Only days after the Arizona state legislature voted for punishing budget cuts in education, the now infamous witch hunt and audit of Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American/Ethnic Studies program is readying to commence. Price tag: An estimated $170,000.
In a blistering letter yesterday, Tucson attorney Richard Martinez warned the backpedaling TUSD superintendent John Pedicone that the audit "lacks legal basis," and "should immediately cease and desist." Representing the Mexican American Studies teachers and the Save Ethnic Studies organization in Tucson, Martinez called the investigation a "violation of federal mandates set forth in the Family, Education and Privacy Rights Act of 1974," among other abuses, and called on Pedicone to "confirm without delay that TUSD's cooperation will cease immediately or at a minimum comport with all applicable legal mandates."
Only two months ago, the newly hired Pedicone had referred to Arizona's notorious HB211 law as "unconstitutional." If found in violation of the law, which bans any studies that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals," TUSD could lose an estimated $36 million in funding.
The Mexican American/Ethic Studies ban, like the audit, of course, has nothing to do with kids learning how to overthrow the government -- especially in a state where a radical anti-federal authority legislature has recently introduced bills for nullification of federal laws.
Take state Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal, who is now marshaling the Mexican Studies/Ethnic Studies witch hunt. Born in Indiana, Huppenthal attended a private Catholic school in Tucson. In his campaign last fall, Huppenthal ran hair-raising ads that he was "one of us," and would "stop la raza." (For some rather embarrassing backstory, check out this video interview with Huppenthal and a high school student, and an interview over the history of "la raza" and Thomas Jefferson with an activist.) In an official statement in January, Huppenthal called the Mexican American/Raza Studies program "an unbalanced, politicized and historically inaccurate view of American History being taught."
Makes you wonder if certain lawmakers in Arizona get their way, will Mexican American students and teachers in Tucson's Mexican American/La Raza Program have to hang a scarlet "R" around their necks in a contemporary version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic (The Scarlet Letter)?
In one disturbing episode of this Arizona soap opera -- a real telenovela -- Huppenthal hired and quickly lost an auditor who had been banned from New Jersey schools over theft.
La raza? As in Raza Studies, of course.
La "raza" is a 20th-century Spanish reference to "the people." A reference, we should add, no different for Arizonans than the word "O'odham," or "the people," for southern Arizona's Tohono and Akimel O'odham Nations that have inhabited the region for a few thousand years.
You sorta learn these things growing up in Arizona -- which, perhaps, is why Canadian-immigrant Tom Horne, the state's Attorney General and driving force behind the Mexican American/Ethic Studies ban, is at a disadvantage and could probably benefit from a course in La Raza Studies.
For example, Horne, whose Jewish family fled Poland for Canada before World War II, might appreciate that Arizona Mexican-American soldier Silvestre Herrera was a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his heroic role fighting Nazis on the European battlefields -- and is part of la raza.
Or that American Legion Post 41 in Phoenix, not far from where Horne recently referred to concerned students invoking their First Amendment rights to protest the Ethnic Studies ban as "thuggish," is home to so many other World War II heroes, who returned to Arizona to fight for civil rights for Mexican-Americans as part of la raza.
Either way, as the audit of TUSD's Mexican American Studies program stumbles on, the out-of-town auditors and Horne and Huppenthal might want to attend the premiere showing of the new film on the Mexican-American Studies program in Tucson on Thursday. Here's the trailer for Precious Knowledge:
http://www.asianweek.com/2008/02/25/ghost-dance-prophecy-fulfilled/
http://cacreview.blogspot.com/2006/06/reclamation-of-indigenous-continent.html
THEN the white American settlers and the US Army invaded the area in the 19th century, throwing Native and Mexican people off of their lands.
Pretty absurd for white people to demand Native and Mexican people assimilate to THEM, the last ones to arrive.
U.S. Gov't did invade Mexico over a land dispute ~ U.S. Troops invaded all the way south into Mexico City via the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.
U.S. Gov't gave back the invaded land to Mexico & left.
Mexcio sold what is now New Mexico & Arizona to the U.S. Gov't for $15 million USD in 1848
Mexico sold what is now the southern parts of New Mexico & Arizona to the U.S. Gov't for $10 million USD in 1853
This same land the Apache Indians assert that Mexico stole from them ~ then sold the U.S. Gov't for 100% profit.
How better to assimilate students who may feel as though they are (unassimilated) "others" than to teach the process by which that assimilation has taken place?
Our nation has endured and prospered exactly because our assimilation has been a shared experience. Every group who has come to our shores (starting with the Asians who followed game across Beringia eons ago) has formed a vital part of our assimilated culture.
The real tragedy is the idea that it is now somehow "static" and that any learning that may call one or another aspect of it to the fore is somehow "subversive".
--Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): Determined that people of African descent--including those brought to the U.S. and held as slaves, as well as their descendents, whether they were free or not--could never be citizens of the U.S.
-- Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): Established the "separate but equal" interpretation of the Constitution that backed up Jim Crow racial segregation.
-- The Mexican Repatriation (1929-39): A forced migration between 1929 and 1939, when as many as 1 million people of Mexican descent were forced or pressured to leave the U.S. Carried out by Immigration and Naturalization Service authorities, there were no mechanisms for due process. Many of those deported were American citiens.
-- Executive Order 9066 (1942): An order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt that paved the way for internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent (American citizens as well as Japanese nationals) were interned during the war
http://inventors.about.com/od/famousinventors/tp/mexican.htm
http://www.hispaniccontributions.org/
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/List-of-Mexicans
This is why tech companies have to be allocated foreign visas for workers they hire and cannot hire US workers because they are not qualified.
Who cares about nationality of origin? The Germans, Italians, Irish, Japanese of the 19th and 20th centuries were all successfully integrated and do not look to know who "their" inventors were.....
Plus, every Congressional candidate should be required to pass the high school civics and constitution tests, and do a couple of essays on constitutional questions. (Maybe every candidate for any sort of public office.)
One of the problems we have now is that the US educations system has completely dumbed down teaching US Consitution and Civics resulting in a population that does not know its right or how the Gov works.
In the past, students could not graduate high school with out passing marks in US Consitution & Civics. It is time to bring that requirement back.
Unfortunately, we have not yet arrived at that place and it is made evident every time an elementary student learns about the "discovery" of the already populated America by Christopher Columbus. To ban curriculum that may "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people" sounds like we are committing ourselves to the same old style of indoctrination that we have been doing in this country since we were taking Native American children from their parents at 6 years old in order to train them to look at themselves through the eyes of the dominant culture. And THAT is what really promotes resentment of a particular race or class of people, not rejecting Eurocentrism. Tom Horne has no interest in ending Ethnocentrism in education, he just prefers Eurocentrism.
Fanned.
In an increasingly diverse US of A what we need to do is draw upon our cultural resources and make natural allowance for the permeation of non-Eurocentric perspectives to flavor the melting pot as the population 'browns' demographically.
This entails a painful choices for many of our European American brethren:
Whether to abandon the cherished but culturally insensitive and inaccurate notions of the 'conquering of the West' and that the words; 'that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness' have truly been complied with. This would free the mind of the mental slavery that is racism, sexism and homophobia and make for the truly equitable nation we strive to live in....
Or, to hold on in psychotic denial of the obvious...like a dinosaur watching the cataclysmic meteor approach....