Warning signs on the TUSD dais, April 3rd, 2012.

Mark Stegeman must be a minuteman now.

That’s how long tonight’s TUSD board meeting lasted; faster than Mark Stegeman running to his car on April 26th and leaving his date behind for fear of UNIDOS.

The meeting was supposed to start at 8pm, but didn’t start until 8:50. The only job that Hicks has tonight is to say the Pledge of Allegiance, as it says right there on the agenda, and he failed to do so.

Why does Michael Hicks hate America so much? Why does he hate the Pledge of Allegiance? Is Hicks a communist now? Oops, I was using the Horne-Hicks horrible logic against Hicks instead of Hispanics there for a second…

Mark Stegeman called the meeting to order, asked Pedicone if he had anything he wanted the board to vote on, Pedicone said no, and then Stegeman said meeting adjourned.

What this means, I’m inferring, is that there were not 3 votes for the proposals, which we won’t know until the next meeting but they are rumored to have included the creation of a multicultural curriculum with a director/manager/whatever selected.

The only board member to stick around after the meeting, Adelita Grijlava, said she is not allowed to share what they argued about in the back board room, but she did say that’s because they cannot discuss personnel issues (except to the Arizona Daily Star editorial board to bash Latinos like they did last year).

Next week, however, there will be a personnel issue discussed, and that will be out in the PUBLIC at the person’s request. That person is the MAS director Sean Arce who just learned today that he will no longer be at TUSD after 16 years of employment there. He received his notice of non-renewal which means the last remaining person in the MAS program will be gone.

MAS will be a thing of the past, part of the Mexican American History that is banned in TUSD.

Well, this is partly true, because this is up for discussion next Tuesday, and there will be a call to the audience, and there will be lots of people there to defend all that remains of MAS.

The showdown begins. The Special Master could have prevented all of this if he had some testicular fortitude, but instead the community must stand up since he lacks the courage to.

NOW is the only time that matters, Dr. Hawley. Our community has been traumatized for too long, segregated for too long, and we need justice now. The nation is watching TUSD, and we will make history.

TUSD was supposed to have a hearing today on the future of the MAS director Sean Arce.

The community demands that MAS co-founder and director Sean Arce keep his job, and the classes reinstated!

The district postponed the discussion of this matter until next Tuesday, April 10th.

However, early today Sean Arce, the sole remaining MAS domino that had yet to be toppled, received notice of non-renewal of his contract; ie. his job with TUSD is over at the end of this semester.

And that’s it folks.

No more MAS to see here!

Public discussion on this matter may be available at next Tuesday’s meeting since there will be a call to the audience, but keep in mind that this is John Pedicone’s decision, and all he needs is the vote to approve his decision to fire Sean Arce, who was just awarded the Myles Horton Award from the Zinn Education Project.

In case you do not know who Myles Horton is, it is his Highlander School that both Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks attended for training before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and it played an important role in the Civil Rights movement by training other leaders who have been vocal in support of the Mexican American Studies program in TUSD, such as Freedom Rider Bernard Lafayette.

Then again, in TUSD, at least one board member refers to her as “Rosa Clark,” so it is doubtful they realize how racist their actions are by getting rid of such an important educational leader in TUSD, Sean Arce.

The community will be at TUSD HQ to show their support for Sean Arce and MAS next Tuesday, 7pm at 1010 E. Tenth St.

Readers of this column know what scholars such as Tim Wise think about TUSD’s plan to kill MAS and replace it with “multicultural” classes.

It is wrong.

We then saw that the leaders behind this movement were people like John Huppenthal, John Pedicone, Mark Stegeman, Willis Hawley, ie. all white males who want to tell Latinos what they can and cannot learn in history and literature classes.

Pedicone already has a solution to this perception problem which is not fooling anyone: Hire Latinos to do your dirty work for you to fight off claims of clear racism.

This is something he learned from Tom Horne, who got Steve Montenegro to sponsor HB2281, the bill that he wrote as state superintendent.

John Pedicone has got his Latino buffer of Drs. Garcia, Morado, and Gastellum that are doing his dirty work.

Now he needs one more to completely kill MAS.

It is no secret that John Pedicone strongly dislikes the MAS director, Sean Arce, and the teachers. Sources from inside TUSD say that he tried to have them all fired last year after they called him out publicly for the May 3rd TUSD Tragedy.

Right now Sean Arce is the only remnant of the MAS program remaining. What will John Pedicone do so that his plan to topple the last MAS domino standing does not seem so overtly racist?

Create a multicultural program, without any input from the community, and get another vendido Latino Ph.D. to fill the seat. Then how could John Pedicone possibly be racist with all these Latinos around? Just like the mayor back east who will honor Latinos by eating tacos tonight, John Pedicone gives six-figure paychecks to gain the loyalty of vendidos, his Latino supporters.

Everyone has a price.

Who will be the next vendido to take Pedicone’s payout to work against the MAS program by moving towards a watered-down “multicultural” program?

We may find out at tonight’s TUSD board meeting.

The future of Sean Arce as MAS director is pretty much decided with the creation of a multicultural program; there is no future for MAS.

Once the multicultural program is created, MAS is pretty gone forever. All done without public input, without public knowledge, and it is our children that get affected with these racist laws and policies. Pedicone-Stegeman would no doubt have been the ones enforcing segregation in the 1950s South because they have to obey the racist state law.

Come to think of it, TUSD is under a desegregation order, so even the federal courts agree that racism is alive and well in TUSD. Sadly the federal court under Judge Bury is putting a lot of trust in those that have been perpetuating this racism to fix the very racism they are causing, such as banning the MAS program, along books written by Chicano and Native American authors.

TUSD superintendent John Pedicone must be super proud of the achievement by one of TUSD’s very own Sean Arce, co-founder and director of the nationally-renowned Mexican American Studies program.

Sean Arce, co-founder and director of the MAS program. Photo: Diana Uribe.

In honor of embattled Mexican American Studies director Sean Arce’s leadership role in “one of the most significant and successful public school initiatives on the teaching of history in the U.S.,” the Zinn Education Project announced its selection of Tucson’s beloved educator as the inaugural recipient of the 2012 Myles Horton Education Award for Teaching People’s History.

“Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program gets it absolutely right: Ground the curriculum in students’ lives, teach about what matters in the world, respect students as intellectuals, and help students imagine themselves as promoters of justice,” Zinn Education Project co-director Bill Bigelow said in the press release.

“I’m thrilled that the Zinn Education Project is able to honor the work of Sean Arce by recognizing him with the first Myles Horton Award for Teaching People’s History. Mr. Arce has begun work that we hope will be emulated by school districts throughout the United States.”

via National Zinn Education Award Given to Tucson’s Mexican American Studies Director Sean Arce

The Zinn Education Project Honors Sean Arce,
Co-Founder of One of the Most Significant and Successful
Public School Initiatives on the Teaching of History in the U.S.

Washington, D.C. (April 2, 2012) – The Zinn Education Project announced the recipient of the 2012 Myles Horton Education Award for Teaching People’s History. The award is named for Myles Horton, one of the most influential educators in the 20th century. Myles Horton was co-founder of Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, famous for its pivotal role in desegregation efforts, and a tireless advocate for education and civil rights. In 1961, segregationists attempted to close Highlander on trumped-up charges, to which Horton replied: “A school is an idea, and you can’t padlock an idea.”

This award honors those who promote democracy through education by ensuring that students have the knowledge and skills to be informed and active participants in their communities, country, and the world.

The 2012 Myles Horton Award for Teaching People’s History honoree is Sean Arce, co-founder and director of the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Ariz. The Zinn Education Project is delighted to honor Sean Arce for his instrumental role in nurturing one of the most significant and successful public school initiatives on the teaching of history in the United States.

“Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program gets it absolutely right: Ground the curriculum in students’ lives, teach about what matters in the world, respect students as intellectuals, and help students imagine themselves as promoters of justice,” explains Zinn Education Project co-director Bill Bigelow. “I’m thrilled that the Zinn Education Project is able to honor the work of Sean Arce by recognizing him with the first Myles Horton Award for Teaching People’s History. Mr. Arce has begun work that we hope will be emulated by school districts throughout the United States.”

The Zinn Education Project is joined by many educators, writers, and policy makers in our respect for the invaluable achievements of Sean Arce.

“At a time when students, particularly students of color, are accused of being apathetic about education, Sean Arce, a teacher and director of the Ethnic Studies program of the Tucson Unified School District, refutes this claim loudly and beautifully. Given the widespread mean-spirited and false attacks on the program from right-wing politicians who have resisted even visiting the program, Sean Arce stands out as an educator who speaks truth to power. He has inspired young people to love, to pursue their dreams, and to work for the betterment and uplift of their communities. As one young man in the film Precious Knowledge so beautifully said, ‘This space saved me.’ Sean Arce’s work is a welcome antidote to the cynicism about young people and a testament to the power of education.” —Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, Language, Literacy, and Culture, School of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Sean Arce has been a steadfast pillar of an outstanding program that was unlike what he had access to as a student. Under his co-leadership, more than 6,000 students, the majority being Latino, have been served by a program producing a consistent graduation rate of more than 90 percent, at a time and in a state in which Latino students complete school at a much lower rate. His work and accomplishments on behalf of social justice for Arizona’s youth merit the highest tribute.” —Christine Sleeter, President, National Association for Multicultural Education

“The Mexican American Studies program in TUSD has been a resounding academic success and affirmation of the diversity of our nation and our community. Sean Arce, as a teacher and as director of MAS, has been key to the success of the program and to the very necessary ongoing effort to save it. He has helped lead the program to a standard of excellence that we all continue to admire, and he will help lead it back to that same standard when these politically motivated attacks on students and education are just a bad memory.” —U.S. Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva  (AZ-07)

“As co-founder and director of the MAS program, Sean Arce developed a culturally relevant program that speaks to students who have felt unseen and marginalized and inspired and motivated them in their education, to know their own history, engage actively in their own learning, and connect in meaningful ways to the larger community. I applaud the Zinn Education Project for honoring this dedicated educator committed to promoting the study and understanding of issues of social justice.” —Myla Kabat-Zinn, daughter of Howard Zinn

“Over the past decade, Sean Arce, the esteemed director and co-founder of the district’s Mexican American Studies program, has created and instituted a nationally acclaimed curriculum with a host of other scholars that has reversed troubling dropout rates among Latino students, and overseen one of the most successful academic programs in the state. When the White House Hispanic Community Action Summit came to Tucson two weeks ago, in fact, Arce emerged as one of the most esteemed voices—as a respected parent, beloved educator, and trusted community member—at the gathering. In a family that traces its roots back to the city’s 18th-century founders, Arce’s longtime involvement and commitment have not gone unnoticed by thousands of students, parents, and community leaders.” —Jeff Biggers, author/journalist

“Sean Arce is a hero and a viral educator.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 finalist for the nonfiction Pulitzer Prize.

