On the first day of the trial, Dr. Curtis Acosta, a former Mexican American Studies (MAS) teacher testified that the materials in his Latino Literature class were intended to operate as windows on the world as well as mirrors in which students could see themselves.¹ To help his students see the broader world as well as to see themselves in it, he included Shakespeare’s Tempest as well as Ana Castillo’s So Far from God.² He also testified that the program treated students as bringing cultural assets that should be valued rather than denigrated as tends to happen in the rest of their public school education.³

If this sounds different from what occurs in most high school English classes, it is because it is. It’s a different education. That’s the point. Courses developed in Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD’s) MAS program were designed to do what decades of federal oversight over TUSD’s had failed to accomplish. They were designed to disparities in school discipline, test scores, and graduation rates of Mexican American students.

And it was working, as would be established at trial in 2017.

The fact that it was working may have threatened those in power, especially when Brown students found their voices and advocated for themselves. These Brown students, by speaking up and engaging politically, showed that they had forgotten their subordinate place in society. The MAS program and its teachers were blamed.

The reality of MAS is much different than how its critics and the masses framed it, and this book seeks to set the record straight. There were overtly racist lies told by politicians, media pundits, and right-wing activists about the MAS program, which were largely imagined or severe distortions of the truth. Further, these distortions were intended to equate teaching about racism with the vilification and demonization of White people. It was much like rapper Immortal Technique offered in the song “Young Lords”:

Mexican American Studies was created to “do” education differently in order to serve the needs of Chicana/o-Mexican American students in an educational manifestation of what Roberto “Cintli” Rodríguez refers to as creation resistance.⁵ This involved building a culturally authentic educational program for Chicana/o-Mexican American students in the borderlands to not only serve their specific needs but also to resist the pressures of the dominant, Anglo-centric US culture that continually tells these students that they are foreign, “illegal,” and should “go back to Mexico.”⁶ While there were non-Chicana/o-Mexican American students who took these courses, they were not the original intended audience, even though they still benefited and were never excluded.⁷

This approach to education stems from the history and creation of Ethnic Studies that dramatically reimagined the relationship among communities, education, scholarship, and racial equity. The formation of the MAS program was deeply connected to the radical legacy of the 1960s, particularly the formation of Chicana/o Studies. While we offer the broad strokes of what Chicana/o Studies and Ethnic Studies are historically and how MAS was developed in Tucson, a detailed account of this is beyond the scope of this text. While some have begun to document it,⁸ there are many areas left to explore, given the nuances of the MAS program.

The Historical Legacy of Chicana/o Studies and Ethnic Studies

Intentional, collective, grassroots agitation during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement led to the creation of Ethnic Studies in general and Chicana/o Studies in particular.⁹ Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, in Message to Aztlán, had a specific message to the educator: “Your responsibility is one of the most important in the Movement. To you lies the task of teaching the truth about our history, our culture, and our contributions to mankind.”¹⁰ Chicana/o Studies was born out of struggle, and it continues in the fight for educational self-determination.¹¹ Few other disciplines stem from that type of institutional history. To our knowledge, there has never had to be a sit-in for a US university to create a Physics Department or a hunger strike that led to the development of a College of Engineering. Ethnic Studies and Chicana/o Studies are unlike any other academic discipline, especially because they were developed from an analysis of deep-rooted social inequities while also calling for community-based education.¹² A core guiding document for Chicana/o Studies was El Plan de Santa Bárbara¹³ stemming from a 1969 gathering. In the opening manifesto of the document, the authors wrote:

In the very formation of Chicana/o Studies, there was a larger community purpose explicitly articulated. It both understood that higher education systematically excluded Brown bodies from full participation since its creation, yet these same institutions hold immense potential in developing community self-determination. Essentially, it was a demand to make higher education work for Chicana/o communities instead of making Chicanas/os assimilate into these White institutions.¹⁵

In addition, the late historian Ronald Takaki offered another rationale for Ethnic Studies in his classic text A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America: “What happens, to borrow the words of Adrienne Rich, when someone with the authority of a teacher describes our society, and you are not in it? Such an experience can be disorienting – a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”¹⁶

This searing critique of monocultural White curriculum was a central component of the push for Ethnic Studies during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Education has always been a battle over what constitutes “official knowledge” and how it should be taught.¹⁷ Takaki illustrated the negative psychological effects of monocultural education.¹⁸ Chicana/o Studies’ scholar/activist Rudy Acuña took it one step further and examined the effects of exclusionary history on society at large. Specifically, he was concerned about the retrenchment he saw occurring within Arizona in the early 2010s, and from his perspective as a critical historian, he offered:

