Join free-thinking Americans on Feb. 29 in a national read-in in support of the children of the Tucson Unified School District and against the outlawing of ideas.

See AZethnicstudies.com for more information.

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Arizona has always been a corridor and an oasis. For thousands of years, the proud, diverse and sometimes desperate cultures of known and unknown peoples have charted and traversed the routes of this land’s majestic rivers, canyons and deserts. The living histories and rich legacies of its Native American, European, American, Latin American, mestizo and an infinite variety of multiethnic communities have left their unforgettable marks of progress and scars of regression. Frankly, to say, “I’m an Arizonan” is an imprecise statement at best. Our state, like our nation, is a continuous invention, a brilliant but everlastingly incomplete idea. That is why “free people” must always stand vigil against the tireless agents of repression. Arizonans should know, should make themselves aware, should understand that as eternally resplendent as our sunsets may seem, we are all but migrants in time. As such, let us welcome the newcomers. It is at once a selfless and selfish act. Because we are them.

That is the clear-cut intent of an administrative judge’s ruling last week that the Mexican-American-studies program at the Tucson Unified School District violated House Bill 2281.
The law was co-written by then-state Sen. John Huppenthal, now the state public-schools superintendent. The bill was the brainchild of state Attorney General Tom Horne. Horne and Huppenthal crafted HB2281 to kill the 14-year-old TUSD program. It was shepherded through the Legislature by recently ousted Senate President Russell Pearce. Gov. Jan Brewer signed it into law.

Threatened with the loss of $15million in state funding if it did not sack its Mexican-American-studies program, the TUSD governing board voted to end it and immediately transfer hundreds of students to so-called traditional social-studies classes midsemester.
In other words, a program that taught high-school students about the history and culture of Mexican-Americans — the people with whom I share a distinct part of my heritage — has been outlawed, some say “criminalized.”

How did this happen?

To be blunt: A relatively small contingent of powerful, bigoted public officials have worked relentlessly to make it happen.

Why did it happen?

It happened because the state’s Latino population has nearly doubled in the past 20 years and the right wing is angry and afraid that it is helpless to stop it. In one generation, Latinos will be 50 percent of the state’s population and, short of declaring martial law and deporting everyone with brown skin, there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent that.

I have taught ethnic studies to university students. The courses I taught included lectures about the brutal treatment of America’s native populations, the inhumanity of Black slavery, widespread discrimination against Irish, German and Chinese immigrants, and the racist treatment of Mexican-Americans and other Latinos.

In the area of Mexican-American studies, I taught students of all ethnic backgrounds about Latino Arizona miners in the 1950s who were paid a lower wage than their White co-workers even though they did the same work.

I taught students how some Arizonans used to hang signs in front of businesses that read, “No Mexicans or dogs allowed.” I taught students how Latino World War II veterans earned medals for bravery in battle only to be told upon their return to the United States that they could not buy homes in White neighborhoods.

My goal as a teacher of ethnic studies was never to foment hatred against Whites or to promote segregation, but to simply educate students about the full breadth of American history and culture, good and bad, so they would know how far as a nation we have come — and how far we have yet to go.

I had that in common with the teachers in Tucson’s Mexican-American-studies program.
I know this because I have listened with pride to the students who took those courses as they’ve recounted how it made them believe for the first time in their worth and contributions.

The late educator and civil-rights activist Myles Horton, who helped train the likes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Congressman John Lewis, once said, “You can’t padlock an idea.”

Likewise, Mexican-American and ethnic studies are ideas. And you cannot outlaw ideas.

JG

1. What was the impetus for your creating and writing Amexica?

I’ve worked and lived along the border on and off for most of my life. My father grew up just south of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, I have family in Laredo, Brownsville, Matamoros. So I know the area well. The most significant influence, however, was the knowledge I gained as a journalist and playwright who’s paid close attention to how the people of the region are perceived. I’ve found is that most people, particularly Americans — and I’m not excluding Latinos from that mix — tend to have a very two-dimensional view of the border. It’s a view based largely on the mass media images of people climbing fence or more recently the disturbing reports of the horrific killing spree that’s occurring in Mexico as a result of the raging drug war. But the truth about the border is that it’s home to 14 million people; families, shopkeepers, cops, artists, teachers, families, normal people doing normal things. It’s also a place where tens of million every year cross legally. So, part of the motivation for telling this story is that I think it’s important that we understand the region for what it is, as opposed to the stereotype that’s been created. Beyond that, I’m incredibly fascinated with the idea that what we are watching along the border is the real-time transformation of culture and society. In many ways, the region is not quite American and not quite Mexican. It is, as the title to my play’s suggests, Amexica, an evolution, a melding, a mixing up of cultures where language, music, art, religion and economies overlap. Five hundred years ago, the border was not the border we know today. Then, it was distinctly Native American and colonialist. Today, it’s a blend of that and much, much more. And five hundred years from now, it will be something altogether new again. And it will not be, despite what the nativist in the United States believe, because of a reconquest, but because of the irrevocable march of history. As an ethnic studies professor at ASU, I’ve often told my students that if they want to know what the world along the north shores of the Mediterranean looked like in the centuries following the slow collapse of the Roman Empire, then go to the border. Just as modern-day Italy and Spain and so much of what would become modern Europe evolved from the mix that define Roman society, centuries from now the U.S.-Mexico border might well be called Amexica.

2. What do you hope audiences leave with after seeing the production?

First, as a playwright who understands that you want people not to fidget in their seats, I want audiences to enjoy the drama, the poetry, the language, the choreography and music that I’m blending in this piece. And because I consciously sought to meld poetry into the play, I also want people to experience what my co-author, Alberto Rios, describes as the lyric moments of the piece. There is a story being told here that’s about a 2,000-mile journey that my lead character, Javier, embarks upon, but there a moments in the play where time and action get suspended by a Alberto’s poetry or Michele’s choreography or the powerful and haunting original music that Quetzal’s created for the work. That’s the emotional experience I’m trying to achieve, while intellectually I hope that audiences who may know little about the border walk away with at least a little more understanding that it is a three-dimensional place with its own history and art and food and culture and force of life. As one of my character’s says in the play, “La Frontera (the border) is unlike anything to the north or south. Welcome to the Fourth World.”

JG