The Myles Horton Education Award will be presented at a special ceremony at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the 2012–13 school year. Busboys and Poets owner Andy Shallal explained, “In these days when so few education reform efforts demonstrate real impact, the Ethnic Studies program that was headed by Mr. Sean Arce hit a bull’s-eye with a 93 percent success rate. We are delighted to honor the founder and host the award ceremony.”

Background on Sean Arce

Sean Arce’s father was a glazier and ironworker whose union struggles gave Sean his first taste for social justice. His mother worked as a translator, giving voice to those unable to speak English as they navigated the U.S. legal and financial worlds. Both instilled in him a sense of service to others.

After playing football at San Jose State, Arce came to the University of Arizona. At his wife’s suggestion he began to take Mexican American studies classes, and his world changed. “It was highly engaging for me,” he says. “I began to make connections and to establish a greater understanding of my history. It really inspired me.”

Arce worked with others to create the Ethnic Studies program at the Tucson USD at the K-12 levels. “The actual planning took place with university students and community folks,” he notes. “We created this understanding of why it’s so important to have culturally and historically relevant education in Tucson. We understood the dropout rate, and the abysmal history of Mexican American education. I heard stories from my parents about their Americanization. Students’ names were Anglicized, they were hit for speaking Spanish, and there was a tracking system [a practice where children of color are put in classes that are not college bound, such as industrial arts], so they didn’t have the same educational opportunities I had.”

At its essence it was a grassroots effort accompanied by a solid academic plan. Arce and the framers of the program did the research as to how to make the material age appropriate and meaningful for the students. Since Arce started in 1999, the program grew from a single American History Mexican American Perspective class to some 44 high school-level classes throughout TUSD, and more at the elementary level.

The Mexican American Studies program, documented in the film Precious Knowledge, has been under attack from the state legislature and from the state superintendent of schools. Arce has played a central role in the public, legal, and political campaigns to reinstitute this invaluable program.

About the Zinn Education Project

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the use of Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States and other materials for teaching a people’s history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Founded with the support of Howard Zinn, the project is coordinated by two nonprofit organizations, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change. Close to 20,000 teachers from every state are registered for the project, 25,000 teachers visit the website each month, and more than 75,000 teachers receive the project news.

The project’s goal is to introduce students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of U.S. history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history. Students learn that history is made not by a few heroic individuals, but instead by people’s choices and actions, thereby also learning that their own choices and actions matter.

We believe that through taking a more engaging and more honest look at the past, we can help equip students with the analytical tools to make sense of—and improve—the world today.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was in Tucson about a month ago doing a segment on the MAS ban in TUSD.

That segment will be airing tonight, April 2nd.

I don’t know what it will look like, but they did interview some of our elected officials, including Michael Hicks if I remember correctly.

Judge A. Wallace Tashima is a Ninth Circuit judge who is also hearing the case on the constitutionality of HB2281, the so-called “Ethnic Studies ban” in Arizona.

He took over the case after the assassination of Federal Judge Roll during the Tucson Tragedy.

Today the Ninth Circuit decided to uphold California’s Affirmative Action ban, with Tashima dissenting:

A federal appeals court on Monday upheld California’s Proposition 209, a 16-year-old voter-approved ban on state-backed affirmative action programs.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the latest challenge to Proposition 209, which rested on the argument that enforcement of the ban has discriminated against minorities in university admissions across California. The three-judge panel concluded that it was bound by a 9th Circuit ruling in 1997 upholding the constitutionality of the affirmative action ban.

9th Circuit Judge A. Wallace Tashima disagreed in part with the ruling, saying he believes the court “wrongly decided” the issue in 1997.

via Mercury News.

Tashima also added:

“Although § 31 itself does not designate a specific state entity to commence proceedings, other provisions of the California Constitution expressly charge the governor and the attorney general with the duty and authority to enforce the law,” Tashima wrote. “Those state executive officers, not Yudof, are the state officials responsible for enforcement of § 31.”

BAMN [By Any Means Necessary] plans to seek an en banc hearing before the 9th Circuit, its attorneys with Detroit-based Scheff, Washington and Driver said.

“This is of critical importance to the country and to California,” said attorney George Washington, who argued the case with Driver in February. “The Ninth ought to be hearing it en banc. We’ve got to reverse Wilson. It’s a terrible decision and it has meant disaster for black and Latino students.”

There’s a whole list of items in the report. Below is an excerpt regarding the “recantation” by Escobar via Facebook.

Rep. Patterson appears to have tampered with the complainant in the pending criminal case against him, presumably in violation of a court order. In fact, Ms. Georgette Escobar’s peculiar Facebook recantation of her abuse allegations against Rep. Patterson was one subject of our truncated interview of Rep. Patterson on March 27, 2012. Rep. Patterson repeatedly refused to answer our questions about whether he wrote that recantation for Ms. Escobar without her permission or through his intimidation of Ms. Escobar.

via Patterson Ethics report via Tucson Weekly.

The Phoenix New Times coverage of highlights in the report is here.

So far TUSD has killed the MAS classes.

There are no more MAS teachers.

These former MAS teachers get the special treatment, with monitors in the classroom to make sure they do not read from the banned books.

They are also forbidden from talking about issues of “class, race, and oppression.”

All that remains is the MAS director and his administrative assistant.

TUSD will try to topple that last remaining domino next Tuesday.

Meeting starts Tuesday, April 10th at 7pm at 1010 E. Tenth St.

See you there.

The campaign ad for current state superintendent John Huppenthal proudly proclaims that “John Huppenthal led the charge to protect charter schools in Arizona.”

After his southern partner in crime John Pedicone came into office as head of TUSD, they have both been working to undermine public education, including mass firings of teachers and the selling off of schools.

This is going on in 2011-2012… today, but it is following the same racist playbook used by white supremacists 60 years ago after Brown v. Board (not to be confused with TUSD Board v Brown students). For what is worth, I was warning Tucsonans about Prop 402 while I was also warning them about Pedicone back in 2010.

The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

The desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five cases decided in Brown, segregationist whites sought to outwit integration by directing taxpayer funds to segregated private schools.

Image: Ernie Jones -- http://www.ernie-jones.com/ernie_website_009.htm

And regarding TUSD’s selling of schools to charter schools:

Two years before a federal court set a final desegregation deadline for fall 1959, local newspaper publisher J. Barrye Wall shared white county leaders’ strategy of resistance with Congressman Watkins Abbitt: “We are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated schools with tuition grants from [Virginia] and P.E. county as the basic financial program,” he wrote. “Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with ‘em.”

Though the county ultimately refused to sell the public school buildings, public education in Prince Edward County was nevertheless abandoned for five years (1959-1964), as taxpayer dollars were funneled to the segregated white academies, which were housed in privately owned facilities such as churches and the local Moose Lodge. Federal courts struck down this use of taxpayer funds after a year. Still, whites won and blacks lost. Because there were no local taxes assessed to operate public schools during those years, whites could invest in private schools for their children, while blacks in the county—unable and unwilling to finance their own private, segregated schools—were left to fend for themselves, with many black children shut out of school for multiple years.

Meanwhile, in less blatant attempts to avoid desegregation, states and localities also enacted “freedom of choice” plans that typically allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools, but forced black students to clear numerous administrative hurdles and, not infrequently, withstand harassment from teachers and students if they entered formerly all-white schools. When some segregationists began to acknowledge that separate black and white schools were no longer viable legally, they sought other means to eliminate “undesirables.”

Attorney David Mays, who advised high-ranking Virginia politicians on school strategy, reasoned, “Negroes could be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they could not maintain, by hazing if necessary, by economic pressures in some cases, etc. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches.”

via Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed | Education | AlterNet.

It was just recently, in 2011, that the Ninth Circuit slapped a desegregation order back onto Pedicone’s TUSD, something I’m sure he is proud of, having an officially segregated school district and all, despite constantly telling administrators that there is no racism problem in TUSD.

If only we had a local Tucson chapter of the YWCA or something to help us confront Pedicone’s racism instead of making excuses for all his failures…

After TUSD board member Michael Hicks called for a boycott of the “raciest” Three Sonorans, the first sponsors of the unpaid blogger have pulled their support.

30 wait, then add chicken.

Chucho’s Chicken and Oil Change was the first to pull out immediately. This saddens me,  and I will miss their dipstick special; oil change and bucket of fried chicken in under 10 minutes or you get a free pine air freshener. No 30 wait here!

I thought about exposing how they were making money being taking new tires off the vehicles and replacing them with old ones and selling the tires to the transportation department, but I’m working on getting Chucho back as a sponsor.

