[News] Neo-Racism in the Southwest

[Anti-Imperialist News]

January 18, 2012
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/18/neo-racism-in-the-southwest/


Neo-Racism in the Southwest

by JORGE MARISCAL

The surge of neo-racism in Arizona, especially 
racism directed at people of Mexican descent, has 
received sporadic media coverage over the past 
year.  But for the most part news about the 
economy and presidential politics has pushed off 
the front page Arizona’s attack against its 
working class of color and their children.  In 
other words, the slow motion creation of a new 
Jim Crow regime for Mexican Americans in Arizona is not “trending.”

But what is taking place in southern Arizona 
deserves our attention as the most fanatical 
episode in the war against public 
education.  Specifically, the question being 
posed is whether or not young people from working 
class communities and communities of color ought 
to be educated and if they are what are they entitled to learn?

Last month, the U.S. Supreme court agreed to hear 
Arizona’s appeal of a 9th Circuit decision that 
declared the draconian anti-immigrant SB 1070 in 
violation of federal law and therefore 
unconstitutional.  In the meantime, those who 
promoted 1070 steadily go about their business 
dismantling the highly successful Mexican 
American Studies program in the Tucson school district.

At first glance, the ban against “ethnic studies” 
would seem to be a prohibition against an entire 
academic discipline.  In reality, it is a 
narrowly targeted attack on Mexican American or 
Chicano studies.  As former University of Arizona 
dean Sal Baldenegro reports, the ban leaves other 
“ethnic studies” programs in place.

Accompanying the elimination of Mexican American 
studies is a list of prohibited 
books.  Shakespeare’s The Tempest leaps off the 
list as the most recognizable title.  Thoreau’s 
Civil Disobedience and well-known histories by 
Howard Zinn, Ron Takaki, and Rudy Acuña join the 
castoffs.  According to the list, one-act plays 
by the Teatro campesino, short stories by Sandra 
Cisneros, essays by James Baldwin, and a speech 
by Cesar Chavez will be added to the bonfire (or 
at least sentenced to perpetual confinement in a local book depository).

The list of banned books invokes more ironies 
than I am able to unpack here.  That a collection 
of short stories (Cisneros’s Woman Hollering 
Creek) whose main characters are young Latina 
women negotiating gender and ethnic roles should 
be on a list of banned readings seems 
silly.  Silly unless one realizes that what 
frightens the right-wing Arizona politicians has 
less to do with the content of the books and more 
to do with the way they might be juxtaposed and 
interpreted by teachers who seek to empower their students.

Joining Shakespeare on the banned list is former 
UC Berkeley professor Ron Takaki.  In his history 
of the United States, A Different Mirror, Takaki 
takes the image of Caliban from The Tempest and 
uses it to explain how Native Americans, African 
slaves, and almost every single immigrant group 
that has come to these shores­Irish, Jewish, 
Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and so on­have been 
cast as the monstrous and dark outsider and fed 
through the grinder of white supremacy and 
economic exploitation.  Perhaps the Arizona 
Inquisitors (as Rudy Acuña calls them) are smarter than we thought.

But there is one more stunning paradox.  Although 
these books are banned for courses taught under 
the umbrella of Mexican American studies, many of 
the same books are allowed in other classes at 
schools such as Tucson’s University High where 
students are placed on a college track and 
exposed to a variety of uncensored curricular materials.

Could it be that the attack on Mexican American 
Studies in Arizona is less about “ethnic studies” 
and more about denying the right to education to 
the coming Latino majority (and to the Black 
community that the neoliberal consensus considers equally disposable)?

Across the Arizona border in California, we are 
witnessing a related transformation that is 
different in its details, subtler, and less 
openly racist.  There are no Sugiyamas, Hornes, 
or Huppenthals, the henchmen of the Arizona 
Tribunal.  But throughout the University of 
California and Cal State systems invisible 
technocrats are slowly destroying the public 
university and converting it into a corporate 
bastion where students from California are 
displaced by foreign students (who pay more), 
where students are “taught” in classes of 900 
people, and where faculty are forced to become 
“entrepreneurs”–a fancy word for academic panhandlers.

At UC San Diego (UCSD), campus leaders recently 
published their three top priority areas for the 
future–all of them had to do with creating 
products for the market.  The word “education” 
was not mentioned once.  Academic areas that 
emphasize history and critical thinking are 
either shrinking or becoming a parody of 
themselves.  The push for on-line education is 
strong–no need to interact with real 
students.  We simply sell them virtual courses 
and have underpaid graduate students grade the 
work. Administrators brag that UCSD is no longer 
a California university; it’s an international 
university­this in a state that will be majority Latino by the year 2040.

As costs go up (more than a 300% increase at the 
UC system over the last decade), working class 
and youth of color will slowly be denied 
access.  The few that make it in will have to 
take on serious debt to finish.  The future? – 
Education for the already privileged and for a 
few tokens.  Education as preparation for the job 
market.  Education as the site of 
corporate-driven research.  Education to train 
elites from around the world.  No more critique 
of the status quo. Minimal engagement with local 
populations. A ban on critical pedagogy in the 
classroom.  No interest in teaching strategies 
that empower youth, especially those who do not 
already arrive with an abundance of social and economic capital.

Back in Arizona, Yolanda Sotelo, now in her 
thirtieth year of teaching in Tucson schools, was 
informed last week that monitors would visit her 
classroom to make sure banned books were not 
being used.  Teachers who assigned reading from 
prohibited titles would be reprimanded.  Monitors 
would also evaluate all posters in the 
classroom.  In other words, no critical thinking, 
no critical history, and no critical pedagogy for 
the new Calibans who must take their designated 
places in the market economy and forget their past.

JORGE MARISCAL has taught at both public and 
private universities for thirty years. His latest 
book is “Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons 
 From the Chicano Movement ” (University of New 
Mexico Press). His website is http://jorgemariscal.blogspot.com/




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