Arizona

“Seven books that were used as supporting materials for curriculum in Mexican American Studies classes have been moved to the district storage facility,” the statement read, “because the classes have been suspended as per the ruling by Arizona Superintendent for Public Instruction John Huppenthal.” District spokesperson Cara Rene added that “the books may be considered for future use as new curriculums are created going forward. We are seeking assistance from the Arizona Department of Education to help us create new classes for the 2012/13 school year.”

Huppenthal, who campaigned in 2010 to stop the Mexican-American studies program, overruled an independent audit that praised the curriculum and ruled last month that it violated the state ban.

The TUSD statement “lacks accuracy and represents a thinly veiled attempt to cover up with distortions what is happening,” said Richard Martinez, the lead attorney on behalf of teachers and students challenging the ban in federal court.  “Pandora’s box has been opened and the ugly face of the bigoted right wing has been exposed for what it is: an attempt to keep Latinos, poor, dumb and abused.”

Whether the removal of the books from all classrooms should be considered an outright ban or a possibly temporary prohibition brought little comfort to supporters of Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program, who sponsored an emotional community forum last Saturday with students and teachers who had witnessed the forced removal of the books from their classrooms.

“In regards to this double-speak about these books being banned,” said Cholla High School teacher Lorenzo Lopez, “it is irrelevant if these books are banned from the entire district or just from our classes. If our kids can’t have access to that knowledge, and it was urgent that these books be removed immediately from our classes, they are, in effect, banned.”

According to one teacher, the mandated roundup of texts included their own personal libraries in the classroom.

“We were told by our principal that we need to comply with the law and that meant that with the suspension of Mexican-American studies classes we had to remove the listed books from our classrooms immediately,” said Pueblo High School teacher Sally Rusk.  “Our own personal copies were not to be on our book shelves either. It seems obvious to us that being made to take certain books out of the classroom — even when used as reference books and not class sets — is censorship.  How can not allowing teachers to use these books, even as reference material in a traditional U.S. history course, not be interpreted as banning those books?”

Retired educator David Safier also questioned whether the book removals conflicted with last week’s school board agreement. In a blog post, Safie wrote, “The decision makes a mockery of this passage from the recent school board resolution to suspend MAS courses: ‘The district shall revise its social studies core curriculum to increase its coverage of Mexican-American history and culture, including a balanced presentation of diverse viewpoints on controversial issues.  The end result shall be a single common social studies core sequence through which all high school students are exposed to diverse viewpoints.’”

TUSD spokesperson Rene noted that while former Mexican-American studies teachers may not be able to include the removed books in their courses, “Every one of the books listed above is still available to students through several school libraries. Many of the schools where Mexican-American studies classes were taught have the books available in their libraries. Also, all students throughout the district may reserve the books through the library system.”

In a district of more than 60,000 students, 61 percent of whom come from Mexican-American families, library copies of the targeted seven books appear to be sparse.  There are two district-wide copies available of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, which had been singled out by state superintendent Huppenthal. The district’s online catalog showed only one copy of the Critical Race Theory textbook. Tucson High School does not have one of the 16 copies available in the district of the textbook “Rethinking Columbus: The Next Five Years,” according to the catalog.

The TUSD administration also denied  “The Tempest” had been banned.  According to the statement, “Teachers may continue to use materials in their classrooms as appropriate for the course curriculum. ‘The Tempest” and other books approved for curriculum are still viable options for instructors.”

However, in a recorded meeting with his administrators last Wednesday, Tucson High School teacher Curtis Acosta was admonished not to teach the classic play in his literature class using the “nexus of race, class and oppression” or “issues of critical race theory.”

“What is very clear is that ’The Tempest’ is problematic for our administrators due to the content of the play and the pedagogical choices I have made,” Acosta said in an interview. “In other words, Shakespeare wrote a play that is clearly about colonization of the new world and there are strong themes of race, colonization, oppression, class and power that permeate the play, along with themes of love and redemption.