Chicos Tacos de Tucson, “home of the Chico’s Tacos” has also pulled their support. They saw me walking into Tacos Apson while visiting Pueblo. They said that just like the TUSD board, they do not like real Mexicans making Mexican history, literature, or food, and instead prefer a more multicultural taco, which they call a “crunchy wrap with a twist of Latin spice!”

White tortillas, of course, claiming there is nothing Mexican about corn.

Bob Marley’s Jamaica and Horchata pulled their support for a similar reason, stating how much less you can spend on being authentic by just watering down the material. By substituting natural fruit sweetness for lots of sugar, you make the federal subsidy that you receive for promoting healthier and all-natural, locally-grown and farmed food go a lot further by simply watering down and add more white stuff to sweeten the bitterness.

At least they gave plenty of ICE with their TEA.

And how can a column run without support from the auto sector? Nothing says our news is reliable like being beholden to the used car salesman industry!

I almost saved up enough to get a Virgen de Guadalupe on the hood of my Ford Pinto.

Lowriders by Limon – “Nada Down” has pulled their Pintos from being used by Three Sonorans on assignment.

It’s just as well, since I won’t be getting free oil changes anymore for them at Chucho’s Chicken.

Trocas by Tia Tequila will no longer be offering 50% off their Virgen de Guadalupe special to readers of the Three Sonorans.

Hick’s Panic Magazine will also stop publishing my column, also agreeing that I am the raciest vato they know.

At least I still have my financial support from the Lea’s Liquor and Vicente Fernandez Calling Cards franchise, but I think Guero’s will pull their support also.

Brujeria Blanca y Raspados is loyal, but will it be enough?

Don’s Diamonds and Gem Clique is rumored to be pulling out also.

Who knew being the raciest would lead to such as successful boycott? Now instead of getting paid nothing for writing the Three Sonorans, I’m getting paid even less!

I guess that makes me this April’s fool? That Hicks is one smart vato.

I have decided to start a new series that I will call “Racism in TUSD.”

I have enough to keep me going for months.

Today’s lesson demonstrates some recent racism that I have experienced personally. I call it being “extra-legal” which sometimes borders on being illegal.

For example, in the 2000 election, in northern Florida where there’s a lot of African-Americans, police would set up roadblocks on the way to the polling booth. There’s nothing illegal about roadblocks, but many African-Americans, disgusted with the way the police continue to treat them in an “extra-legal” way while not doing the same to others, many would just turn around, and the intended voter intimation was successful.

They have been through this before. Remember poll taxes?

How mad do people get at traffic enforcement via cameras? Illegal is illegal, que no? So why are patriotic Americans so against the enforcement of the law when it applies to them?

Extra-legal is hated by patriotic Americans in the name of freedom and liberty, but it is something minorities have to endure all the time. Every time I cross the border, after the gringos in front of me get waved through, I get the first degree. Pull over to get the full vehicle search.

I am guilty until proven innocent. 4th Amendment is suspended for this American.

Now back to TUSD.

For the past 10 years, the Cesar Chavez march would start at Pueblo High School. Cesar Chavez is like the Latino MLK, and he’s from Arizona. His motto of “Si Se Puede” became the current president’s “Yes We Can!”

But now Cesar Chavez is banned from TUSD. According to vendido Abel Morado, once respected but after a pay increase has the following to say:

I informed Dr. Romero of two areas of concern that I had as Assistant Superintendent for High Schools. First, that the kick off of the Cesar Chavez march from Pueblo should not be a political forum. Second, that the petition drive where organizers would circulate petitions against Mr. Hicks, Governing Board member in TUSD should not occur on district property.

Abel Morado is the new superintendent of high schools, and there is no way Cesar Chavez can be honored because it might turn into a political forum. There are two MAJOR contradictions with this that make Abel Morado Tucson’s version of Steve Montenegro with his extra-legal nonsense.

First problem:

There is an inter-governmental agreement between the City of Tucson and TUSD to make the schools available as parks on the evenings and the weekends:

Under the plan, TUSD would continue to be responsible for maintenance and upgrade costs at all school playgrounds and fields throughout the school year. The city would then take over maintenance and equipment costs during summer months when school was not in session. In exchange, the schools would open gates or take down fences and make these spaces available to the public after school hours and on weekends.

So basically the fields at TUSD schools are to be open to the public on evenings and weekends. This extends the amount of park space available, making the grass and baseball fields, basketball courts, etc. available to all when not in use during school hours.

Therefore the Cesar Chavez march could have started at Pueblo High School, aka the Tucson park on Saturday morning, at least on the grass or football field. You can play frisbee or toss the football around, just don’t open your mouth and use your First Amendment rights?

Second problem:

The second problem is at the heart of racism in Arizona, and that is inconsistency.

In TUSD you have the 3S schools which are privileged: Sabino, Sahuaro, and Santa Rita, and then you have the rest (excluding University which has special treatment for mostly white students) which are neglected.

Here’s an example of this racist favoritism.

According to vendido Abel Morado, there is no way a political forum can take place at Pueblo High School. How dare the organizers even think of such an atrocity. This must be enforced!

Extra-legal nonsense to the rescue!

One can make the case that honoring Cesar Chavez is not a political forum, or that one cannot separate politics from what Cesar Chavez did, so it has to be mentioned, but that will fall on deaf ears.

Jon Justice.

Now look at mighty Abel Morado when it comes to a clear and obvious political forum; the Young Republicans host a debate at Sabino High School, with Panelists that include Jon Justice, all in the same month of March 2012.

Clearly a right-wing Republican political forum is ok because it was at Sabino HS, a mostly white school, right Dr. Morado?

Jon Justice as a panelist? NO PROBLEMO! No conflict in political forums on high schools to be found here boss!

Sabino High School is indeed a high school, and the superintendent of high schools, Abel Morado, says A-OK to a Republican political forum with Jon Justice.

But a memorial of Cesar Chavez at Pueblo HS, a 95% minority school? Hold on boss! We don’t have political forums on TUSD property!

Got racism?

An L-shaped mesa in the foreground (Train Rock) and a larger mesa in the background (Oljato Mesa) lie just to the west of Monument Valley. The top of Oljato Mesa is actually the site of a uranium mine. Oddly enough, these areas have deposits of uranium and in some cases Navajo residents have built homes or other structures using rocks with significant radioactivity.

For some Navajos, the uranium contamination is all of a piece with their fraught relationship with the federal government.

“They’re making excuses, and they’ve always made excuses,” Ms. Knorr said. “The government should have had a law in place that told these mining companies: you clean up your mess when you leave.”

via NY Times.

A Navajo friend was once telling me about Monument Valley, about those famous structures that you see in northern Arizona made famous by old western films.

Monument Valley... it's radioactive also.

Little did I know that those famous landmarks are radioactive, and some contain old uranium mines at the top of them. Some 8.7 million pounds of uranium oxide were taken from these sacred lands by Monument Valley.

Arizona is the land of everything.

We have deserts and we have snow. We have tall mountains and deep canyons. We have the newest urban areas and old Native American domains, from dug up villages that pre-date the birth of Jesus to the largest area of reservations in the country.

We have a large elder and retired population from out of state, immigrants if you will, and we have more than 50% of the babies born today being minority, and its no wonder the older people with the money don’t want to share it by paying for public education.

Arizona also has the largest nuclear power plant in the nation, one that you can see as you head west of Phoenix on I-10 towards LA. It is also the only one not near a source of water, but instead uses 20,000,000,000 gallons of sewage water a year for cooling.

The Navajo Nation, sacred land near the Grand Canyon and Four Corners area, is also home to lots of uranium and coal. This is were Arizona gets a lot of its energy from, and Tucson is not exempt, exploiting this finite resource in the land that extends from Northeastern Arizona and into New Mexico, home of the dirtiest coal plants in the nation.

We have already mentioned how uranium mines can be found in Monument Valley. A friend once told me about driving through the reservation and a truck carrying uranium drove by carrying a load that was uncovered, and on these old bumpy roads sometimes rocks would fly out.

Navajo and their sheep.

You can find uranium on the side of the road on the Navajo rez. Sometimes these rocks end up in small depressions that form puddles when it rains, and sometimes the sheep that are in the area drink this water. You can tell if they have because its nose turns bright pink before it falls off.

This radioactivity in Arizona is the focus of a NY Times Sunday article:

CAMERON, Ariz. — In the summer of 2010, a Navajo cattle rancher named Larry Gordy stumbled upon an abandoned uranium mine in the middle of his grazing land and figured he had better call in the feds. Engineers from the Environmental Protection Agency arrived a few months later, Geiger counters in hand, and found radioactivity levels that buried the needles on their equipment.

No warning signs at this mine. Image: Joshua Lott for NY Times

The abandoned mine here, about 60 miles east of the Grand Canyon, joins the list of hundreds of such sites identified across the 27,000 square miles of Navajo territory in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico that are the legacy of shoddy mining practices and federal neglect. From the 1940s through the 1980s, the mines supplied critical materials to the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

For years, unsuspecting Navajos inhaled radioactive dust and drank contaminated well water. Many of them became sick with cancer and other diseases.

The radioactivity at the former mine is said to measure one million counts per minute, translating to a human dose that scientists say can lead directly to malignant tumors and other serious health damage, according to Lee Greer, a biologist at La Sierra University in Riverside, Calif. Two days of exposure at the Cameron site would expose a person to more external radiation than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers safe for an entire year.

Sometimes this radioactive uranium not only contaminates the water, but the soil as well. Then when a traditional Navajo home is made out of the earth, the kids and family living inside are exposed to radioactive uranium the entire time without even knowing it.

But hey, America is addicted to that rock. We need our energy. We need that power.

