What Arizona’s 2010 racial studies ban could mean for fighting over critical race theory

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Despite having a few pockets of wealth, the Tucson Unified School District is a largely impoverished area that serves a majority of the Hispanic population. White students make up only about 20 percent of the district, and the vast majority of students are eligible for free and discounted lunches. TUSD students lag behind their peers across the state on standardized tests, and students of color lag further behind their white peers.

Romero and other founders of Mexican American Studies hoped that by linking history to current events and racial identity, the program would inspire Latino students in particular to envision a better future for themselves, their communities, and the country. The classes, taught by a small group of teachers scattered across the district, counted for the required graduation credits, though they weren’t mandatory—students were free to take standard American history or literature classes instead. In 2010, before Prohibition began, the program included approximately 2,000 students annually and was present at five high schools, as well as some middle and elementary schools.

Maria Federico Brammer, who began teaching on the program in 2006, says the classes spoke to their students in a way that sparked their intellectual curiosity and motivated them to imagine more for themselves. “As a middle school teacher, I could see it. I knew this was how we should teach our students.” I saw that these students were more academically engaged, and the students felt for the first time that they could be scholars in some way and that this school did not It was a strange place for them, but somewhere where they could have a future.”

Numerous surveys and independent audits backed this up, and found that students enrolled in the program experienced improved scores in reading, writing, and even math. They were also less likely to drop out, and more likely to feel engaged in school.

But critics, including Patton, the Republican lawmaker who picked up Dolores Huerta’s comments, clearly described the show as a cult of personality about Romero and other early leaders with a “pseudo-spiritual” vibe. Teachers who opposed the program reported harassment from Mexican American Studies teachers and students. Many opponents of the program have been blacklisted and have long suspected that their opposition is to blame.

Protesters are escorted out of a May 2011 school board meeting in Tucson (top), while district director John Pedecon addresses attendees (bottom). | Dean Knuth/Arizona Daily Star

“It was really weird. There was so much about self-confidence and connecting with my people — sort of a liberation theology,” says Patton. They knew about Aztlan. …it was quite a wackadoodle. (Aztlán is the name of the legendary homeland of the Aztec people, as well as a term used by Chicano activists to refer to the area captured in the Mexican-American War.)

Doug McKechearn, a conservative editorial columnist for the Arizona Republic at the time, found the show an endless source of commentary. “Until these ideologues got their claws in, these kids had a good chance at an education,” MacKiachern said in an interview. “I try to get away from these terms, but you can’t: they were turning them into Marxist foot soldiers.”

After years of attacking the program, Republican lawmakers finally put a bill to ban lessons that teach “racial resentment” and support “overthrowing the government” on the governor’s desk in 2010. Brewer signed the legislation — along with Arizona’s tough immigration legislation, SB 1070 — the same year. .

When the hammer finally fell, Federico Brummer joined other teachers in going from class to class to collect the books they used in the curriculum. Some of the students cried, she says, as she packed copies of Elizabeth Martinez’s 500 Years of Chicano History with Pictures, a zote suit by Luis Valdez, and occupied America by Rodolfo Acuna. The students held a 24-hour vigil.

Under threat from state legislators and politicians in Phoenix to cancel state funding in the millions for violating the ban, the Tucson School Board dissolved the program in 2011. That was when the battle reached its climax, a fierce confrontation not unlike school board fights. Today – though, it was the students, not the parents, who led the protest.

On one April day of that year, a group of more than a hundred students and supporters gathered for a school board meeting at the district office. Nine of them stormed the stage and wrestled with security before chaining themselves to board chairmen. “Our education is under attack,” they chanted. “What do we do? Drive!”

The meeting was closed, temporarily delaying the inevitable dissolution of the program. The case generated national news, deepening the division between the two sides and increasing tension in society.

Critics such as MacEachern argue to this day that students would not have protested without orders from their teachers. “Who bought them the chains and locks?” Asked. But the teachers were proud of the students’ show, and said they didn’t plan on it – that the ban was as much an attack on the students as it was on the program.

“The best part is that they were able to keep this secret even from us,” Romero says. “The honest truth about this is, when I stood up and saw the students rushing in, they were afraid of me too.”

It all happened at a difficult time for Latinos in Arizona. The immigration and education bill came on the heels of voter overwhelming support for a proposal to bar undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition for local universities and community colleges. That was the same era when Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was racially labeling Latinos in traffic stops and conducting workplace raids in search of illegal immigrants. (Arpaio was later found guilty of contempt of criminal court for defying an order to stop racial profiling, a crime for which Trump pardoned.)

As stressful as those years were, they were in some way satisfying to the leaders of the Mexican American Studies Program. The students were living through the same struggles their icons faced in the Chicano rights movement decades earlier—the same kinds of struggles they read about. They were fighting for better education the same way Dolores Huerta fought for better working conditions. They were making their own history.

“I have seen our students organize and grow and feel proud not only of themselves, but their families and our community proud of the work they have been doing to save our program,” says Federico Brummer.

In fact, the ban was not the end of Mexican American studies in Tucson. In 2012, a federal court appointed a “special professor” to oversee negotiations in the district’s decades-old desegregation case — an academic named Willis D. Hawley, who saw the program’s benefit for Latino students. Hawley ordered the district to reinstate Mexican American studies while finding a way to comply with a 2010 state law. So, the program’s teachers and administrators began rebuilding. They have abandoned the name Mexican American Studies in favor of “culturally responsive” classes and curricula. But the books used by the program were reintegrated, and most of the teachers themselves remained involved.

However, veterans of the Mexican American Studies Program say it hasn’t really been the same after the state’s ban. Federico Brammer was required to undergo a “retraining” to weed out some of the methods used in Mexican American studies, she says. During the restart of the program, Arizona Department of Education officials, led by John Hopenthal—one of the main opponents of the program who became the state superintendent of public education, the state’s highest education authority, immediately after the passage of Prohibition—sent monitors into classrooms to hold them. Eye on teachers and even read their lesson plans.

John Hopenthal, Arizona’s highest education authority, declared at a 2011 press conference that the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson was in violation of a state law passed the previous year. | Ross D. Franklin / AP Photo

Today TUSD’s culturally responsive curriculum program is larger than Mexican-American Studies were: it now has more than 200 instructors in history, literature, and social studies classes for nearly 6,000 students. It’s in every high school and middle school in the area, with plans to expand into elementary schools. Federico Brammer, who is now director of Mexican American Student Services at TUSD, says that without the core group dedicated to teachers, classes are not good. The surge in test scores experienced by teachers at the height of the program has also faded away.

“We have a problem with quantity versus quality,” Federico Brammer says. “We have ‘volunteer’ teachers,” this language arts course will teach from a Mexican American point of view. “This is completely different.”

What portends Tucson’s embrace of race studies for the rest of the country while debating whether schools should—or even do—teach critical race theory? Today’s political context varies, as is the curricula under discussion, but there are some lessons from how the fighting erupted in Arizona.

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