Nogales border wall (Jonathan Mcintosh via flickr/creative commons)

Fighting against state power can seem like a herculean task to many activists, but in places like Tucson, Arizona, community groups see no choice but to keep fighting an uphill battle.  In this essay, part of our Saving Ethnic Studies series, leading ethnic studies scholar Rodolfo Acuña uses Camus’s essay on Sisyphus as a window into the fundamental crisis of faith that many activists encounter: halfway up the hill, we have to question how far we’re willing to push for incremental change, and whether we should just give up on the system and let it all come tumbling down. Acuña observes, “some of us cannot leave the rock behind and getting to the top of the hill without the rock has no meaning.” With the courts, the school system, and the political establishment stacked against them, those who dare challenge the status quo gain strength from embracing the full weight of their struggle.

When asked what I have learned from writing about Arizona and what is going to happen in the future, I feel like the legendary king of Corinth immortalized by Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” You remember the guy who was condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill. Every time he felt that he was making progress, the giant rock rolled back to where he started.

The moral of the story, according to Camus, is the absurdity of thinking we can learn the meaning of life. This absurdity compels us to turn to religion for answers — religious faith supposedly tells us the meaning of life without us having to find the answer for ourselves. It gives us faith that we can roll the rock up the hill even though it keeps rolling back.

For over forty-three years I have been pushing a rock called Chicana/o Studies, obsessed with the notion that we as a community can push the rock to the top of the hill. Chicana/o Studies would give a greater number of us access to knowledge that would free and enable us to solve the contradictions of American society.

Instead of reaching the top, the rock has become heavier and it has slipped back to where we started in 1969. Still we believe that we can reach the top of the hill despite the size of the rock. Truth be told, it would be easier to leave the rock behind and “make it in my own.”

But, some of us cannot leave the rock behind and getting to the top of the hill without the rock has no meaning. How long can you live solely on memories of those you left behind?

Is the obsession of reaching the top collectively an absurdity? Will those of us who are pushing the rock suffer the fate of Sisyphus – reducing our efforts to the absurd? Isn’t having faith in Chicana/o Studies’ ability to push the rock to the top in fact having faith in the system?

It is difficult to accept that there is nothing more to life than the absurd. At some point, Sisyphus has to accept the absurdity of his faith. In this case not so much the absurdity of faith in Chicana/o Studies, education or the community but in the system’s ability to allow everyone to find the meaning of life because it is the absurdity that keeps faith in the system alive.

The failure to make progress in pushing the rock to the top has nothing to do with Chicana/o Studies, Mexican Americans or our failure to push the rock up the hill. It is possible to make it to the top alone but impossible to make it as a community.

Ironically, the rock ruts a path that makes it easier for a few to reach the top; unjustly those who have abandoned the rock benefit from the sacrifices of those pushing the rock. For them, it matters little if they make it to the top of the hill without the rock and less that their desertion potentially permits the rock to crash down into the gully.

From my point of view, what gives life meaning is the struggle to make it up the hill collectively. This is how all progress has been made. As long as there has been humanity, people have struggled for the truth. The answer to the meaning in life is hope for a better and a just world. Without struggle life has no meaning.

You may ask what is so hard about pushing the rock to the top. It would not be if everyone pushed the rock until the end. But it is easier said than done. Society or should I say those who control the system protect themselves by exerting social control through popular culture, mass media, ideological divisions, religion, and fear. Education becomes part of this “invisible hand” that makes absurdity seem rational.

This brings us to Sisyphus’ dilemma in Arizona. Many understand the absurdity of believing that the system will protect the rights of Mexican Americans within the state. But they also believe in the Constitution and in the myth of “equal protection.”

The system, however, is not constructed to protect the rights of the poor but the privilege of those who benefit from it. Today more than ever Supreme Court decisions such as “Citizens United” give the rich uncontrolled access to power – making the rock even heavier.

In Arizona, the rock is heavier because it is a state without laws and bought public officials. The absurdity of the struggle struck me as I learned more about the interests behind the anti-immigrant hysteria and why it is important to the Kochs, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), the prison industry, the gun lobby and other special interests to erase the memory of Mexican Americans left behind.

