of Latin America’s popular culture. Even the great Nicaraguan poet, Ruben Dario, who was hardly a revolutionary bitterly complained about the actions of Theodore Roosevelt:

“You are the United States,
future invader of our naive America
with its Indian blood, an America
that still prays to Christ and still speaks Spanish.

****

You think that life is a fire,
that progress is an eruption,
that the future is wherever
your bullet strikes.
No.
The United States is grand and powerful.
Whenever it trembles, a profound shudder
runs down the enormous backbone of the Andes.
If it shouts, the sound is like the roar of a lion.

****

But our own America, which has had poets
since the ancient times of Nezahualcóyolt;
which preserved the footprint of great Bacchus,
and learned the Panic alphabet once,
and consulted the stars; which also knew Atlantic
(whose name comes ringing down to us in Plato)
and has lived, since the earliest moments of its life,
in light, in fire, in fragrance, and in love–…
God! O men with Saxon eyes and barbarous souls,
our America lives. And dreams. And loves.
And it is the daughter of the Sun. Be careful.
Long live Spanish America!
A thousand cubs of the Spanish lion are roaming free.
Roosevelt, you must become, by God’s own will,
the deadly Rifleman and the dreadful Hunter
before you can clutch us in your iron claws.
And though you have everything, you are lacking one thing:
God!

So you see, Fidel Castro did not invent anti-Americanism which is a product of history rather than jealousy or communist propaganda. Anti-Americanism was forged by history and if we went back in time and eliminated Castro, these feelings would not be erased. Only in knowing the causes can we corrected them.

It is like when my wife gets angry with me and I ask why and she answers, “Whatever.”

Latin Americans have always been enamored with history. Castro should be studied if for no other reason than to learn the answer for “whatever.” During his failed coup in 1953, Castro based his defense on Cuban history, summing up by saying: “I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”

Upon achieving victory in 1959, Castro again turned to history:

“PEOPLE OF SANTIAGO, COMPATRIOTS OF ALL CUBA…

Our Revolution … will not be like 1895 when the Americans came and took over, intervening at the last moment, and afterwards did not even allow Calixto Garcia to assume leadership, although he had fought at Santiago de Cuba for 30 years.

Nor will it be like 1933, when the people began to believe that the revolution was going to triumph, and Mr. Batista came in to betray the revolution, take over power, and establish an 11-year-long dictatorship.

Nor will it be like 1944, when the people took courage, believing that they had finally reached a position where they could take over the power, while those who did assume power proved to be thieves. We will have no thievery, no treason, no intervention. This time it is truly the revolution, even though some might not desire it.…

The Republic was not freed in 1895, and the dream was frustrated at the last minute. The Revolution did not take place in 1933 and was frustrated by its enemies. …in the four centuries since our country was founded, this will be the first time that we are entirely free …”

Can we say that because we do not agree with Castro that the events did not happen? I don’t think so.

Truth be told, Mexican Americans are the only ethnic/racial group in the United States who are at this moment being ordered to forget their history. No one has passed a law ordering the English, the Irish, or the Jews to forget their history and culture; it was only demanded of the Germans during the American cultural and political panic after World War I.

I went to Catholic Schools that for all intents and purposes nurtured Irish nationalism. St. Patrick’s was a holiday and we learned the latest score of and prayed for the Fighting Irish football team.

American historical ignorance is a disgrace. Students have a D.W. Griffith “The Birth of a Nation” vision of slavery and even at the university level most students do not know that the Southwest once belonged to Mexico.

In 1968 I was denied employment in the History Department at San Fernando Valley State because, according to the chair, I could not be objective in teaching Latin American history because my parents were Mexican. He forgot that every U.S. History class was taught by a white American.

“Occupied America” was attacked by academic reviewers at the University of California Santa Barbara because, according to them, I lied when I wrote that the United States invaded Mexico.

The study of history is the search for the truth and you cannot learn the truth unless history is vetted and discussed.

Moreover, if we live in a democratic society we better ask simple questions like why Italian-Americans and Jews can have Columbus Day Parades and carry the flags of their countries of origin. Their patriotism is not questioned. However, the patriotism of Mexican Americans is questioned for marching with and waving the Mexican flag.