This is the pattern with mines. They set up, contaminate, then leave town. It costs too much to be safe. It would cost too many jobs if they have to be clean. So they are dirty, and once they leave, the federal government is left to clean up to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. This is another example of privatizing the profit, socializing the costs that pervades throughout American society.

America’s exploitation of Native American continues to this day. We feel bad about the Trail of Tears but continue to make them endure the new Trail of Toxic Tears today, just to power our iPads and air-conditioners while ignoring the vast solar energy available in the Sonoran Desert.

Departments of Justice and Education Reach Settlement with Arizona Department of Education to Ensure That Potential ELL Students Are Properly Identified

WASHINGTON – The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights today entered into a settlement agreement with the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) to ensure that Arizona’s English Language Learner (ELL) students receive the educational services that they need. The agreement requires ADE to revoke its one-question Home Language Survey (HLS), which failed to identify and serve all eligible ELL students, and reinstate its three-question HLS so that all potential ELLs are identified for assessment and service.

“Proper identification of ELLs is the essential first step in ensuring that students receive the services they need to help them overcome language barriers and participate equally in the instructional process,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. “We commend Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction and ADE for voluntarily agreeing to reinstate the three-question HLS and take remedial steps to identify ELL students who were missed by the one-question process.”

“This agreement highlights our commitment to ensuring that all ELL students receive the services they need to learn,” said Russlynn Ali, Assistant Secretary for the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education. “All students are entitled to equal opportunities, and this resolution will help to make sure Arizona students receive the education they deserve.”

With the cooperation of ADE and Arizona school districts, the Departments of Justice and Education conducted an extensive investigation of the state’s policies and practices for identifying ELL students. Prior to July 1, 2009, ADE used a three-question Home Language Survey (HLS) that asked:

“What is the primary language used in the home regardless of the language spoken by the student?”

“What is the language most often spoken by the student?” and

“What is the language that the student first acquired?”

Since July 1, 2009, ADE has allowed only a one-question HLS that asks, “What is the primary language of the student?” If a student answered English to this one question, ADE prohibited school districts from assessing the student’s English language proficiency unless and until a teacher documented specific language problems on a form prescribed by ADE, and met with the parents in person to obtain their permission to assess the student.

In the 2009-10 school year, ADE reported almost 100,000 ELL students, which reflected a decline of approximately 33,000 students from the prior school year. School districts attributed at least part of this decrease to the one-question HLS. The federal government’s investigation determined that the one-question HLS failed to identify and serve eligible ELL students in violation of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The investigation further revealed that the teacher referral process for the one-question HLS unnecessarily delayed the identification of ELL students, and therefore delayed ELL services, in violation of both laws.

The settlement agreement will ensure that all ELL students who attend Arizona public schools will be identified and served in a timely manner. Under the agreement, ADE will revoke its one-question HLS and its accompanying burdensome teacher referral process and reinstate its three-question HLS and prior HLS policies and practice of giving teachers more flexibility in referring students to be evaluated for English proficiency. ADE has agreed that an answer other than English to any of the three questions on the HLS will trigger timely assessment of the student’s English language proficiency. In order to capture potential ELLs who are now registering for the 2011-2012 school year, ADE will send a directive to each of its local educational agencies in two weeks informing them of the reinstated three-question HLS, and explaining how to identify potential ELL students among those students whose parents already completed the one-question HLS. ADE will also train the local education agencies regarding these changes and monitor them over the next school year to ensure that they are appropriately administering the three-question HLS. As a result of the settlement agreement, new students in Arizona schools who are ELL students will be timely identified, and students who were improperly identified as non-ELL students will be identified and offered ELL services.

The enforcement of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act and Title VI are top priorities of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Additional information about the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is available on its website at www.justice.gov/crt . Enforcement of Title VI is also a top priority of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Additional information about the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is available on its website at www.ed.gov/ocr/ .

11-378  Civil Rights Division

via Departments of Justice and Education Reach Settlement with Arizona Department of Education to Ensure That Potential ELL Students Are Properly Identified.

Professor Debbie Reese decided to look at TUSD’s new language arts curriculum (in TUSD, “arts” means everyone uses the same color and brush to draw the same picture of reality) and she finds some contradictions and raises some interesting questions:

I wonder if TUSD administrators are aware that Appendix B has books on it by Latino/a authors? Several of them wrote books or stories that are on the list of over 50 books that can no longer be taught by teachers who taught courses in the Mexican American Studies department, and some of them were purchased by the MAS department and are in resource rooms in TUSD.

Here’s books from Appendix B:

K-1
Family Pictures by Carmen Lomas Garza
Tomas and the Library Lady by Pat Mora

Grades 2-3
Eating While Reading by Gary Soto

Grades 4-5
Words Free as Confetti by Pat Mora

Grades 6-8
“Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros

Grades 9-10
“I am Offering this Poem to You” by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Grade 11
“The Latin Dell: An Ars Poetica” by Judith Ortiz Cofer
“Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry” by Rudolfo Anaya

Curtis Acosta taught “Eleven” in his Social Justice/Latino Literature course. But, because he was a Mexican American Studies teacher, that course doesn’t exist anymore, and he’s not supposed to teach the way he used to. What will he do? What can he do?

via American Indians in Children’s Literature (AICL): TUSD Announces New English/Language Arts Curriculum.

The true story of wetbook smugglers bringing banned books into Tucson… they are known as Librotraficantes.

My son had the honor of receiving the first smuggled book, and now he’s hooked on the hard stuff, but he enjoys paperbacks as well.

World War II changed everything in this nation.

Mexican American soldiers fought heroically for the United States:

Proportionately, Mexican Americans surpass all other ethnic groups with respect to the number of Congressional Medals of Honor earned for valor in combat.

After WW II, these patriotic men and women encountered “No Mexicans Allowed” signs in public places. Robert Oppenheimer describes a typical incident of a Mexican American WW II veteran, in his medal-decorated uniform, who was refused service in a restaurant. “White” cemeteries refused to bury Mexican American veterans.

Things had to change.

After putting their life at risk for this country, fighting as true patriots, Mexican Americans who came home from the war only to encounter segregation and inequality began to work for a change.

The labor unions were a huge part of that shift in power for basic decency and equality.

The history of Mexican Americans in intimately connected with union history. Take recent Arizona history for example. The history has a lot to with mining, and it was unions that helped our community get better wages and safer working conditions. Chicano history is also a story of workers’ rights and labor union history.

I’m skipping a lot of the details here, but you can spend hours researching events such as the Bisbee deportation, the strikes in Clifton-Morenci, etc.

Arizona is also the birthplace of Cesar Chavez. He wasn’t just a Chicano; he was a labor union organizer and founded the United Farm Workers (UFW). Ironically, Arizona has no chapter of the UFW today, but UFW history is very closely related to Chicano history.

Cesar Chavez ranks up there with people like Gandhi and MLK.

Mark Stegeman doesn't care too much for Cesar Chavez marches.

TUSD board president Mark Stegeman seems to not care for him much.

In the video above, (former) MAS teacher Curtis Acosta describes a visit to his classroom by the UA Economist Mark Stegeman who votes against the TUSD labor unions so it is no wonder he has disdain for the founder of the UFW. In email exchanges with a board member, Stegeman is bothered by the mention of a Cesar Chavez march that weekend.

A year later, TUSD has banned the Cesar Chavez march from starting at Pueblo High School, a TUSD school, because people might speak about the MAS ban TUSD just enacted. First they oppress you, then forbid you to talk about that oppression, leading to more oppression.

How interesting that the person who criticizing the political bias in MAS does not see what his own job is everyday as an Economics professor; to promote his own biases on economic theories. To promote the same system that the US uses to destroy Latin American countries as the Chicago boys did in Chile, using Latinos as lab rats for their economics experiments.

No wonder the economist is banning Latinos from learning the truth about the past.

The Democratic National Committee released a new web video Friday mocking what they call the “bro-mance” between Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.).

The video is the latest effort looking to handcuff the likely Republican nominee to a budget proposal Democrats argue would devastate Medicare and Medicaid programs on which the nation’s poor and elderly rely.

via The Hill.

These last two years have been eye-opening in terms of politics and racism in this state.

Two years ago the Three Sonorans began writing. The topic I wrote most about at first was regarding Randy Parraz vs Rodney Glassman. Then in the fall I started writing about John Pedicone.

These are actually both related closely.

Rodney Glassman is a multi-millionaire who got mega-rich from his family’s agribusiness and dangerous pesticide corporation that uses tons of water in the Fresno, California area. Nowadays Glassman works for Waste Management and helps them steal jobs away from the union workers of the City of Tucson by stealing contracts from places around Tucson, where he used to be a city councilmember, and having Waste Management take them.

Far from being an environmentalist and about water conservation when your family business is draining the water and polluting it with Britz chemicals, he actually passed himself off as an environmentalist who literally wrote the book on water conservation; it was named “Jeremy Jackrabbit Harvests the Rain.”

It was also these Fresno farmers that Cesar Chavez protested against and when he fasted, it was against the pesticides that farmworkers were exposed to. The Fresno farmers were the people the UFW worked against.

Now they are BFF.

Did Raul Grijalva and company endorse the Latino labor union activist who worked with the UFW in the past, or did he endorse the Fresno Farmer for US Senate?

Now we come to TUSD.

I started warning everyone, even while there were 31 applicants, about who would win because the fix was in for him. John Pedicone. He was the Vice-President of SALC at the time. I wrote about his lack of support for bilingual education when he was superintendent of Flowing Wells, and I wrote many other things.

Doesn’t matter. Who voted for him?

Adelita Grijalva.

She even chose him over Auggie Romero, who was one of the applicants.

Let us not forget the effort at being proactive to stop this mess that was ignored.