Acuña directly related the backlash to Chicana/o Studies to the interrelated issues of xenophobia and the Chicana/o student dropout (or pushout) crisis. Essentially, the more that xenophobia becomes engrained in society, the more Chicana/o Studies is ignored and banned, and the more Chicana/o students are likely to drop out. While the interrelation of these concepts is much more complicated than a simple 1:1 correlation, the overall trends hold true. Essentially, Chicana/o Studies is critically important to Chicana/o student educational advancement; the more that racism is the norm in society, the less that raza are able to utilize this community-oriented, community-developed knowledge base.²⁰

From this perspective, Ethnic Studies as related to Chicana/o Studies has multiple interrelated purposes. It is meant to be rigorous education for those frequently written off by society as academically incapable.²¹ It is meant to offer an alternative account of this country that shows that their communities and histories are not marginal. As Evelyn Hu-DeHart offered: “Ethnic studies seeks to recover and reconstruct the histories of those Americans whom history has neglected; to identify and credit their contributions to the making of U.S. society and culture; to chronicle protest and resistance; and to establish alternative values and visions, institutions and cultures.”²²

The resistance component is central to Ethnic Studies done effectively, for this is an academic discipline that is also rooted in social activism.²³ It centers structured racial oppression in the analysis and then challenges students, teachers, and community members to collectively transform these inequitable conditions.²⁴

The interrogation of systemic oppression was one of the central points of contention offered by opponents of the MAS program. Then State Superintendent of Public Instruction and key MAS opponent, Tom Horne, was very direct in his Open Letter to the Citizens of Tucson: “Most of these students’ parents and grandparents came to this country, legally, because this is the land of opportunity. They trust the public schools with their children. Those students should be taught that this is the land of opportunity, and that if they work hard they can achieve their goals. They should not be taught that they are oppressed.”²⁵

The last line is key, that students should “not be taught they are oppressed.” This begs the question: What if they are systemically oppressed? Most of the leading education and sociological literature on race argue that contemporary racism is a social structure of oppression that privileges White people at the expense of people of color.²⁶ This contemporary form of White supremacy may be accurate from a social science perspective, but it also makes people – White people in particular – very uncomfortable.²⁷ John Huppenthal, State Superintendent after Horne, repeated this argument many times as he derided the oppressor/oppressed paradigm that he claimed was the framework of the MAS program.²⁸

His essential argument was that explicitly engaging oppression in teaching creates blame toward the people who have and continue to benefit from the system. In this case, that means White people. Huppenthal’s critique is, however, very common in the everyday ways that people talk about race. Think about the part of town, wherever you might live, that is labeled “bad” or “dangerous.” Please be clear, we are not demeaning these areas. We are criticizing how people conceptualize them. In Tucson, for example, it is the Southside that is the proud Brown barrio, and it is extremely common for people – especially on the north side of town – to talk about “those poor people in the south side of Tucson,” not to be confused with the separate city, South Tucson. Conversely, it is extremely uncommon for these statements to be linked to the affluence in the largely White suburbs also within the Old Pueblo. As Nolan Cabrera offered, “This is akin to saying up with no down, good with no bad, hot with no cold. Unfortunately, this is how a number of contemporary investigations of race occur – engaging racial marginalization without also analyzing advantage.”²⁹ The one-sided analysis of race was all that Horne and Huppenthal would allow as Superintendents of Public Instruction, which could only be countered by a coordinated resistance to their policies and rulings. Fortunately, resistance is in the very DNA of Ethnic Studies.³⁰

The Formation of Mexican American Studies in Tucson

Brown v. Board of Education³¹ may have declared a formal end to de jure segregation, but active resistance to integration led to de jure segregation persisting; and even when de jure segregation ended or in places where de jure segregation had never existed, residential segregation meant that de facto segregation remained the lived realities of many students throughout the country.³² In Arizona, this meant keeping Mexican American and other non-White students separate from White students.³³ Within this context, the “all deliberate speed” mandate of Brown butted up against Dr. King’s argument in Why We Can’t Wait.³⁴ That is, if separate is inherently unequal as declared by Brown, how long should minoritized students exist in under-resourced schools? This was especially pressing because despite the change in national law, school officials in Arizona continued to forbid interracial dances, implemented multiple programs to “Americanize” students of Mexican origin – especially around issues of language – and increased internal segregation within schools.³⁵ Arizona officials also turned to English proficiency, actual or perceived, as a proxy for race, justifying the continued segregation of Mexican American students from their White peers.³⁶