Historically and as human beings we lost a great deal when the Spaniards destroyed the indigenous codices. Whether we want to admit it or not these works held a key to the past. Of all the great religions of time, Native Americans religions of the Americas are the only great religions almost totally erased; others are studied at august institutions.

This ignorance is one reason why learning the past is so vital. We cannot afford to have our children grow up to be like today’s Arizona xenophobes.

Most educated people in other countries know history while we are forced to live in ignorance. The U.S. could probably get away with imposing its narrative if it were at the height of its power. However, fewer nations now go along with the U.S. and it needs friends both internally and externally.

Its moral authority has been badly damaged by lies. It is to its best its interest to find friends which it won’t get trying to impose its narrative of history.

We have to ask, what happens to a narrative when the most fundamental assumptions turn out to be lies?

Did the lie that our reason for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction hurt our moral authority?

What happens to the narrative that we are in the land of the free and education is a leveling force when we realize that one group has been singled out to censor and deny what every other American has?

One of the unforeseen consequences of the crackdown on ethnic studies programs by Tucson education authorities is a burgeoning market for contraband literature. The market price for Pedagogy of the Oppressed has gone through the roof!

Just ask the young activists who are making lemons out of lemonade by capitalizing on the book ban: “GET YOUR BANNED BOOKS NOW!!!!!!! This is a non-paid advertisement to combat Arizona law HB2281 and the ban of Mexican-American studies.”

To read more about the actions Tucson activists are taking this summer to defend ethnic studies and support immigrants’ rights (and get your hot books before they’re gone), check out our Saving Ethnic Studies series.

While few other high school programs have drawn the national media attention of Tucson’s embattled and now outlawed Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies program in recent years, the origins of the celebrated education initiative have remained overshadowed by the state’s relentless witch hunt campaign.

Via thinkmexican.org

In this essay, part of our Saving Ethnic Studies series, Prof. Rodolfo Acuña looks at the parallels between the struggles of the poor and the abysmal inequities plaguing the public education system in Arizona. Dismantling the system of segregation from within might seem like an impossible task to Latino communities under siege. But, as Acuña reminds us, every attempt by state authorities to crush progressive education can generate disillusionment and resistance in equal measure.

When you rarely win, you learn not expect much. I never considered myself poor but when I was growing up I never remember my parents telling me that I was going to college or encouraging me to enter a profession. Indeed, when I would read my maternal grandmother who I loved dearly would say, “Hijito, no léas tanto, te vas a volver loco!” (Son, don’t read so much, you are going to go crazy!)

It was only later that I learned that my grandmother, like many others, instinctively did not want to raise my hopes too high and get hurt. What was the purpose of reading if it was not going to put food on the table?

This scenario was played out in many ways. My grandfather, a janitor with the Southern Pacific (SP) roundhouses in Tucson and Los Angeles, got angry with my uncle for not taking his advice and remaining a laborer and becoming a machinist apprentice.

My grandfather knew our limits in this country and knew that my uncle would be the first Mexican American machinist IF he made it through the system. What would happen if his hopes were too high and proved to be false?

Throughout my life, these situations played out thousands of times. I remember talking to an African American mother and telling her that her son was very bright and that she should encourage him to read.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and said, “He’s a big kid, he’ll do well in sports.”

My experiences can be multiplied in the thousands. Hence I was not too surprised at the reaction of many Tucsoneses to the news that the Unitary Plan ordered by Federal Judge David C. Bury had been delayed by two to seven weeks.

Bury, a George W. Bush appointee to the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, granted Special Master Willis Hawley extra time to complete his plan which would mark the future of the education of Latinos in the Tucson Unified School District.

Normally, it would seem no big deal – two to seven weeks. But, this is a community under siege and the delay dashes high hopes that the Mexican American Studies program would be reinstated by the fall. It delays the process which requires mandatory community forums.

Did the group have false expectations of success? Yes, they were probably expecting too much from the system.

Failure makes you gun shy. Fear is the memory of danger. Some people are afraid to be loved. You can see the fear of loving on the faces of adults who were abandoned as children or mistreated by a partner. Fear is like touching a hot iron, it tells us beware. It cannot be dismissed as anxiety or a loss of courage. Fears are real.