The few who have fought back are paying the price. The teachers of the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American Studies program have been fire, not because they were not doing a good job teaching students, but because they were too effective.

Making the rock even heavier — a million dollar civil suit has been filed by the Tea Party with the support of Arizona Attorney General Tom Horn for defamation against TUSD Mexican American Studies Sean Arce and José González.

Meanwhile, Arizona lawmakers are attempting to nullify the U.S. Constitution. This is so even though Arizona receives back $1.30 for every dollar it sends to Washington –contrast this to California that gets back 79 cents.

The rock gets even heavier when the weight of the Democratic Party is added. The so-called Party is too timid to fight back and the Blue Dog Democrats cringe in fear of the Tea Party, the Minutemen and their corporate “sponsors.”

For the past forty years, Arizona has defied a federal court order to desegregate the TUSD and it has avoided compliance. Worse of all “the system” has bought off many of those who had pushed the rock in previous struggles. Tired of struggling they abandoned the village.

In spite of the absurdity of his belief that he can push the rock to the top of the hill, Sisyphus is not absurd. He realizes that if he lets go of the rock it could roll back and crush him or even worse tumble down and wipe out the village.

Sisyphus has no other choice but to struggle. Abandoning others pushing the rock up the hill would be abandoning his memories, abandoning his values. These are choices we all have to make.

I was once told that I could make it by changing my last name. I was light enough that I could pass. My first thought was, what about my sister? My cousin? They had the nopal plastered on their faces. Besides, I loved who I was, and that meant pushing the rock up the mountain.

As Tucson Unified School District students returned to the classroom yesterday, the towering role of one education innovator is being championed by a broad spectrum of local students, parents, teachers, community members and national scholars.

Over the past decade, Sean Arce, the esteemed director and co-founder of the district’s Mexican American Studies program has rescued the floundering district’s reputation from an embarrassing desegregation court order and No Child Left Behind mandates to close the high school achievement gap, created and instituted a nationally acclaimed curriculum with a host of other scholars that has reversed troubling drop-out rates among Latino students, and overseen one of the most successful academic programs in the state.

Despite the extraordinary stress and uncertainty over Arizona’s controversial ban on Ethnic Studies, which Arce and his fellow Mexican American Studies teachers have challenged in a landmark case in federal court as a violation of constitutional rights, the famously calm program director remains an inspiring figure for educators across the country.

Even now, suddenly stripped of his supervisory duties in a unilateral and political decision by an assistant superintendent for the first time since the Mexican American Studies program was created in the late 1990s, Arce’s national role as a cultural broker, education pioneer, scholar and respected mediator has taught his district a critical lesson on the frontlines of Arizona’s Ethnic Studies crisis: Once the dust settles in the bewildering witch hunt by transient Tea Party state officials and school administrators, Arce’s documented success and legacy will remain as enduring as his family’s Tucson-founding roots.

“Mr. Arce has been in the business of saving lives for many years, whether he realizes it or not,” said Jesus “Tito” Romero, a 2007 alumni of the Mexican American Studies program. “It wasn’t until I had Sean Arce as a history teacher that I discovered what it meant to be as a student, and I soon realized that Mr. Arce had not only saved my life, but had changed and touched so many others.”

In the tradition of Esteban Ochoa, the first Mexican American mayor of Tucson, who defied the Arizona territorial legislature in founding and funding the first public school in Tucson in the 1870s, Arce has drawn on his family’s legacy and history in drawing national attention to Tucson’s celebrated Mexican American Studies program. While he was raised in Oakland, both of Arce’s parents and extended families grew up in historic Tucson barrios; his father helped a community endeavor that sent local music legend Lalo Guerrero, “the father of Chicano music,” off to fame in California; his beloved mother served as a translator and mentor. Returning to Tucson to study at the University of Arizona, where he also played football, Arce soon replanted himself in the Tucson school system as a popular mentor and curriculum specialist. After a brief stint at the United Farm Workers, Arce helped to co-found Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican American Studies (MAS) program.

“Mr. Arce has an exceptionally gifted intellect and is a highly competent administrator,” noted Dr. Devon G. Peña, Past Chair of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies. “Under his leadership, MAS-TUSD has become the nation’s most innovative and successful academic and instructional program in Ethnic Studies at the secondary school level.”