With this as context, Darius Echeverría argued that in the 1960s “[m]any students began to believe that the political mindset of moderation, accommodation, and reasonable cultural awareness of their parents’ generation was ineffective and ultimately passé.”³⁷ While the dramatic images of the East Los Angeles Blowouts of 1968 and the Crystal City walkouts dominate much of Chicano history, there were lesser known, but equally important, efforts underway in Tucson during the same time period fighting for educational justice.³⁸ As then activist and current US Congressperson Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) said, reflecting on the need for direct action against the district, “We knew that we had a school board and a superintendent that basically ignored [us] and at best neglected this community and population so it was just a question of time … There was an urgency for us to make a statement here in Tucson and the statement was the walkouts.”³⁹

In February of 1969, the Mexican American Liberation Committee (MALC) organized a walkout at both Tucson and Pueblo High, majority Chicano schools, resulting in hundreds of students leaving campus and marching throughout the community. Student leaders such as Isabel Garcia, Guadalupe Castillo, and Raúl Grijalva, all of whom continue to be leaders in Tucson to this day, presented the students’ demands. One key component was the implementation of Mexican American history courses.⁴⁰

Much of the Tucson organizing was led by college students associated with MALC, such as UA senior Salomón Baldenegro, the less radical Mexican American Student Association (MASA), and the eventual merging of the two into a MEChA (El Movimiento Estudiantíl Chicanos de Aztlán) – the last group being the one Tom Horne continually derides as both “racist” and “anti-American.”⁴¹ This group of Chicana/o college students and their allies, through a protracted five-year struggle, were able to get the University of Arizona administration to bend and institute an MAS program.⁴² Their demand for the inclusion of Mexican American history classes would have to wait thirty years and the formation of an MAS Department at TUSD.

It should surprise no one that the initial formation of this department at TUSD stemmed from grassroots activism and a lawsuit.⁴³ A group called the Coalition of Neighbors for Mexican American Studies (CONMAS) comprised of University of Arizona MEChistas, high school students, and community activists spent approximately two years applying political pressure to the TUSD Board, advocating for the establishment of an MAS department.⁴⁴ Again, their advocacy began with a critique.

CONMAS members argued that TUSD had African American and Native American studies, so why did the largest ethnic group in the district not have one of their own?⁴⁵ In this case, anything related to MAS was subsumed in the Bilingual Education and Hispanic Studies Department. Scholars Conrado Gómez and Margarita Jiménez-Silva reflecting on this controversy argued, however, that while Bilingual Education was well structured, “the Hispanic Studies component had not properly and systematically been addressed.”⁴⁶ That is, there were few systemic offerings as one would expect from an academic department, and the community activists demanded more. Additionally, equating MAS with bilingual education created the danger of conflating the two in a way that echoed the earlier use of presumed language ability to treat Mexican American students differently.

To further add pressure to the TUSD school board, a lawsuit was filed in US District Court and claimed that the lack of MAS department amounted to race-based educational discrimination.⁴⁷ The lead attorney on the case was none other than the Chicana/o Movement icon José Angel Gutiérrez, whose words spoken in a different context would be seized upon decades later by MAS detractors as promoting resentment and fomenting violence. In the 1960s, Gutiérrez was a founding member of both the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) and the electoral third-party organization the Raza Unida Party. Thus, the plaintiffs in Tucson were directly connected to the very history of struggle that led to the creation of Chicana/o Studies in the first place.

The combination of strong political pressure with mounting legal fees led TUSD to settle the case, which resulted in the creation of the autonomous Hispanic Studies Department in 1998. Sean Arce, who later became the director of MAS, taught one of the first courses in the program in American History–Chicano Perspectives. The course offerings, though, remained piecemeal initially.⁴⁸

Strangely, MAS in Tucson became a more integrated department in part because of mandates set forth by the second Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. While the act as a whole has rightfully been criticized as being ineffective, harmful, heightening school-based segregation, and providing a public subsidy for private education,⁴⁹ there was one component that was somewhat – stress “somewhat” – beneficial. NCLB mandated that data be collected on student achievement and that the data be disaggregated along racial/ethnic lines. The data from TUSD highlighted massive inequities between White and Mexican American students throughout the district.⁵⁰