At the same time, this political group refused to endorse or help one of the strongest advocates for MAS that I know, Miguel Ortega, for the TUSD school board. A no-name person with the last name of gold in Arizona named Hicks got into office.

Sure, no one deserves all the blame, but you either help or you hinder, and now we got Hicks and Horne’s plan being enforced by Pedicone.

All this time I kept criticizing the machine.

My apology to Grijalva and camp.

This whole time I thought you actually had power. There are many individuals who have been negatively affected by this power, so I thought it was real, but it was really just small-time and only works against your own.

I thought when this camp told Pedicone not to put Garcia in charge of MAS, Pedicone might listen.

I thought when this camp then called for Garcia’s resignation for bashing MEChA, they might listen.

But why should they, since there is no enforcement, while there is enforcement of the anti-Latino policies in TUSD?

I wondered why Elias’ aide joined SALC.

I wondered why Grijalva gave in on SALC’s Ciscomani.

I wondered a lot of things, then I realized that the power is not really that great, and can only really be used against our own community for political power.

But to get the white folks to listen, yeah right.

It is Grijalva that must listen to them, doing their bidding left and right on progressive issues, but ignoring what goes on in Tucson. Why can Grijalva visit other states and rally against their bad bills, but he cannot get other Congressmen to come to Tucson and rally for MAS?

And now we come to the Cesar Chavez march.

First of all, I don’t think Chavez would have been hugging Glassman instead of helping a labor activist get elected, but we will never know since he is no longer with us.

But now we have a chance to honor him, and we have recently, every year with a march from Pueblo High School. Pueblo is also Adelita Grijalva’s alma mater, and as a board member she can surely continue this traditional starting point for the Cesar Chavez march…

But then Grijalva voted for Pedicone.

And then MAS was banned.

And then the books were banned.

And then the MAS director and former MAS director get their positions taken away by Pedicone.

And now not even the Cesar Chavez march can begin on TUSD property.

And then I realized, the power was an illusion.

This whole time I was getting mad for them not using power that never even existed.

My bad.

So this Saturday we get to be filled with pride as Pedicone bans the Cesar Chavez march from Pueblo because we might talk about the truth of the oppression he has committed against our community this past year… and we shall comply.

The politicians will get up and speak, from Grijalva, to Elias, to Romero and Fimbres, and they will talk and talk with no power behind those words.

Sure, they support the cause, but remembering Chavez’s life is about memorial marches, not civil disobedience or fasting. That’s so yesteryear.

Now we just comply and issue strongly worded letters. We issue press releases.

But that is also becoming yesteryear.

The youth are not beholden to this nostalgia. There are new leaders being forged in Tucson today.

UNIDOS did not move aside when Pedicone told them to; instead they took over his seat and chained themselves to it. When Pedicone told 7 women to shut up on May 3rd they did not comply, they kept talking.

Instead of the politicos keeping the march start location at Pueblo, they just moved aside.

Speeches will be given, but not at TUSD.

MAS will be spoken about, but it will still be banned.

The book ban will be condemned, but the books will still be banned.

The march will continue, people will eat at the park, then go home. Then Sunday comes and life goes on.

Monday brings the Facebook pictures of people with fists in the air, but MAS will still be banned.

And Pedicone will still be in charge, and soon Sean and Auggie will be gone.

That will be condemned when that time comes, but working pro-active is not our style.

My only hope is the youth.

I apologize for setting my expectation too high when it comes to Raul Grijalva, Ruben Reyes, and the rest. It will never happen again, trust me.

This is just my opinion. In the meantime, it’s time to yell and march this weekend in a place where TUSD will never see us, on a side of town most people will ignore, and in a way that allows Pedicone and Stegeman to enjoy their Saturday Cesar Chavez-free. At least there are still schools that aren’t afraid of Cesar Chavez, such as Toltecalli.

By now most people have heard of Trayvon Martin, the black youth that was killed while armed with Skittles and Arizona Ice Tea.

Today’s Democracy Now! has the following story of an African-American Marine that was killed by police:

As the Trayvon Martin case draws national attention, we look at another fatal shooting of an African-American male that has received far less scrutiny. Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr., a 68-year-old African-American Marine veteran, was fatally shot in November by White Plains, NY, police who responded to a false alarm from his medical alert pendant. The officers broke down Chamberlain’s door, tasered him, and then shot him dead. Audio of the entire incident was recorded by the medical alert device in Chamberlain’s apartment.

Let’s not forget that the Tucson area has a history of wrongful death, sometimes at the hands of police also.

Many nationwide know of one innocent 9-year old that was killed at the Tucson Tragedy, but fewer know about the other 9-year old that was killed by white supremacists in Southern Arizona.

Brisenia Flores.

There is the death of a Latino Marine who served in Iraq, Jose Guerena, who was killed here in Tucson with his wife and baby in the next room. This murder was by law enforcement, so thus the people who killed the Marine will never be brought to justice.

The former leader of the Pima Republicans even lost his position for speaking out on this issue. A Marine was shot in his home so he spoke out. He forgot that Marine was Latino so TEApublicans don’t really care:

A call for Miller’s removal came after he angered party stalwarts by criticizing a May SWAT raid that resulted in the shooting death of a man law enforcement officers suspected of involvement in drug trafficking. After raising questions about the amount of police force used in serving the search warrant, Miller said he hoped the incident would foster a community discussion of “the policies that routinely lead to heavily armed and militarized local police invading private homes, and a renewed interest in the civil liberties codified in our Bill of Rights.”

Several elected officials and party leaders said his comments pitted the party against law enforcement at a time when city elections are looming and candidates are gearing up for bigger 2012 races.

Read more: http://azstarnet.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/county-gop-chairman-miller-is-ousted/article_31d1cc31-e507-5b74-a988-73a841b658dd.html#ixzz1qX67C7k5

There is also an attack on innocent teachers in Tucson, and this attack seems to be very rooted in racism.

The death of the teacher’s career.

Consider the story of Charles Collingwood, a true lover of mathematics and the ideal teacher. He taught AP Calculus at Rincon HS, and the graduate student you see working with him in the image below is now a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

Pedicone’s despicable treatment of Collingwood is pushing a minority calculus teacher out of Tucson schools.

And of course there are all the other teachers that are being attacked. Every teacher at Palo Verde HS also got fired.

Years of teaching experience irrelevant. TUSD could save money by getting rid of seniority and sometimes bringing in teachers fresh out of college. This is what happens when economists and businessmen run a school district, and then they wonder why they are getting a failing grade from the state.

The MAS teachers are no more, and now Pedicone has his sights set on the co-founder and director of MAS, Sean Arce.

Teachers with proven success records and who actually close the achievement gap for Latinos in a district that is 61% Latino must go. It’s the Pedicone way.

Other signs in Tucson would say "No Mexicans or Dogs Allowed"

Some might call this racism. Some might call it business as usual, but if you know a little bit of American history, you will know that business as usual means an institutional system of white supremacy is in place.

Slaves do not deserve freedom, blacks must sit at the back of the bus, no dogs or Mexicans allowed, and your perspective of American history and your authors are not allowed in the TUSD classroom.

This is why any penny that is spent on MAS is under examination, and older folks cry about their taxpayer dollars being spent on race, but then titles such as the following get minimal complaints, and in fact, it’s the Pedicone way!

TUSD spending $92K to attract Anglo kids

“These trends are part of the forces of history that cannot be stopped,” Chavez admonished his listeners. “No person and no organization can resist them for very long. They are inevitable. Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride.

You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. Our opponents must understand that it’s not just a union we have built. Unions, like other institutions, can come and go. But we’re more than an institution. For nearly 20 years, our union has been on the cutting edge of a people’s cause–and you cannot do away with an entire people; you cannot stamp out a people’s cause.”

via WordStrike | Silencing Chavez.

The Si Se Puede movement is strong in Arizona.

The words above are by one of Arizona’s favorite sons, Cesar Chavez, who was born in Arizona and died in Arizona.

He also made famous the “Si Se Puede” motto in Arizona which would later become one of the mottos in the 2008 presidential election, “Yes We Can.”

These words are truer than ever today for those who toil for education under the Arizona sun, as our community’s history and literature books get taken out of the classroom to demotivate the potential scholar and to lead them into life of hard labor; building our houses, cleaning our yards, and picking our food.

The essay above reminds us of the significance of Cesar Chavez as nationwide there will be marches in his honor, including here in Tucson.

While schools across the country celebrate United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez’s March 31st birthday this week, Tucson students reassigned from the recently outlawed Mexican American Studies program will be forced to deliberately ignore Arizona’s most famous native son.  Four years ago, presidential candidate Barack Obama joined a campaign to make Chavez’s birthday a national holiday.  Today in Chavez’s home state, as part of the Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) indiscriminate sweep of all textbooks, videos and Mexican American Studies curricula from the classrooms, Chavez’s powerful “Address to the Commonwealth Club of California” has been banished from any teacher-led discussions.

As Arizona state superintendent John Huppenthal now launches an extraordinary new attack on Mexican American Studies on the university level, Chavez’s prophetic speech in 1984 has never seemed more timely–and more dangerous to the extremist Tea Party elements behind Arizona’s witch hunt of Mexican American Studies and their Tucson enablers like TUSD superintendent John Pedicone.

The words above ring truer than the author could have imagined.

The Tucson Cesar Chavez march, last year and many years before that, started at Pueblo High School and concluded at Rudy Garcia Park across from the Rodeo Grounds on Irvington and 6th Ave.

Pueblo High School.

On the outside stage at Pueblo HS, community leaders would speak about the significance of Cesar Chavez, and why we honor him and need to remember his work beyond the march and throughout the year.

This is no longer the case.