“At the end of the meeting it became clear to all of us that I need to avoid such literature and it was directly stated. Due to the madness of this situation and our fragile positions as instructors who will be frequently observed for compliance, and be asked to produce examples of student work as proof of our compliance, I cannot disagree with their advice. Now we are in the position of having to rule out ’The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’ ‘The Great Gatsby,’ etc. for the exact same reasons.”

Lorenzo Lopez said that when his daughter, Korina, a plaintiff in the federal court case, heard the texts had been taken to a storage facility, she asked him, “Isn’t that the book graveyard where they send all the old books, never to be seen again?” Lopez said he replied, “Yes, it is.”

Facing a multimillion-dollar penalty in state funds, the governing board of Tucson’s largest school district officially ended the 13-year-old program on Tuesday in an attempt to come into compliance with the controversial state ban on the teaching of ethnic studies.

The list of removed books includes the 20-year-old textbook “Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years,” which features an essay by Tucson author Leslie Silko.  Recipient of a Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, Silko has been an outspoken supporter of the ethnic studies program.

“By ordering teachers to remove ‘Rethinking Columbus,’ the Tucson school district has shown tremendous disrespect for teachers and students,” said the book’s editor Bill Bigelow. “This is a book that has sold over 300,000 copies and is used in school districts from Anchorage to Atlanta, and from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. It offers teaching strategies and readings that teachers can use to help students think about the perspectives that are too often silenced in the traditional curriculum.”

Another notable text removed from Tucson’s classrooms is Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” In a meeting this week, administrators informed Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away from any units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes,” including the teaching of Shakespeare’s classic in Mexican-American literature courses.

Other banned books include “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by famed Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos” by Rodolfo Acuña, two books often singled out by Arizona state superintendent of public instruction John Huppenthal, who campaigned in 2010 on the promise to “stop la raza.”  Huppenthal, who once lectured state educators that he based his own school principles for children on corporate management schemes of the Fortune 500, compared Mexican-American studies to Hitler Jugend indoctrination last fall.

An independent audit of Tucson’s ethnic studies program commissioned by Huppenthal last summer actually praised “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” a 40-year-old textbook now in its seventh edition.  According to the  audit: “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos is an unbiased, factual textbook designed to accommodate the growing number of Mexican-American or Chicano History Courses. The auditing team refuted a number of allegations about the book, saying, ‘quotes have been taken out of context.’”

Freire’s work on  pedagogy has been translated into numerous languages, and is taught at universities around the United States.

In a school district founded by a Mexican-American in which more than 60 percent of the students come from Mexican-American backgrounds, the administration also removed every textbook dealing with Mexican-American history, including “Chicano!: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement” by Arturo Rosales, which features a biography of longtime Tucson educator Salomon Baldenegro.  Other books removed from the school include “500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures,” by Elizabeth Martinez and the textbook “Critical Race Theory” by scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.

“The only other time a book of mine was banned was in 1986, when the apartheid government in South Africa banned ‘Strangers in Their Own Country,’ a curriculum I’d written that included a speech by then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela,” said Bigelow, who serves as curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, and co-directs the online Zinn Education Project. ”We know what the South African regime was afraid of. What is the Tucson school district afraid of?”

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Update: In response to this story the Tucson Unified School District issued a statement saying that the books removed from the classrooms are still available in the District’s library system and will  be considered for possible use in the 2012-2013 school year. Salon included this information in its follow-up story.

In 2009, a study commissioned by the Center for the Future of Arizona found that only 12 percent of surveyed residents in the state agreed that “people in our communities care about each other.”That all changed, at least for a while, on January 8th, 2011, when 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner stepped out of a taxi in front of a Safeway supermarket on the northwest suburban edge of the city and unloaded an estimated 32-rounds of bullets from an extended magazine clip once banned under the Violent Crime and Control Law Enforcement Act.  The story of his derangement is well known now.  His target was 41-year-old US Rep. Gabby Giffords, who he managed to shoot in the head; Loughner killed six people and injured 18 other citizens before he was wrestled to the ground and disarmed.