This led TUSD Deputy Superintendent Dr. Becky Montaño to appoint Augustine (“Auggie”) Romero head of the MAS department, bringing together fifteen teachers across the district to coordinate their efforts and offer a radical alternative to the increasingly rigid and formulaic ways education was being offered in the early 2000s under NCLB. This approach included helping students understand their Indigenous roots in this land, helping them develop the ability to critically analyze structured inequality and oppression, while centering issues of race, racism, and other local community issues in the curriculum and pedagogy.⁵¹

From 2008 until the elimination of the program, Sean Arce served as its director. During the time the department existed, 2002–2012, those in the MAS program were continually focused on using different forms of critical pedagogy while also raising Mexican American student achievement in the district.⁵² Many in Arizona, as detailed in Chapter 2, found this approach to education not only inappropriate but also threatening, especially to White people.⁵³ This White backlash – or Whitelash if you will – has followed Chicana/o Studies since its creation.⁵⁴

Part of this handwringing is that historically, Chicana/o Studies programs have operated differently from nearly all other academic disciplines,⁵⁵ and the TUSD MAS program was true to this legacy.⁵⁶ As Juan Gomez-Quiñones succinctly argued, “Validity for Chicano Studies is self-knowledge, community knowledge and social change.”⁵⁷ Thus, and in stark contrast to the images of higher education and the ivory tower, Chicana/o Studies tends to have a strong connection to local communities.⁵⁸ Additionally, community knowledge is seen as valid, moving beyond the ways that traditional, White academic work is done.⁵⁹ There is frequently an applied nature to the work that is specifically dedicated to working with marginalized communities to challenge oppressive social circumstances and structures.⁶⁰ Gomez-Quiñones, writing in 1974, further defined Chicana/o Studies in terms of its liberatory purpose as well as the predictable backlash it provoked: “When authentic to the historical condition and the contemporary state of the Chicano community, Chicano Studies is indeed a mirror and a call to action. Those who do not like the reflection are bothered by the call. They would prefer to break the mirror, stifle the call, or simply play dumb.”⁶¹

His description of the mirror and the reaction that Chicana/o Studies causes could have been taken out of its 1970s Southern California context, put in the late 2000s Tucson one, and have been just as valid. It shows the potential power of Chicana/o Studies as an avenue of community-based, educational self-determination, as well as how that type of work threatens the powers that be.

Chicana/o Studies in general, and MAS in particular, involves a radical redefinition of education as it overtly acknowledged the cultural and political aspects of teaching. To effectively do this type of education, it requires teachers to blur the lines between the school and the community so the educator can truly understand the community context of their students.⁶² While this connection to community beyond the ivory tower has been waning in recent years,⁶³ it is still a foundational component of Chicana/o Studies in particular and Ethnic Studies in general. It was also this general philosophy that led to some of the central features of the MAS program.⁶⁴ It was also a curriculum that explicitly centered race and racism among other forms of oppression in an effort to racismize the classroom.⁶⁵ To this end, works of Critical Race Theory such as Delgado and Stefancic’s seminal text Critical Race Theory: An Introduction – a text used in many law schools and in education schools throughout the country – was used in some MAS classes and would later be fiercely criticized by the state and banned by the district.⁶⁶ As we remarked earlier, the ushering in of the Trump administration propelled much of the rest of the country to catch up to circa 2010 Arizona. Thus, it was not surprising when Trump signed a 2020 order banning federal trainings that employed “divisive concepts”⁶⁷ that have been associated with Critical Race Theory. This 2020 Executive Order eerily mirrored the actions of Arizona state legislators in 2010, and though the Biden administration quickly rescinded it,⁶⁸ Arizona and other state legislators revived aspects of the “divisive concepts” ban, seeking to forbid them in public education.⁶⁹

It may be surprising to some that the creators of the MAS program would use college-level texts because the students who took these classes tended to be the ones who the district gave up on. Their grades prior to taking the MAS courses were extremely low, hovering around a 2.0 GPA.⁷⁰ Instead of lowering expectations for these students, the MAS teachers and administrators resisted the urge to make them “remedial classes” and instead challenged the students. Oddly, this became a point of contention for critics of MAS, whether the texts offered were “age appropriate.”⁷¹ If texts are good enough for college students, and sometimes graduate students, why is it a problem if high school students also read them? Nowhere did this central question become more contentious than in the incorporation of Paulo Freire into the MAS program.

