The Fight for Hispanic Culture in Schooling

Earlier this month, the Tucson governing Board of Trustees voted to end its nationally acclaimed ethnic studies and Mexican-American studies program in its public schools, an action that amounts to an egregious display of book-banning and cultural suppression. The termination of the Tucson ethnic studies program, implemented as a part of the disturbing Arizona House Bill 2281, effectively bans Hispanic students, who represent 56 percent of the Tucson school district (as per the New York Times), from engaging with their own cultural history. In keeping with the ethnic studies ban, the Tucson Unified School District also created a list of related books to be banned from the district and cleared from classrooms.

The Tucson school district is not only engaging in censorship. The ethnic studies ban is also white supremacy. Simply, it prefaces the values of the dominant white, English-speaking culture over all others. It also speaks to larger racism against Latino/as in American society, in which those of Hispanic decent are dehumanized as “illegal aliens,” “border rats,” “anchor babies,” and a multitude of ethnic slurs I won’t repeat here.

Additionally, the ban underscores how schooling is used to marginalize Spanish-speakers and prepare them for second-class citizenship. Though Arizona’s actions represent the most obvious example of a state-mandated censorship of Hispanic culture, the ethnic studies ban is a factor of a nationwide censorship of such cultural history. These implications are relevant to schools here in Florida, where nearly 20 percent of the population speaks Spanish as a first language.

A closer look at the Arizona ethnic studies ban demonstrates these larger issues of the marginalization of Hispanic and other minority populations in the U.S.

Arizona House Bill 2281 follows a logic that equates ethnic studies with racism. As the bill reads, courses that “promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, and advocate ethnic solidarity instead of treatment of pupils as individuals” are now prohibited. However, what the bill truly amounts to is a whitewashing of a history of oppression leveled by the United States and other Western nations against ethnic groups such as Hispanics, Native Americans, and groups of color.

Tucson’s list of banned books confirms this. For instance, the the newly-banned textbook Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, edited by Bruce Bigelow, attempts to tell the history of the European “discovery” of America from the perspective of groups that were victims of such conquest. In essence, the Tucson school district has deemed the ethnic-cleansing of Native Americans as a result of European and American expansion unimportant or irrelevant, and thus voided the education of its history.

Another banned book, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is one of the most widely-influential works of educational theory. Freire’s ideas such as “problem-posing education”—the position that classroom knowledge should be structured in terms of problems for students to solve, rather than unchallenged truth for students to consume—has had an effect that reaches well-beyond radical educational circles. The critical education that Freire advocated stands in direct opposition to draconian policies like the ethnic studies ban.

Additionally, every textbook on Mexican-American history, such as “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos”  by Radolfo Acuña, was removed, regardless of scope. Remember the pretext of these removals under Arizona H.B. 2281: presumably the teaching of Mexican-American history “promotes ethnic solidarity” and implies a form of racism. In reality, the removal of Mexican-American history sends a different message: those in the non-dominant culture must assimilate into the dominant culture. The native tongue and culture of Latino/as is violently disaffirmed.

To combat this assault on student rights, bilingual education—defined by Lilia Bartolomé and Pepi Leistyna as “grade appropriate, native language instruction in the content areas while English proficiency is achieved”—should be put back on the table. For native Spanish speakers, English-only education creates an environment in which Spanish-speakers are set up to fall behind in academic areas while learning English.

These students are even likely to fall behind in their native language, since education in the language also abruptly stops. Bilingual education allows the acquisition of English to coexist with an equal access to academic content that native-English speakers receive. Politically, we should at least uphold the precedent that the United States should have no official language. However, I would also go a step further and suggest that Americans consider the benefits of an official multilingualism, which protects the equal access to education of minority language speakers.

Nationwide, we should stand in solidarity with the disenfranchised students of Arizona, and demand that their history, too, be deemed worthwhile.

Mikey Angelo Rumore can be reached at michaelangelorumore@gmail.com.