You see, Pueblo High School is TUSD property, and despite it being over 95% minority, with more Native American students than Anglo students, it is still TUSD property, and guess who runs TUSD?

The enablers of the MAS ban in TUSD, the enablers of the banning of books from being used in the MAS classroom, the enablers of Arizona’s racist attack on Tucson Latinos… TUSD has now banned the Cesar Chavez march from beginning at Pueblo High School.

“For over a decade, The Cesar E. Chavez Holiday Coalition has collaborated with TUSD to celebrate the life and legacy of this civil rights icon by staging the march at Pueblo High School on Tucson’s south side,” according to the released statement. “The Mexican American Studies Community Advisory Board is appalled by the censorship TUSD has elected to impose on this traditional celebration. We sincerely hope that TUSD administration will take the time to reconsider the treatment of all its’ students and the community at large.”

Pueblo is a symbolic starting point, alma mater of Adelita Grijlava and other Tucson community leaders such as Isabel Garcia, and home of historic walkouts for justice in TUSD. Back when Raul Grijalva joined the school board, the only books Pueblo would get were the old, out-of-date and used ones from the north-side schools, given to them whenever the more “white” schools got new books. Now that Pueblo HS has books that students are actually motivated to read, they get put into boxes labeled “Banned books” by TUSD and taken out of the classroom while TUSD claims there are no banned books.

TUSD can also raid the desegregation funds to build a new million-dollar football field, but heaven-forbid the community remembers one of Arizona’s favorite sons outside a high school on a Saturday morning.

Remembering the Latino past is banned in Tucson, and Pedicone is not only enabling this, but enforcing it as well.

March 28 – A national debate over the killing of a black teenager in Florida spilled into the House of Representatives when Democratic lawmaker Bobby Rush put on a ”hoodie” – clothing that has become emblematic of those protesting police handling of the Trayvon Martin case. The lawmaker was escorted out for violating a rule that prohibits wearing hats on the House floor.

via Reuters.

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of FIVE banned books in TUSD.

Evil Companions literary award ceremony honoring 2012 winner Luis Urrea, CU Boulder Alumni and Member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame

The Evil Companions Literary Award is celebrating its 20th year, and perhaps this year’s winner is the most evil of them all – in a good way.

CU-Boulder alum and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, Luis Urrea is an award-winning author of 14 books. Born in Tijuana, Mexico, to a Mexican father and American mother, he uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph…

The article continues:

But, perhaps what makes Urrea our most evil companion is that five of his books have been recently banned from the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), along with all Mexican American Studies (MAS) materials. In fact, the MAS program has been indefinitely suspended all together.

“Ethnic Studies do not divide Americans–they unite,” Urrea states.

via Luis Urrea to receive literary award | Alumni Association.

To the TUSD defenders who say the books are not banned, one thing they cannot deny is that the Latino Literature was eliminated this semester, and MAS teachers were told that they could not discuss issues of “race, class, and oppression” in the classrooms, or use any books that dealt with these topics.

To really rub this oppression part in since MAS teachers cannot talk about it, SALC’s John Pedicone used his new asst. superintendent of high schools, Abel Morado, to deliver this ban on certain topics to MAS teacher Curtis Acosta.

Here’s your oppression, and you cannot talk about it, because that’s part of the racist oppression.

It is like evil-squared.

Just after starting the third Ph.D. Program in the nation for Mexican American Studies, now comes the continued attack on education from the state of Arizona.

An Arizona official who led the effort to suspend Mexican American studies from Tucson public schools is considering taking his fight to the state university system.

Arizona’s superintendent of schools, John Huppenthal, says Tucson’s suspended Mexican American studies curricula teaches students to resent Anglos, and that the university program that educated the public school teachers is to blame.

“I think that’s where this toxic thing starts from, the universities,” Arizona Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal said in an interview with Fox News Latino.

via Arizona Official Considers Targeting Mexican American Studies in University | Fox News Latino.

The article goes on to say:

Huppenthal is not satisfied with the suspension of the Tucson program. He views the University of Arizona as another source of what he believes are biased educators.

Feed the monster a little bit and they want more.

When the Europeans first came to this continent, they saw bits of gold and silver and wanted more. Now our mountains are being destroyed, cyanide leeching into the ground water, tailings clogging up the air that is breathed in by elders in places like Green Valley.

All just to get more of that rock; be it gold, copper, or coal.

John Huppenthal wants to end Ethnic Studies at universities also. He has vowed to "Stop La Raza."

Huppenthal is right about one thing, and it’s something that Stegeman reiterated last week at the UA.

Professors are HIGHLY biased.

For example, in Stegeman’s economics class, one of his lectures was titled why I love free trade. Keep in mind that these are economic THEORIES and yet he is pushing his biases and beliefs on the students.

Does he devote half of the class to promoting socialism or communism, giving equal time to all theories, or is he pushing a capitalistic agenda?

It matters if this is the line of attack you want to pursue, and the inconsistencies are glaring but sometimes that white privilege blinds professor’s own biased belief-pushing in their own classroom.

Critical thinkers on the troubled history of American economics are simply labeled Marxists and commies by the right as the 1% and the billionaire bankers continue to get socialist money known as bailouts from taxpayers.

San Antonio is one of the largest cities in the nation and it continues to put Tucson to shame.

First is the fact that its Latino mayor was able to turn off the dependence on coal for electricity generation for the seventh largest city in the nation; San Antonio is a million+ city that is about as big as Phoenix, AZ.

Surely if a city the size of Phoenix, AZ can turn off its dependence on primitive fossil fuels such as coal, then a smaller city such as Tucson also can, right?

The main difference is the future that the mayors see for their cities as Rothschild makes his priority appeasing the business community which will increase our coal usage, which is sad for a city in the Sonoran Desert like Tucson that is one of the sunniest cities in the nation and yet is dependent on the black stuff that darkens the sky rather than the bright light that fills our daytime skies with clean solar energy.

Tucson’s coal dependence also exploits the Navajo Nation as the new Trail of Toxic Tears marches on for our economic selfishness.

While Tucson bans the discussion of “race, class, and oppression” amongst the students in the former MAS classes, thus banning any book by Latino or Native American authors that deal with this topic from the reality of American history, and while TUSD has district monitors coming into the classroom to first put the books into boxes labeled banned books, then makes sure this censorship of ideas is enforced, cities such as San Antonio are embracing their culture rather than banning it:

Calling on San Antonio to “be bold and invest in the city’s future,” Mayor Julián Castro announced plans today to appoint renowned author Carmen Tafolla as the inaugural poet laureate for a major Texas city.

One of the most innovative poets and authors over the last 25 years, Tafolla’s genre-bending bilingual verse from San Antonio’s West Side barrio has given voice to several cherished volumes of poetry and stories, including the acclaimed “Curandera,” a collection of poetry that marked her as a “pioneer in Chicana literature.”

Tafolla’s appointment could not be more timely. Swept up in Tucson Unified School District’s unprecedented censorship and massive removal of Latino and Mexican American literature and texts from its classroom–as part of the outlawing of Mexican American Studies and literature curricula– Tafolla’s work has found a new generation of readers beyond Texas, the Southwest and across the nation. In a special 30th anniversary “Banned in Arizona!” edition, Wings Press just reissued “Curandera” to coincide with the legendary “librotraficante” book caravan last month, that brought thousands of books banished from former Mexican American Studies classrooms in Tucson to students across that troubled sister city in the Southwest.

If Carmen Tafolla’s name sounds familiar, that’s because she has been written about in the Three Sonorans column in the past. Below is an excerpt from that article.

Ethnic Studies and the Lockers of Our Minds

Carmen Tafolla, author of banned books in TUSD.

One of the repercussions of the suspension of Mexican American Studies program in Tucson is that the texts previously taught in these courses have been removed from the curriculum and the classroom.

One such text, by Austin College alumna Carmen Tafolla, is especially poignant in evoking the relationship between a curriculum which does not foster free speech and consideration of one’s heritage, and the dreams of many which are left behind.

In her poem “and when i dream dreams…” Tafolla begins by proclaiming:

when I dream dreams
I dream of YOU,
Rhodes Jr. School
and the lockers of our minds
that were always jammed stuck
or that always hung open
and would never close.

The poem then describes the disappointments, low expectations, and poor results of “the toughest Jr. High in town” and references classmates who ended up in Vietnam, prison, or pregnant and working at the café.

The poetic voice, in a defiant yet bitter tone, concludes thus:

I keep my honorary
junior school diploma
from you
right next to the B.A., M.A.,
etcetera to a Ph.D.
because it means
I graduated
from you
and when I dream dreams,
–how I wish my dreams
had graduated too.

How sadly ironic that in one of the most successful Latino education programs in the country (one with a 95% graduation rate), one which had transcended the isolation of curricula like that of Rhodes Jr. High, books like Carmen Tafolla’s Curandera have been closed and the prospect of minds “jammed stuck” or “always hung open” once again looms large.

TUSD has two leaders, Superintendent from SALC John Pedicone, and UA Economist and TUSD board president Mark Stegeman.

They are two smart people who have been fooled, willingly or unwillingly, into implementing Horne’s Hispanic Hating HB2281. Stegeman just last week said he opposes this bill, but I’m sure he would have also returned escaped slaves to their masters even though he opposed slavery because that was the law of the racist state.

As a gift from the alliteration gods, there have been 4 key players in this Hispanic-hating HB2281 plan, and each one had a name beginning with “H.” I call them the 4H club.

Horne was 2006-2010. He wrote HB2281.

Huppenthal was 2011. He used the bill to threaten TUSD with a budget cut if they continued Mexican American Studies classes.

Hicks was the beginning of 2012. He is the one that told KOLD news that he doesn’t respond well to threats (from Latinos), but when the threat is against 10% of the budget unless TUSD attacks Latino education, he was only too happy to do his part in the Hispanic hating.

