Latino Studies in Arizona

Arizona, already known for its deeply anti-Hispanic political environment, continues to make progress in its effort to make the state even more inhospitable for Mexican-Americans. After shutting down the Mexican-American studies program at the Tucson School District, the state Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal said last month that he is considering doing the same with the Mexican-American Studies program at Arizona’s public universities.

It was Huppenthal himself who passed the law that made this attack on ethnic studies possible. In 2010, Huppenthal, then a state senator, helped write a bill banning public school courses that advocate the overthrow of the United States government, promote racial resentment, and treat students as members of an ethnic group rather than individuals. The language of the bill was race-neutral, but in a state where a third of the population is Hispanic, the target of the bill was clear.

By going after university curricula, Huppenthal is again treading dangerous waters. As a matter of general principle, what is taught in university halls is a matter that should be decided by academics, not politicians. When politicians, not Ph.D.s, decide on a school’s curriculum, we end up with a situations like the one in Texas two years ago, in which political conservatives on the school board voted put less of an emphasis on the study of Thomas Jefferson as a founding father because they disagreed with his view that there should be a wall of separation between church and state.

Huppenthal claims the Mexican-American studies program produces radicals indoctrinated to resent Anglos. If this is true, the rest of America should be watchful of the Anglo-hating radicals coming out of Stanford and over twenty other universities and colleges that offer a Chicano studies program. If Huppenthal’s goal is to reduce resentment toward Anglos, then he is shooting himself in the foot through his actions. I see no better way of increasing resentment toward Anglos than having an Anglo politician shut down a Mexican-American studies program amid massive protest from largely Mexican-American students like he did in Tucson.

The establishment of Chicano Studies programs in universities across the country was a decades-long struggle led by Mexican-American faculty and students, and it would be a shame if it were all laid to waste in Arizona by a politician with irrational fears of a Reconquista, a supposed plan by Mexico to re-conquer the lands it lost in the Mexican-American War.

It is interesting that Huppenthal did not single out the University of Arizona’s African-American Studies program. The people of Arizona should pray that the superintendent does not come to the conclusion that learning about slavery and Jim Crow causes resentment toward Anglos, lest the students of Arizona are deprived of two centuries of American history.

The victims in all this are the students in Arizona’s public universities who will be put at a disadvantage against students at other schools. If Huppenthal succeeds, they will no longer be able to learn about Westminster v Mendez, the Southwestern version of Brown v Board of Education that ended the segregation of Mexican-Americans in public schools ten years before Brown, or about César E. Chávez and his struggle for fair wages for farm workers. These are both essentially important parts of American and Chicano history. Mexican-American Studies, like other ethnic studies programs, allow students to learn more about events in history that are too often overlooked in general history courses.

Perhaps if Superintendent Huppenthal took one of these courses and learned of the struggles of Mexican-Americans in the U.S., he would be less enthusiastic about bringing about their demise. Either way, Huppenthal would do well to end his crusade against Mexican-American Studies in Arizona’s public universities and revise his decision to defund the program in Tucson’s high schools.

José I. Robles ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Canaday Hall.