When you put the saying “Never trust a Mexican smoking a cigar or a Gringo speaking Spanish!” into the context of Texas history, it makes a lot of sense. It is not so much an expression of anti-white feelings but a warning. Let’s play it trucha (crafty like a trout). Tejanos have good reason to be weary of politicians. Why should you trust a Gringo speaking Spanish or a Mexican smoking a cigar?

Believe in justice? Without even considering history, how many innocent people are sitting on death row today? How many Latinos and blacks are being disenfranchised by the voter ID laws? Should we trust politicos to keep their promises?

Putting Hawley and Bury’s delay into the context of recent Arizona history, are you anti-Gringo if you are weary?

Like my students say, “I don’t theenk so!”

For ninety-years, Mexican miners in Clifton-Morenci-Metcalf struggled for a union. They struggled to end discrimination, segregation, a dual wage system, good schools and representation. By 1983 they controlled the union and local government.

That year a strike was called against Phelps Dodge. The union was broken by the company’s use of permanent replacements; the strike was then suffocated by Democratic Governor Bruce Babbitt who sent in the National Guard and Arizona Highway Patrol to support PD. Miners lost their union and the county went Republican.

In Arizona, Mexican American and progressive educators joined to improve education and end segregation and stem the horrendous dropout of Mexican American youth. They achieved some reforms but bilingual education was wiped, declared un-American and dismantled.

Fisher/Mendoza v. Tucson Unified School District emerged from two cases filed in 1974 by African American and Mexican American students who sued the Tucson school system for intentionally segregating and discriminating against Mexican Americans on the basis of race and national origin. Four years later, a federal court found the Tucson Unified School District Schools in violation of Brown v. The Board of Education (1954).

The TUSD was placed under an order to desegregate, which has not been enforced to this day.

In 2008, the Court and the TUSD entered into a unitary plan that supposedly ensured that the TUSD would end segregation. The agreement ended the Court’s oversight with the stipulation that a Post Unitary Plan be developed jointly with Mexican American educators and community.

Judge Bury put it on a fast track and in December 2009 approved the Post Unitary Status Plan effectively ending assurances of the equal advantage of every child. Importantly, the Post-Unitary Plan also required the expansion of the Mexican American studies department. But, was the unitary plan adequate to safeguard equal protection of the students and community? The Fisher/Mendoza plaintiffs did not think so and immediately appealed Bury’s decision.

In retrospect the Mexican American Studies program is the victim of its own success. It had been approved in the mid-1990 as a result of another suit. But, much to the chagrin of its detractors MAS greatly improved student performance. The State’s own audit attests to this. So it was no accident that the MAS program’s success drew fire in 2010 with the passage of HB 2281.

On October 18, 2010, attorney Richard Martíez filed a suit against then Superintendent Tom Horne and the State Board of Education on behalf of eleven TUSD Mexican American Studies teachers and mounted a legal challenge to HB 2281′s attempt to wipe out MAS. It was separate from the Fisher/Mendoza case and litigated in the 9th Circuit in California.

In this charged atmosphere Judge Bury apparently changed his mind. Bury is one of the good old boys, graduating from the University of Arizona Law School. A former partner in the Tucson law firm of Bury, Moeller, O’Meara, & Gage, Judge Bury has maintained his chambers in Tucson. He is well connected with the City’s elites which are led by the Southern Arizona Leadership Council which TUSD Superintendent John Pedicone is a former vice-president.

In 2011 Judge Bury held that the TUSD had made a good faith effort to comply with the Court and lifted government oversight. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund representing Fisher/Mendoza challenged the ruling.

Bury had apparently made a political decision. He knew that Charter Schools were increasing the segregation of Mexican American and other minority students. Despite this Bury ruled that the TUSD had made a good faith effort to comply with the terms of the Court.

A year later the Board violated the Post Unitary Status Plan that described the MAS program as “an organizational contributor to TUSD’s commitment to greater academic and social equity for Hispanic students” and caved in to the State of Arizona and allowed the Plan to be violated.

In January 2012, Arizona State Superintendent John Huppenthal provoked a crisis by ruling that MAS courses were in direct violation of a segment of the Arizona law HB 2281. Meanwhile, the Ninth Circuit Court upheld MALDEF’s appeal and reversed Bury’s decision to accept the Post Unitary Plan. The Ninth Circuit concluded that the TUSD had not made a good faith effort. Bury then appointed Hawley to draw up a new plan.