Hawley is now and the future. He is the biggest disappointment because as the Special Master he is supposed to know better. But in the end he is playing along and using his power to make sure Tom Horne’s Hispanic Hating plan is in force right now.

In some ways that makes Hawley the worst of all.

The justification for all the elimination of MAS is because these white men know what is best for Latinos. They are going to create a multicultural classroom and that will solve everything.

So why couldn’t they do that first, and then let the students decide. Why has this class not been created in all these years of American history?

Stegeman is preparing to have community forums were other MAS-haters such as the Hunnicutts from TU4SD get to decide what the new classes look like. Yes, older white people are exactly the diversity we need to silence the Latino community and tell them what their history was.

What could go wrong?

Just like the barrio that was destroyed by the same people, white folks who know what’s best for Latinos, they created the TCC on sacred land and now some believe that the ancestors of Barrio Historico whose sacred ground lies underneath the concrete and asphalt have made the TCC cursed. It is certainly a financial failure, costing Tucsonans a fraction of a billion dollars in lost money.

But at least those Mexicans are gone!

TUSD may have a problem with an achievement gap for Latinos, and while they ignore programs that actually segregate students and are a living ELL, they focus on proven programs that work, such as MAS, and then eliminate them.

At least those Mexican American Studies classes are gone!

Anti-racism scholar Tim Wise was at the UA last week, and I asked him his thoughts on “multicultural” curriculum and how they have turned out nationwide in the past.

He said that they usually turn into a generic curriculum of “food, fabric, and festival.”

Mexicans like beans, wear sombreros, and drink cerveza on Cinco de Mayo. Nuff said. No other contributions to American history to see here folks, keep moving along in your books, the ones we haven’t banned.

Isn’t it sad that we trust Mexicans to make sure the food is authentic, that the mariachi band is not all white men so thus it is authentic, but then when it comes to their education we leave them out of the process. Mexican American classes were built by the Mexican American community, by professors, scholars, and community leaders. Compare this to the multicultural classes from the 4H club and you will see why there is no authenticity.

Will the 4H club put in their own chapter of Mexican American History, about how they acted against Latinos, or will that part be conveniently left out?

Tim Wise then delves deeper into the racist roots of this situation. The school system was not created to have minorities becoming smarter than whites. All these MAS graduates who are now in graduate schools must be embarrassing for Michael Hicks with his degree from the online Charter Oak university that offers some 90 credits just for life experience.

No wonder he wants MAS killed.

How are he and people like him going to compete with the academic warriors that MAS is producing?

Tim Wise gives a historical background and future directions in the video below. You can watch his entire speech regarding the topic of White Anxiety at the UA here.

A young boy is searched by security guards at the entrance of the Tucson Unified District headquarters, ahead of a school board meeting on March 13, 2012. (Photo: Roberto Cintli Rodriguez)

The censorship, banned curriculums and banned books in Arizona, are subject to much spin, which often lacks a grasp of the bigger and more ominous picture. These actions in Arizona are a stark premonition of what could happen elsewhere, but what’s important to remember is that they are not new. The suspension and dismantling of Arizona’s Mexican-American studies (MAS) program in Arizona is the most dramatic and recent incident in a process that was set in motion some 500 years ago.

On paper, HB 2281 – Arizona’s 2010 anti-ethnic studies house bill – criminalizes the teaching of ethnic studies, but the reality is that there has always been but one target: Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Raza Studies department. Under intense political pressure, it was renamed Mexican American studies or MAS-TUSD.[i] However, the name change did not spare the department, as the state schools’ then-Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, had already targeted the department for elimination.

In this highly successful department, Horne saw something un-American at its core, something evil and cancerous. MAS-TUSD’s indigenous, maiz-based curriculum, was something he saw as outside of Western civilization – something outside of Greco-Roman culture. He is unaware of the irony that maiz, or corn, is indigenous to this very continent, whereas things Greco-Roman are not. For Horne, what he deemed to be the “foreign” curriculum was something that had to be destroyed at all costs.

Among those who look on in horror at what is happening in Arizona, many are blinded to the fact that this has already occurred in every state of the union.[ii] Arizona was the last holdout. Thus, as people look on in horror, what they should be contemplating is not simply how to help save Arizona, but how to reverse the 500-year process of de-indigenization and dehumanization that continues unabated on this continent and in virtually every country in this hemisphere.

Asking what is at stake in Arizona is not only asking the wrong question, but it is asking it a few centuries too late. This, Horne understands. He refers to the process of eliminating Raza Studies as a civilizational war. And indeed, it is the very same one prosecuted by Bishop Diego de Landa in Mani, Yucatan, where he declared an auto-da-fé in 1562, setting in motion one of humanity’s greatest cultural tragedies: the destruction of Mayan books, known as amoxtlis. That three-day book burning is only one incident in a hundreds-of-years process that attempted to destroy the intellectual, mathematical, scientific, cultural and spiritual knowledge of this continent. (Fortunately, while thousands of Mayan, Nahua and Mixtec amoxtlis were destroyed, the knowledge itself was not; it was simply suppressed and survived via oral tradition).

In this civilizational war, one by one, peoples and communities – and their unique corpus of knowledge – are condemned as pagan, barbaric and demonic; a dehumanization that prepared the ground psychologically for the same peoples to be evangelized and colonized.

In the realm of civilizational war, that auto-da-fé was never actually called off or corrected. Instead, De Landa thereafter wrote a book (“Relación de las cosas de Yucatán”) about the Maya, which to this day, many Western scholars praise for its insights into Mayan civilization, conferring upon the destroyer of Mayan culture the title of foremost expert on the Maya.

Mind-boggling is perhaps the best adjective that fits here. Yet up until recently, this has been the norm throughout history: indigenous peoples are reduced to illiterate savages, to be civilized and studied, never to be treated as co-equals.

Fast forward 500 years and Horne, who today is the state’s attorney general, may soon be viewed as the state’s foremost champion of human rights. Horn ironically fancies himself an adherent of Martin Luther King Jr.[iii] His successor to the superintendent position, John Huppenthal, is less grandiose in his ideas and ambitions, but also fancies himself a multiculturalist (though he would never employ this term). They have both destroyed MAS-TUSD in order to “improve” it by giving all students greater exposure to the many cultures that make up Arizona and this nation.[iv]

Akin to Diego de Landa, they, apparently, are the experts with respect to what should be taught about Mexican Americans. Dr. John Pedicone, superintendent of TUSD, also ranks with these two other experts in determining what knowledge is valid and what it is that should be taught in Tucson schools. It is under his stewardship that MAS-TUSD has been dismantled.

But all of this is the smallest of pictures.

Critics of the program rightly point out that MAS-TUSD is the only department of its kind in the nation. But they are incorrect as to why. The reason is that the policy of “reducciones,” the colonial practice of attempting to literally wipe out all vestiges of indigenous knowledge, is nearly complete. It was not a 300-year colonial project, but an ongoing one, continued by successive governments, under different guises and different names, whether it has been called civilization, Westernization, modernization, evangelization, Hispanicization, Americanization or forced assimilation. In the United States, American Indians know all too well the variants in the process used to “reduce” them: the boarding school.

Why was MAS-TUSD unique? Because per Horne’s view, it had reversed history; it was in the process of reversing a historical process. In his view, MAS tapped into historical memory; it utilized culture to bring out the best in students. Horne believes that students should be treated as atomized individuals, not as members of distinct cultures, and he believes that the only valid culture they should be exposed to is that which is based on Western civilization. He cares little or nothing about their personal or academic success, their agency or empowerment – what is essential is their indoctrination.

This is why the whole nation has it upside down. This is why Arizona is not the future. It’s not that other states may enact future and similar bans. Through omission, those bans have long been in effect, in this country and on this continent. That is why MAS-TUSD was virtually the lone example, nationwide, of a district-wide indigenous and social-justice-based K-12 curriculum.

In no other district nationwide are the indigenous or maiz-based concepts of In Lak’ Ech (“You are my other me”) and Panche Be (“To Seek the root of the Truth”) taught.[v] In no other district nationwide is this curriculum at the center, as opposed to at the fringes or the margins. At MAS-TUSD, indigenous knowledge was in its proper place; at the center, and more importantly, at the root of the curriculum. In that sense, Horne has always been correct: maiz-based knowledge does not emanate from Greece or Rome. It is indigenous to this continent, including Arizona, purportedly the site of the oldest cornfield in the nation.[vi]

That this curriculum is unavailable in other districts nationwide means that this “reduccion,” in effect, has already also taken place nationwide. Many, many thousands of years of the history of this continent have been displaced, and, at best, marginalized or remanded to institutions of higher learning. Apparently, the history of this continent is out of bounds for K-12 students.

Every child should know the amazing history of this continent. But they don’t. Rare is the K-12 student who can name more than one or two cities that existed prior to the first European setting foot on Abya Yalla – on this continent – before it was renamed America.[vii] If they don’t know those names (there were thousands of cities), still less do they know the history of this continent.[viii] This erasure did not or has not taken place solely in Tucson, but virtually throughout the entire continent, and it has been normalized, with K-12 students having no knowledge of an entire continent (prior to the arrival of Europeans), its peoples, its civilizations, its knowledges and philosophies. That ignorance is the norm, rather than the exception.

This is why Raza Studies or Chicana/Chicano Studies have long been opposed – even and sometimes especially – at colleges and universities. [ix] From their inception, there has been a relentless cold war waged against them, often waged under the guise of budget cuts. This cold war has also been waged against American Indian Studies, Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, African American Studies and Asian-Pacific Islander Studies (erroneously categorized as ethnic studies).[x] Their existence has been tolerated, as is the case in Arizona, at the university level. But their existence in Tucson at the K-12 level, along with their great success as measured by student achievement, apparently assured its targeting and destruction. The department boasted an unheard-of near-100 percent graduation rate at a time when the drop-out rates for students of color range between 40 and 60 percent.