Along with the lost lives of an unusually diverse group of citizens, including federal Judge John Roll, congressional aide Gabe Zimmerman, nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, and retirees Dorothy “Dot” Morris, Phyllis Schneck and Dorwan Stoddard, Loughner also managed to shatter one of the last remnants of trust in the public commons for my hometown.The extraordinary heroism on January 8th, including the life-saving role by Giffords intern Daniel Hernandez, bolstered the city–and the nation–with a sense of resiliency and bravery in a moment of sheer disbelief.

Memorials grew at the supermarket and at the University of Arizona hospital; testimonies flowed.  Neighbors met and chatted.  Committees for civility emerged.  President Obama soon arrived in Tucson and poignantly addressed a packed arena under the banner, “together we thrive.”One year later, Rep. Giffords will miraculously join Tucsonans on this Sunday for a special candlelight memorial to the victims, as we once again grapple with the still unfinished process of healing and finding some meaning in the fallout of a tragedy.

When we wake up on Monday morning, the real challenge will be whether Tucson, Arizona–and the nation–will still to rise to meet ourselves as neighbors and effectively work to prevent the next tragedy from finding its all-too-easy expression through the barrel of the gun, or recoil back into the divided enclaves of denial and distrust that nurtured the very landscape of this tragedy.

2011 has not exactly been a year to “thrive together” in Arizona.  Nor were the Safeway victims the only casualties of derangement and hatred in our state’s borderlands of denial.

Only a month after Loughner’s assault, an Arizona jury gave anti-immigrant militia wanna-beShawna Forde the death penalty for her role in the murder of nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in a botched vigilante-inspired robbery south of Tucson.  In July, a Maricopa County Superior Court justice sentenced Phoenix resident Gary Thomas Kelley to 20 years in prison for the murder of 3rd-generation Arizona Juan Varela, after an allegedly drunken Kelley objected to protests against Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 immigration law and threatened Varela to “go back to Mexico” or die.

In September, Attorney General Tom Horne stunned observers at a conference on the state’s ban on the teaching of Mexican American Studies, as he invoked one of the bloodiest episodes in ancient Roman history and demanded that Tucson’s nationally acclaimed Ethnic Studies program “be destroyed.”  Arizona state superintendent John Huppenthal followed up Horne’s harrowing pronouncement by referring to Mexican American children in Tucson as “Hitler youth.”

A week after Giffords made a dramatic return to the floor of Congress in the debt ceiling vote this summer, one of the most chilling reminders of Tucson’s denial of its open wound took place at a Tucson Unified School Board meeting in August.  A self-proclaimed Tea Party member, who had actively circulated a conspiracy video on Facebook that Giffords’ attempted murder was set up by the Department of Homeland Security, unleashed an inflammatory tirade of a coming civil war and bloodshed over Ethnic Studies in Tucson.

None of these incidents, outside of the Forde murders, garnered any national media attention or even much local discussion, as if a crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster.  A prescient admonition by one of Loughner’s fellow students at Pima Community College, who noted his “seriously disruptive” and “scary” behavior in class, remains a cautionary reminder that “until he does something bad, you can’t do anything about him.”

No one has probed the terrain around the Tucson shooting better than author and journalist Tom Zoellner. A 5th-generation Arizonan, a confidant of Giffords and a virtual neighbor of the troubled Loughner, Zoellner reluctantly returned to his hometown soon after the Safeway tragedy.  In his new book, “A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America,“ Zoellner set out to transcend the endless political banter over blame and explores the social contexts underscoring how Giffords’ act of democratic participation–”reaching out to strangers at the fringe of a Safeway”–could lead to one of the most disturbing assassination attempts in recent history.  In the process, Zoellner asks a lot of questions most Arizonans would prefer to ignore; for starters, given Loughner’s abundant trail of erratic and violent flare ups, including his suspension from Pima Community College for unruly behavior, would a simple gun law requiring a one-hour safety training prior to purchase have prevented his access to a semi-automatic weapon?

Zoellner notes that while the Tea Party-led legislature managed to pass a law declaring the Colt Single Action Army Revolver the state gun in the first session after the Giffords shooting, it also cut $510 million from the state health care budget, including mental health services.