Suspicions were rife when despite the plaintiffs’ argument, the judge and the special master buckled to the state and agreed that the discontinuation of the classes did not violate the Post-Unitary Plan.

The Mexican American community now awaits the recommendations of the special master.

From all that I have heard, Hawley has worked with black children, a plus. At the same time, he knows nothing about Tucson or Mexican American students. Most of his sources and contacts have been with the City’s white establishment especially John Pedicone who has continuously stabbed the Mexican American community in the back.

At the time he was a candidate for his $300,000 plus position Pedicone sang the praises of the MAS department only to betray it once in office. Mark Stegeman came with his tail between his legs seeking the community’s endorsement when he first ran for the school board, only to betray it once elected.

So, are those fighting to save MAS paranoid? Should they be apprehensive about the Mexicans smoking cigars and the Gringos speaking Spanish?

No one wants to eat “atole con el dedo” (thick hot beverage prepared with corn flour with his fingers) (i.e., to be played for a fool). It is hard to eat atole without a spoon.

From the earliest times, we have made inventions to survive. When we were hungry we reached the apple high in the tree by using a pole. When this became impossible we either walked away or if we expected more, chopped the tree down.

Image: evmaiden via flickr / creative commons

As a longtime ethnic studies scholar and activist, Rodolfo Acuña has been observing the politics of public education for years. As part of our Saving Ethnic Studies series, he looks at the war on critical thought in both Texas and Arizona schools, and the political agendas that are slowly eroding the system.

I am having trouble getting into this essay on the war on critical thinking. I cannot figure out whether it is dumb or ignorant. My mother would say that the people conducting the war are malditos, mean. The reality is that the criminalization of rational thought goes beyond being dumb, ignorant or just plain mean.

Because the consequences are so calculated and far reaching, it is important to break it down so everyone can understand it and where we are headed.

Fascism did not start on February 27, 1933 with the burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin; it did not begin with the building of concentration camps after the fire. It was all planned and a strategy of division, doubt, and fear simply bore fruit at this point.

Hitler summed up his strategy; he sowed the seeds of “mental confusion, contradiction of feelings, indecision, [and] panic.”

Were the German people dumb, ignorant or just plain malditos? Some were all of the above. bHitler and his gang set out to stamp out all vestiges of freedom and decency in German society. It is a story goes back to the early 1920’s and was formed after great forethought.

It used symbols such as the black swastika within the white circle, triggering images of hate toward Jews. Similarly, the Tea Party movement uses the flag with the circle of stars, the border and the tea kettle to nurture fear and hate.

The process of “mental confusion, contradiction of feelings, indecision, panic” follow a blueprint. You watch Tea Party rallies play to mobs that identify with a distorted sense of nationalism; the speakers playing to the fears of the dumb, ignorant and malditos.

In the United States, the Tea Party has been taken over by corporate interests. The involvement of the Koch brothers is well documented. Like the Nazis it has integrated friendly media such as Fox News and a network of right-wing radio talk shows that include scores of hate-mongers such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage who are supported by dozens of other radio hosts and guests.

The message is redundant.

In Germany it was the fear of attacks from without – the invasion of aliens from within — who would infect their racial purity and rob them of the bounties of the German Nation. The Tea Party following a similar plan has substituted the word “illegal alien” for Jew.

The excesses are discernible even at this early stage. One can see the parallels with the Tea Party’s alliances with so-called Minutemen who can justify the murder of a nine-year old Mexican girl, Briseña Flores.

These parallels hit me over the head when I read my friend Devon Peña’s blog, one of the more intelligence on the internet. Devon is one of the few Chicano intellectuals that I know who thinks outside the box.

(See Peña’s article, “Fear & Loathing in Texas: State Republican Party Seeks to Ban Critical Thinking in Public Schools Platform Prohibits Teach Higher Order Thinking Skills,” July 1, 2012.)

Peña’s blog follows the Texas State Board of Education and its adoption of high school social studies and history curriculum standards. The Texas body is a collection of extremists who mirror the fanaticism of the gaggle in Phoenix.

In 2010, it attempted to adopt standards which declared war on the truth. It began with the ridiculous rationale that the Constitution did not provide for the separation of church and state. They said that the words were not in the Constitution. Telling they did not bother to read the Federalist Papers.