To be sure, MAS-TUSD should not be counted out just yet. But for those outside of Tucson, that is to miss the point. For the most part, the rest of the country and the rest of the continent has already been “reduced.” Most of the continent has either been Hispanicized or Anglicized.

Translated, what this means is that it is not ethnic studies in Tucson that needs to be saved, but rather, metaphorically, it is that “reduccion” or forced assimilation needs to be reversed in every community, in every school and in every nation on this continent. A further translation: decolonization is not a project of the past, but of the present.

Caravans should be going to Los Angeles, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Denver, Dallas and Houston, Kansas City and Chicago, Atlanta and New York, not to solely support Tucson, but to place humanity at the center of school curriculums and ensure that indigenous peoples and their/our history remain at the center on this content, along with the rest of humanity.

If people want to see what erasure or a disappeared curriculum looks like, they can look not to Tucson, but to every K-12 curriculum in the nation. This is not hyperbole. Akin to what the Zapatistas often told visitors as they streamed into Chiapas after their January 1, 1994, uprising: “If you want to assist us, go back home and fight for your own human rights.” In this case, people should examine the curriculum of their local schools and wage the battles there, ensuring a relevant and inclusive curriculum, one that stresses humanization or rehumanization.

It is easy to descend upon Tucson to fight against banned books. And perhaps that’s why people will come and why they will always be welcome. But the real challenge should be for people to fight for an indigenous-centered social-justice-based curriculum in everyone’s local school. We do, after all, live in the Western Hemisphere – not Western Europe. This battle has to be waged at local school board meetings and at state legislatures. To not do so is to accept that reduccion, or that auto-da-fé that has yet to be extinguished.

To read other articles by writers in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

* Five of Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez’s books and one video are on the banned curriculum list. The video is: “Amoxtli San Ce Tojuan.” The books are: “Justice: A Question of Race,”

“Gonzales/Rodriguez: Uncut and Uncensored,” “The X in La Raza,” “Codex Tamuanchan: On Becoming Human,” and “Cantos Al Sexto Sol.” This last book is a collection of more than 100 Raza/Indigenous writers, writing on the topic of origins and migrations. These bans highlight that virtually the entire cultural production of the past generation of Raza/Indigenous writers/artists has been criminalized.

Rodriguez teaches at the University of Arizona and can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com.

[i]Under similar pressure, the name of the University of Arizona’s Mexican American and Raza Studies Department was changed to the Department of Mexican American Studies. The right wing assumes La Raza means “The Race,” but the concept is actually traced to Mexican scholar Jose Vasconcelos, who coined the term at the beginning of the 20th century. The concept alludes to the mixture of all the races of the world.

[ii] This alludes to the teaching of the so-called master narrative of history, traditionally taught in US schools as the story of this nation and continent, beginning with the pilgrims or with Christopher Columbus, an event that set in motion the ideas of providence and manifest destiny – the belief that God had bestowed upon Europeans/European Americans, the right to conquer all of the Americas.

[iii] Bernard Lafayette Jr., a colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. and a Freedom Rider, along with virtually the entire civil rights community nationwide, begs to differ with Horne, consistently denouncing his use of the civil rights icon to destroy MAS.

[iv] Huppenthal doesn’t appear to grasp big-picture ideas. He is more plain-spoken in his biases. For instance, when he campaigned for Arizona superintendent, he campaigned on the promise to Stop La Raza (the department, presumably, not the people).

[v] Much of what is known about In Lak’ Ech and Panche Be comes to us in the United States via Domingo Martinez Paredes, a Mayan scholar from Yucatan and an author of several books, including “Un Continente y Una Cultura.”

[vi] University of Arizona researchers pinpoint the corner of Ina and Silverbell in Tucson as the oldest cornfield (4,000) in what is today the United States. The oldest evidence of corn in the United States however, was found in Bat Cave, New Mexico, dating close to 6,000 years before the present era. It is believed that maiz was created some 7,000 years ago in Southern Mexico.

[vii] Abya Yalla is a word from the Cuna peoples of Panama, a term that indigenous peoples from this continent have adopted in lieu of “The Americas.” Other similar names include Pacha Mama from the Quechua peoples of the Andes and Cemanahuak from the Nahua peoples of Mexico, or Turtle Island by a number of American Indian peoples.

[viii] The one city that most seem to know is Mexico City-Tenochtitlan. A few may have heard of Teotihuacan (misnamed the City of the Gods), the huge pyramid site 45 minutes north of Mexico City.
[ix] Huppenthal campaigned on the promise to eliminate Raza Studies at both the K-12 level and at the university level.

[x] A more proper term should be civilizational studies. Women Studies and LGBT Studies have also been similarly attacked, though they are generally not lumped into the category of ethnic studies. In Arizona, HB 2281, in effect, bans “ethnic studies.”

It looks like Rep. Daniel Patterson has made amends with his ex-girlfriend.

Even after exposing her previous life and name, calling her a criminal and defaming her, it appears that love wins in the end.

Below is a recent email exchange between the two. Yes, Patterson was not supposed to be contacting her (he also wrote her in jail), but he’s a legislator, and he is immune from silly restraining orders. Plus, his heart is filled with love!

Subject: Re: We can both get treatment. I know you keep your promises to work on dealing with your dsyfunctional family just like me

Daniel R. Patterson wrote (reply to below):
How are you? I’ve been trying to help and I sent you a letter to the jail. Call me if you want to talk. Daniel

Daniel R. Patterson wrote (reply to below):
Please call me if you want to discuss. I am working on my issues and committed to being the best man I can possible be. Love Daniel

Georgette Escobar wrote:
http://www.givingahand.org/
We can even share a room.
G

Now after this contact, Escobar appears to be standing by her man.

I wish the both of them the best. Patterson will need all the support possible when his ex-wife tells her own story of alleged domestic violence before the Ethics committee.

Remember as you watch the video above that all the cops in riot gear are in TUSD by invitation, it is clear that Pedicone has been given some kind of authority to decide who gets arrested, and in the video above, all those cops in riot gear are handling one woman who just turned 70 years old this past week.

John Pedicone tells police to arrest Lupe Castillo for reading a letter from MLK. Photo: Lorena Howard.

She walks with the aid of two crutches, and TPD was trying to get her to drop to the floor in the lobby of TUSD.

This is Tom Horne and John Huppenthal’s dream come true. We are all just individuals. There are no elders or leaders of a community. There are only individuals to be taken off one-by-one.

That Marxist president Abraham Lincoln used to talk about a bundle of sticks that are strong vs single sticks that are easily broken. That a house divided will fall.

Perhaps that is why they are promoting their single stick theory of individualism?

Arizona-Israel bill raises some unsettling questions

by Gabriel Matthew Schivone, published in the Arizona Republic

On its surface, the recent resolution bill “Supporting the Nation of Israel” that unanimously passed in the Arizona House raised no eyebrows.

A bipartisan consensus supporting Israel is nothing new. However, upon closer inspection of the bill, it is unclear to whom the proposed legislation is appealing based on its language regarding Arizona and U.S. border policies.

The Arizona-Israel support bill, HR 2008, is essentially a solidarity statement. It begins by recognizing “the Jewish people … in their homeland.” It later hails Arizona and Israel as eclectic “trade partners, a relationship we seek to enhance,” according to the bill’s authors.

So one might presume the largely Republican bill speaks to Israel supporters. A sound assumption, since the chief issue of agreement among liberal and conservative groups (whether Jewish or not) surrounds Israel’s 45-year military occupation of Palestinian Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Here, Israel’s border security language is approximately that of the U.S. Border Patrol, whose “priority mission” is “preventing terrorists and terrorists’ weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, from entering the United States.”

In regards to maintaining Israel’s ethnic Jewish majority, American bipartisan support likely also resounds in agreement, like most of Israeli society, around Israeli immigration policies that prompted the government’s current construction of a $1.5 billion “border fence” across Israel’s own southern desert borderlands to keep out “illegal” migrants, mostly from North Africa. After all, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warns, the invading “flood” represents “a concrete threat to the Jewish and democratic character of Israel.”

Generally, Democrat and Republican parties and their constituents are in uninterrupted harmony on the issue of Israeli border security and preserving Israel’s predominant Jewish character. But when it comes to American liberals of various stripes, many are firmly rooted in the immigrant-rights movement.

The vast majority of Jewish-American groups, especially in Arizona, for example, passionately support migrant rights and immigration reform, defend outlawed Mexican-American Studies programs, and rail at the thousands of migrant deaths in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands resulting from the 20-year U.S. militarization of its southern border.

Meanwhile, the Republican-led Arizona-Israel bill gloats that “Israel receives vital military and security assistance from the United States, much of which, in turn, is spent here in Arizona with its defense contractors” — no doubt along the border, where a big military-style “defense” business booms.

So who is this bill written for? Who are the authors fooling? If anything, the bill is a political liability for a prominent array of Israel’s American supporters whose unshakable support for Israeli policies — in light of the Arizona-Israel bill — now appears irreconcilably right wing to their cherished Latino allies, particularly in Arizona.

According to the House spokesperson, the Arizona-Israel bill was remitted to the U.S. Secretary of State the same day (Feb. 27) of its unanimous adoption on the House floor.

American liberals now face uneasy questions. The challenge now will be to apply standards equally across the board — across borders and states where situations may be different in the details but fundamental human-rights issues remain stubborn and constant.

Gabriel Matthew Schivone writes a column in the “Latino Voices” section of Huffington Post.