As the second week of testimony is poised to start in the Arizona Supreme Court trial to overturn Arizona’s ban of Mexican American Studies, I have to reflect on that first week just to wrap my head around the oppression I saw firsthand.
To set up the time frame, the first week of the trial ran from Monday, June 26 to Friday, June 30, 2017. The second week runs from Monday, July 17 - Friday, July 21, and it turns out a 3rd week might be required.
We hit the road the week before the start of the trial, launching the 2017 Librotraficante Caravan from Casa Ramirez Folk Art Gallery on Wednesday, June 20 to drive the 1,100 miles from Houston to Tucson. Along the way, we visited the Under Ground Libraries we formed during the 2012 Librotraficante Caravan to restock them with copies the books banned in Arizona, with stops in San Antonio and El Paso in Texas, then Las Cruces and Albuquerque in New Mexico, and then Tucson.
Those stops empowered and inspired us because each site was thriving. I will write about them at length later, but for now I just want to mention what it meant to see each Librotraficante Under Ground Library becoming a part of the powerful community center housing them, cultivating a love for the books by and about our culture that have been vilified in Arizona.
It was powerful to visit Richard Moore and Sofia Martinez at Los Jardines Institute in ABQ because not only are they a site for one our Under Ground Libraries, but they are also editors of one of the banned books “500 Years of Chicano History” by Elizabeth Martinez. They have a mural of the underground library along the part of the fence that circles the large plot of land that includes different buildings, each catering to a different aspect of community empowerment. We convened with them one Sunday, as high school students joined mentors to work the community garden, and we talked about the banned books, culture, and so many other topics. It was beautiful.
It was an edifying moment. And I was going to need it.
A few days later, I would be sitting in a hot, court room, having to listen to former Arizona Education Chief John Huppenthal vilify the book, those people, students, our community.
It was like entering a time a time machine and going back to the 1930’s or 1920’s.
No recording devices are allowed in the court room, so we were literally witnessed to history, as we sat, and wrote down the contempt for our community that he harbored and acted on.
He likened the advent of our community during the civil rights movements to the rise of the Klu Klux Klan.
He repeated his twisted notions that the original Mexican American Studies instructors were secretly teaching methods to sabotage society.
He insisted that he had no hidden motives for disregarding a six-figure report that he spent tax-payers’ money on after it drew the conclusion that “Mexican American Studies did not promote the overthrow of the government. To the contrary it created a positive learning environment.”
I had to sit and listen to him speak ill of the teachers who I’ve had the honor of meeting, the books I’ve had the pleasure of reading, and the authors who we had just convened with it New Mexico.
Huppenthal vilified “500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures” and other texts based on phrases taken out of context and passages that did not even appear in the books.
The only more oppressive than the Arizona heat is Arizona hate.
However, I must admit, as much as it hurt and offended me to listen to all this discrimination, I will not suffer the way generations of Mexican Americans had to suffer this discrimination.
I am bolstered by the resilience of our community exemplified by such places as Los Jardines. And, I am not in the same situation as my late parents who had to tolerate such hate. I am part of the generation that can do something about it.
As the second week of the court case begins, it is powerful to see that our community has the talent and power to defy this oppressive law which would have decimated our community just a generation or two ago. Instead, we have gifted individuals from the students in the class and on the streets protesting, to the lawyers organizing the legal team, to the writers creating the books, the teachers creating the curriculum, the scholars conducting the research to prove the curriculum works, to community members supporting them by being there to witness history. There’s also groups like the Xito Institute comprised of visionary, educators including some of the original MAS teachers, spreading the word on ways cultivate education in our community.
The 2017 Librotraficante Caravan rolls into the South West Workers Union Under Ground Library in San Antonio, Texas on their way to Tucson, Az with a new shipment of contraband prose.
Yes, it was mind-blowing to hear Arizona lawyers grill one of the original MAS instructors Curtis Acosta about a poem he wrote, but it is also empowering to know that our voices will never be stifled ever again.
If you can, support our families in Tucson, standing up for freedom of speech. If you can get there, get there. If you have relatives in AZ or nearby, let them know. If you can’t go, spread the word, organize affinity events, boldly display the books banned in AZ. You can see the list by visiting www.Librotraficante.com and clicking on “banned.”
Perhaps Democracy needs to be rebooted every 40 or 50 years. This time it is on our shoulders and during our watch, and we will come through.
Long live Mexican American Studies.