Conservatives insisted that the U.S. government be referred to as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic.”

The new standards required students to study how global organizations such as the United Nations undermine U.S. sovereignty. Efforts of the Texas American Civil Liberties Union failed to rein in the State Board of Education and politicized what was taught to Texas school children.

Back to Hitler’s take on education: “Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented.” In Mein Kampf he stated “Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round.”

The Nazi party did not openly purge existing professors if they conformed. It implemented a plan to transform the profession by controlling entry and promotion within it. Teachers could either conform or resign.

The Nazis also moved to block the negative influence of parents and traditional culture. The Party moved to revise history. It saw that the problem that the teaching of history was not guided and taught by Nazi standards – the truth did not matter.

Enter the 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform:

“Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

Peña asks, “Where does this Republican fear of critical thinking come from?” He deduces: “HB2281, the law banning the teaching of Chicana/o Studies in public schools, or that Texas public schools are now filled with a majority [Latino].” The motivating factor was that Latino students now make up just over 50 percent of Texas schools.

John Huppenthal, the Arizona Superintendent of Schools, appearing on Fox News Latino, said, “this toxic thing [critical thinking] starts from, the universities.” Proponents of HB 2281 see critical thinking as “un-American and a threat to Western civilization and culture….”

This dumb, ignorant, and mean spirited movement is spreading, following the same path as the anti-immigrant movement.

In Tennessee Tea Party groups introduced a proposal to take minorities out of American history textbooks. It also proposed to remove negative portrayals of the wealthy white men and references to them as slaveholders or mention of the Indian genocide.

Rep. Michele Bachmann once claimed that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery. But, her saying so does not make it true.

Why has the struggle in Texas then been less intense than in Arizona? There are a lot of factors. It is not that Texas politicos are less dumb, ignorant or malditos, but that with the size of Arizona you can get a lot more bang for your buck. The Kochs, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), and the prison, gun, and charter school interests have hijacked the Republican Party and silenced the Democratic Party and most progressives in the state. In Texas you have a critical mass of Latino elected officials that can put a brake on extreme legislation, although some creeps through.

The perfect storm occurred in Arizona, and the effects are now spreading elsewhere.

What is this straw man called “critical thinking?”

It is nothing new; it was not invented by Mexican Americans to overthrow the government. It simply is a method of teaching to engage the learner and motivate her to learn and understand concepts. It is nothing new. Most civilizations engaged in it. American law schools which some say are the bastions of conservative thought use the Socratic Method, which is called the case book method. Cases are studied, analyzed and the student seeks to learn the law rather than to repeat it.

Throughout history critical thinking has been a threat to tyrants.

It was used extensively in the early Christian Church where communities studied the early writings of prophets. The Gnostics used this method extensively, and they were purged.

In recent times educational reformers like John Dewey have differentiated between training and education. The object of education was to engage the student in inquiry in a search for the truth. The criminalization of rational thought is of concern.

On July 4, 2012, The Chicago Tribune reported the experience of a University of Chicago undergraduate volunteer at a Southside school. He posed the question to the class: “Why do we need laws?”

Immediately, nearly all 12 hands shot up. “To make sure people don’t go around being mean,” one student said. Another said: “We need laws because this world is falling apart. It’s going crazy.”

Here the volunteer was acting as a coach, much like on a football team when players engage in the subversive process of critical thinking in critiquing game film.

This article is not into name calling. People are dumb, ignorant and mean, but they are also greedy as the movie “Wall Street” so graphically points out. Greedy people want power and they don’t strive for it solely because they are dumb, ignorant or mean. They do it because they are able to manipulate others to follow them against their own self-interests.

I am not saying that we are the same as Nazi Germany in 1933 or 1939; however, there are parallels to its development in 1921. We have to remember that Hitler came to power because of massive U.S. and German financial and industrial collaboration.

American automaker Henry Ford invested in Hitler’s rise as did the late US Senator Prescott Bush, Averill Harriman, the Dulles brothers, German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, and chemical manufacturer I.G. Farben, among a score of others. They helped finance Hitler. Why? Because they were dumb, ignorant and/or mean? No, because they profited.

The drive to make more profits makes critical thinking and the preservation of a historical record a threat.