Over the last several years, Arce and a cross section of educators and scholars have designed scores of culturally relevant and rigorous curricula that serve as the foundation for today’s Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies programs. Over 60 percent of TUSD’s students share a Mexican American heritage. According to a recent audit commissioned by Arizona’s state superintendent of public instruction, the MAS program was not only in full compliance with Arizona laws, but students in the MAS high school program “graduate in the very least at a rate of 5 percent more than their counterparts in 2005, and at the most, a rate of 11 percent more in 2010.”

“Anyone who has visited classrooms run by the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson would know that the goal is not to teach hate or sow division,” said Dr. Pedro Noguera, Executive Director for the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University. “Under the leadership of Sean Arce, the program has paved the way in helping students and teachers make connections between the school curriculum and the student’s history and culture. These efforts have produced heightened student engagement and deepened their motivation to learn. Those who are serious about finding ways to help schools reach all students should support such efforts and oppose the petty and punitive actions of Arizona’s Attorney General.”

Such success has not gone unnoticed by scholars and educators across the country, especially as the Ethnic Studies program has come under assault by Tea Party activists and extremist state officials, including Attorney General Tom Horne, State Superintendent John Huppenthal and disgraced Tea Party icon and state senate president Russell Pearce.

Dr. Sonia W. Soltero, in the College of Education at DePaul University, noted:

The political move by the state of Arizona to make the teaching of a social studies curriculum illegal is both draconian and anti-democratic. A curriculum that offers the often ignored histories, experiences, and contributions of the largest ethnic group in the U.S., and presents different perspectives in literature, expands the knowledge and understanding of both Mexican-American and non-Latinos students. Without any empirical evidence, detractors claim that the Ethnic Studies Program promotes antagonistic relations between Mexican-American youth and mainstream society. By contrast, advocates of the program can point to empirically-based record of increased academic outcomes and graduation rates for students who participate in the program.In the face of the current teacher-bashing and anti-school climate, the actions taken by Sean Arce and the other 10 Tucson educators, show extraordinary courage and conviction. Defending the academic freedom and the rights of minority students to learn different perspectives of their own histories as well as legally challenging an entire state requires an enormous amount of energy, time, resources, and money. While the battle to reinstate the Ethnic Studies program is underway, Sean Arce and the other plaintiffs continue to teach their students, administer school programs, attend to their family responsibilities, and more. Add to this the real potential for retaliation and harassment toward these teachers and school administrators. Their efforts to stand up to the powerful conservative Arizona political machine and its large anti-immigrant constituents are indeed brave.

Dr. David Stovall, at the University of Chicago, added:

Sean’s work is emblematic of a collective struggle to ensure the rights of students throughout TUSD to ask critical questions of themselves and society while making informed decisions based on such inquiry. By providing a model for young people to interrogate the disparities familiar to their conditions, they are simultaneously creating pathways to guarantee quality education for current and future students in the district. For these reasons (and countless others), their program should serve as a national model for Ethnic Studies initiatives in K-12 education.

“Mr. Arce greeted me like a neighborhood friend, and on the first day he immediately made the class room space something familiar and comfortable,” 2008 MAS alumni Jacob Robles recalled. “It was easy to get us engaged. He made things funny, interesting, but also very serious. I had never had a teacher quite like this, and he had all of the goofballs in the class quiet and listening. I was interested right away and knew I was in the right place. I am forever grateful for having Sean Arce as a teacher for that semester, and enabling my whole life to change from teaching us about one word.”

Last spring, Arce attended the standing-room-only premiere of the film documentary Precious Knowledge, which chronicles the inspiring role of Mexican American Studies in educating, transforming and empowering students in Tucson. Arce’s father also attended the screening at the Fox Theatre in downtown Tucson, which had been segregated during his youth. The irony wasn’t lost on Tucson’s national education hero. As he watched the documentary on the role of transformative education alongside his father, who had been forced like all Mexican Americans, African Americans and Native Americans to view film screenings from the segregated balcony seats as a student, the historic role of Arce’s work had come full cycle.

Just one more enduring lesson of hope to teach Tucson’s incoming students.