The surge of neo-racism in Arizona, especially racism directed at
people of Mexican descent, has received sporadic media coverage over the
past year. But for the most part news about the economy and
presidential politics has pushed off the front page Arizona’s attack
against its working class of color and their children. In other words,
the slow motion creation of a new Jim Crow regime for Mexican Americans
in Arizona is not “trending.”
But what is taking place in southern Arizona deserves our attention
as the most fanatical episode in the war against public education.
Specifically, the question being posed is whether or not young people
from working class communities and communities of color ought to be
educated and if they are what are they entitled to learn?
Last month, the U.S. Supreme court agreed to hear Arizona’s appeal of a 9th
Circuit decision that declared the draconian anti-immigrant SB 1070 in
violation of federal law and therefore unconstitutional. In the
meantime, those who promoted 1070 steadily go about their business
dismantling the highly successful Mexican American Studies program in
the Tucson school district.
At first glance, the ban against “ethnic studies” would seem to be a
prohibition against an entire academic discipline. In reality, it is a
narrowly targeted attack on Mexican American or Chicano studies. As
former University of Arizona dean Sal Baldenegro reports, the ban leaves
other “ethnic studies” programs in place.
Accompanying the elimination of Mexican American studies is a list of prohibited books. Shakespeare’s The Tempest leaps off the list as the most recognizable title. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience
and well-known histories by Howard Zinn, Ron Takaki, and Rudy Acuña
join the castoffs. According to the list, one-act plays by the Teatro
campesino, short stories by Sandra Cisneros, essays by James Baldwin,
and a speech by Cesar Chavez will be added to the bonfire (or at least
sentenced to perpetual confinement in a local book depository).
The list of banned books invokes more ironies than I am able to unpack here. That a collection of short stories (Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek)
whose main characters are young Latina women negotiating gender and
ethnic roles should be on a list of banned readings seems silly. Silly
unless one realizes that what frightens the right-wing Arizona
politicians has less to do with the content of the books and more to do
with the way they might be juxtaposed and interpreted by teachers who
seek to empower their students.
Joining Shakespeare on the banned list is former UC Berkeley professor Ron Takaki. In his history of the United States, A Different Mirror, Takaki takes the image of Caliban from The Tempest
and uses it to explain how Native Americans, African slaves, and almost
every single immigrant group that has come to these shores—Irish,
Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and so on—have been cast as the
monstrous and dark outsider and fed through the grinder of white
supremacy and economic exploitation. Perhaps the Arizona Inquisitors
(as Rudy Acuña calls them) are smarter than we thought.
But there is one more stunning paradox. Although these books are
banned for courses taught under the umbrella of Mexican American
studies, many of the same books are allowed in other classes at schools
such as Tucson’s University High where students are placed on a college
track and exposed to a variety of uncensored curricular materials.
Could it be that the attack on Mexican American Studies in Arizona is
less about “ethnic studies” and more about denying the right to
education to the coming Latino majority (and to the Black community that
the neoliberal consensus considers equally disposable)?
Across the Arizona border in California, we are witnessing a related
transformation that is different in its details, subtler, and less
openly racist. There are no Sugiyamas, Hornes, or Huppenthals, the
henchmen of the Arizona Tribunal. But throughout the University of
California and Cal State systems invisible technocrats are slowly
destroying the public university and converting it into a corporate
bastion where students from California are displaced by foreign students
(who pay more), where students are “taught” in classes of 900 people,
and where faculty are forced to become “entrepreneurs”–a fancy word for
academic panhandlers.
At UC San Diego (UCSD), campus leaders recently published their three
top priority areas for the future–all of them had to do with creating
products for the market. The word “education” was not mentioned once.
Academic areas that emphasize history and critical thinking are either
shrinking or becoming a parody of themselves. The push for on-line
education is strong–no need to interact with real students. We simply
sell them virtual courses and have underpaid graduate students grade the
work. Administrators brag that UCSD is no longer a California
university; it’s an international university—this in a state that will
be majority Latino by the year 2040.
As costs go up (more than a 300% increase at the UC system over the
last decade), working class and youth of color will slowly be denied
access. The few that make it in will have to take on serious debt to
finish. The future? – Education for the already privileged and for a
few tokens. Education as preparation for the job market. Education as
the site of corporate-driven research. Education to train elites from
around the world. No more critique of the status quo. Minimal
engagement with local populations. A ban on critical pedagogy in the
classroom. No interest in teaching strategies that empower youth,
especially those who do not already arrive with an abundance of social
and economic capital.
Back in Arizona, Yolanda Sotelo, now in her thirtieth year of
teaching in Tucson schools, was informed last week that monitors would
visit her classroom to make sure banned books were not being used.
Teachers who assigned reading from prohibited titles would be
reprimanded. Monitors would also evaluate all posters in the
classroom. In other words, no critical thinking, no critical history,
and no critical pedagogy for the new Calibans who must take their
designated places in the market economy and forget their past.
JORGE MARISCAL has taught at both public and private universities for thirty years. His latest book is “Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons From the Chicano Movement ” (University of New Mexico Press). His website is http://jorgemariscal.blogspot.com/
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