The Brazilian Boogeyman: Paulo Freire

The use of the work of the Brazilian critical theorist Paulo Freire⁷² became one of the greatest points of contention as critics such as Tom Horne continually criticized the use of Freire’s work, even mislabeling the classic text Pedagogy of the Oppressed⁷³ as the “pedagogy of oppression” in a public document while also claiming to have read the book.⁷⁴ Horne centered a great deal of his criticism of the MAS program around the use of this text, even as he continued to get the title wrong,⁷⁵ including in his widely circulated Open Letter to the Citizens of Tucson.⁷⁶

For those not familiar with this book, some context is necessary. First, Paulo Freire is largely considered the second-most important educational theorist of the twentieth century behind only John Dewey.⁷⁷ His work is centrally concerned with education that supports radical democratic possibilities as well as human freedom.⁷⁸ Freire’s work is assigned in the most prestigious colleges of education in the US,⁷⁹ but it is worth noting that his work can also be very difficult to read because of its abstract nature and sometimes convoluted writing style.

One of the authors of this book, Cabrera, has lectured on the MAS controversy throughout the country. As part of many lectures, he would tell audience members that in some of the MAS courses, high school students would read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which often prompted a collective gasp among many education scholars and students. An audience member once said, “Shoot, I’m a third-year doc student, and I still struggle to get through that book!” The overall point is that the MAS teachers using this text were teaching graduate-school-level texts in a high school class, challenging students to both read and apply the lessons in their everyday lives.⁸⁰ This, in-and-of-itself, is a remarkable educational feat that should be commended and replicated – not condemned.

What, then, did Horne find so objectionable in Pedagogy of the Oppressed? He continually referred to Freire as a “Brazilian Marxist,” an accurate description that Horne thought ought to be the end of the conversation.⁸¹ For him, and a number of MAS critics, simply saying “Marxist” was a sufficient critique, at least for their political base and readership. Interestingly, they were not concerned with Freire’s radical humanism rooted in his Catholic faith and the teachings of Jesus.⁸² A more accurate description of Freire’s work is that it is an unusual melding of Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, with all of the strange, sometimes contradictory, beauty that this union produces. Instead, a large part of the attacks on MAS were rooted in a modern-day McCarthyism – a “Brown Scare,” if you will – meant to paint those associated with the program as anti-American, subversive, and dangerous.⁸³ This is not unexpected because the formation of MAS was directly linked to the activism of the 1960s that created the community demands for Ethnic Studies, and those activists in their time were also attacked in similar ways as Communist, subversive, anti-American, and White hating.⁸⁴ From this context, those attacking the program continually argued that student achievement was irrelevant in this controversy, and the primary messenger was the office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Student Achievement Doesn’t Matter Here: Programmatic Efficacy and Official Dismissal

Jose Gonzalez, an MAS teacher, described what he and his co-teachers attempted: “What our program did, really, was focus on identity and making sure that students’ identify was affirmed. If students have a sense of self, who they are, and they’re proud of it, then they do well academically.”⁸⁵ He knew, at least anecdotally, that his students benefited from the program. However, it was strange that given the existence of Ethnic Studies in K-12 educational settings since the late 1960s, there had not been a thorough, robust, statistical analysis of any program’s efficacy to date when the TUSD MAS controversy arose. This was, in large part, because Ethnic Studies courses tended to be standalone offerings, not a coordinated department like the one in Tucson. As Christine Sleeter demonstrated in her review of the literature on the impacts of Ethnic Studies courses, “Only one school district – Tucson Unified Public Schools – has a full-fledged ethnic studies program” and it was eliminated shortly after her review was released.⁸⁶ Thus, it makes sense that there was a severe lack of evidence around Ethnic Studies programs because there was concurrently a severe lack of these programs in existence. That said, there is another layer to this issue. Prior to the elimination of the TUSD MAS program in 2010, Dean Ronald Marx, and Associate Dean Jeffrey Milem from the University of Arizona College of Education made an offer to TUSD Superintendent John Pedicone. They would conduct the statistical analyses of the MAS program free of charge. All Dr. Pedicone had to do was agree to release the data. He refused.

Up to this point, there had been several analyses of the TUSD program that pointed to the program’s efficacy.⁸⁷ However, the statistics provided were descriptive in nature and not capable of actually determining, quantifiably, the program’s impact on students who took it. For example, when it was repeatedly shown using descriptive statistics that MAS students passed state standardized tests and graduated at higher rates than their peers,⁸⁸ critics of the program would offer questions such as:

• While the students in the MAS program tend to be low-income Mexican Americans, how do we know that the teachers and administrators didn’t simply find the best performing students in this demographic and push them to take these courses?

• We know that female students tend to perform better academically than male students. How do we know that the teachers and administrators didn’t simply recruit more female students into these classes and that accounts for these results?

From a scholarly perspective, these questions are important and relevant. The difficulty is that they were rarely lodged from a place of concern for rigorous empirical analyses. Rather, they were meant to shut down the debate about programmatic efficacy, even as they raised legitimate points.

Additionally, there was a major political hurdle in this debate about programmatic efficacy. Tom Horne was clear that he thought the possibility that MAS might raise student achievement, in particular for low-income Mexican American students, was irrelevant. Specifically, he said the following in the documentary Precious Knowledge: “There are better ways to get students to perform academically and wanting them to go into college than trying to infuse them with racial ideas.”⁸⁹

He added later: “And, uh, anybody who says kids can’t learn unless they’re subject (sic) to that kind of militancy is … is … uh … the clearest example of racism that I can think of.”⁹⁰

In both quotations, Horne primarily focused on the “radical ideas” in the course that he found objectionable, and he dismissed educational achievement. He went so far as to say that if people believed MAS was the way to educate Mexican American students, this was itself a form of racism.

A consummate politician, Horne wanted the issue of educational achievement out of the MAS debate. The optics are terrible when a State Superintendent of Public Instruction continues to publicly state that educational achievement is irrelevant within an educational controversy. Attempting to bolster his position, Horne commissioned a fatally flawed study that showed no beneficial effect of taking MAS courses,⁹¹ but this was almost an afterthought for him in the debate about MAS. Leading up to the eventual elimination of the classes, more analyses questioning the efficacy of MAS began to emerge. For example, TUSD released a descriptive report whose author argued that the effects of taking MAS classes were the same as participating in extra-curricular activities such as sports or student government.⁹²

The timing of this report being conducted and released was curious because it coincided with increased political pressure on TUSD and a hearing before an administrative law judge (ALJ) in which TUSD was claiming that it was not in violation of HB 2281 and therefore should not lose 10 percent of its funding. That is, the very people tasked with defending the program and local control against the racist attacks of the state – TUSD Superintendent Pedicone and data manager/analyst David Scott – were actively participating in undermining the program by undercutting arguments regarding its efficacy. An interesting point about their analysis was that it was also descriptive in nature and, therefore, not capable of assessing impact. This became the larger context for the definitive analysis on the MAS program’s educational efficacy, which became the basis for Nolan Cabrera’s expert testimony in the federal trial, which we examine in detail in Chapter 11. But at this stage of the story, the overall point is that what ought to have been at the center of this issue – educational opportunities for Mexican American students – was continually dismissed as irrelevant.

Resistance Is in Our DNA

Even though the question of programmatic efficacy remained unresolved, students, teachers, and community activists knew there was something special about the MAS program. It was worth fighting for. People in the community were beginning to realize that the classes were not simply facts and trivia, but as what MAS teacher Curtis Acosta refers to as Quetzalcoatl, precious and beautiful knowledge.⁹³ The state’s attacks were more than simply the elimination of a set of courses, but rather, criminalizing and erasing community-based knowledge.⁹⁴

Despite the incredible odds against the people of Tucson‚ the power and resources of the state of Arizona demanding the classes be eliminated – people in the community were not going to simply accept this edict. Instead, they organized. While the Chicano blowouts in 1960s Los Angeles received the bulk of the historical attention,⁹⁵ similar blowouts occurred in Tucson during that time as well.⁹⁶ The demands were similar, and the spirit of activism and resistance lives on in the Old Pueblo to this day. Part of the reason for this is that Tucson is small, for a city, and historical memory persists. While this means that people in Tucson are frequently closely connected, it also means that grievances that went unaddressed during this organizing persist to this day like open wounds. Historically, this has been part of radical coalition politics for decades.⁹⁷ Despite these tensions, internal issues, and a repressive state demanding the elimination of the program, people resisted. Despite the divides in the community, people showed up at local rallies to support MAS and shouted, in unison, “When our education’s under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!!!”

But when Brown people assert themselves, when they speak and demand justice, when they stop knowing their place, it can give a fright to those who had become comfortable with, and benefit from, the status quo.