The Washington Post reported this week that a number of Arizona politicians, both Republican and Democratic, are deeply concerned over their state’s developing reputation for intolerance and bigotry. One interviewee, Grant Woods, a Republican former state attorney general, lamented the current state of affairs: “To be an Arizonan is to be a part of Mexico. It’s to be a part of the various Native American tribes. That’s part of our culture, the diversity. I think the people’s hearts are there, but the leaders don’t always respect that.”
While Attorney General Woods was speaking in reference to Arizona’s now-infamous immigration law, his statement is just as salient to HB 2281, a controversial new statute that bans K-12 ethnic studies programs throughout the state. Woods’ plaintive observation leapt out at me as I was in the midst of examining Arizona’s public school history standards in light of the education legislation—and discovering that the standards omit most of the last 150 years of Hispanic-American history.
In the aftermath of HB 2281’s passage Arizona public school superintendent Tom Horne defended the new law on CNN, telling interviewer Anderson Cooper that “what I’m opposed [to] is dividing kids up so they have Raza studies for the Chicano kids….African-American studies for the African-American kids, Asian studies for the Asian kids.” Horne went on to assure Cooper that Arizona’s educational standards “require that all social studies classes teach different cultures. We want all kids to be exposed to a lot of different cultures.” As a professional historian I became curious about how “Arizona’s Academic Standards for Social Studies” deals with the rich subject of Hispanic-American history.
After a careful review of Arizona’s K-12 benchmarks, I can attest to the accuracy of Superintendent Horne’s assertion, with one glaring exception: the Hispanic-American historical experience from the latter half of the 19th century onward. In this case the omissions are egregious, to the point of appearing nothing short of pathological.
We need to pause here and note that the main target of Superintendent Horne’s ire is the Tucson Unified School District’s K-12 Mexican American Studies program, whose Website informs visitors that among its goals is to provide “a counter-hegemonic curriculum” and “[a]dvocate for and provide curriculum that is centered within the Mexican American/Chicano cultural and historical experience.” Oy. The Tucson program embodies the academically dubious mission of consciousness-raising: the celebration of unique virtues and parochial monofocus embedded in the intellectual DNA of identity studies programs (although there are many individual scholars whose work is admirably rigorous).
However, part of the reason these programs emerged is because scholars were slighting minority groups’ historical experiences both in research and in the classroom. To their credit, historians have gone a long way over the past several decades toward redressing this record of scholarly omission, including Hispanic-American history, while generally avoiding the sort of feel-goodism or polemics that vex Tom Horne and other conservatives.
So if Arizona tosses out Hispanic/Mexican-American studies, what exactly is left?
It should be noted that the Arizona guidelines are actually quite good overall, marked by both breadth and admirable specificity throughout. For example, there are no fewer than six enumerated factors for teachers to cover in the seventh grade guidelines alone concerning the causes leading to the Civil War. The coverage concerning the Hispanic dimension of American history from the early Spanish colonization through the 1820s is consonant with other study areas during the same time period. Guidelines for the 1846-48 Mexican-American War are far less specific and encompassing than those for the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. But there is still room for sufficiently motivated (and well-informed) teachers to provide an adequate overview of the conflict and its controversies.
But from the post-Civil War period through the 20th century, Hispanics become virtually invisible in the Arizona standards. The result is a virtual blotting out of the historical experience of Hispanic Americans in both Arizona and the United States overall from the late 1800s through the present.
For example, when the standards deal with the emergence of the modern United States between 1875-1929, one of the guidelines meticulously deals with “changing patterns in Immigration (e.g., Ellis Island, Angel Island, Chinese Exclusion Act, Immigration Act of 1924).” But mysteriously absent is any mention of the importation of thousands of Mexican laborers to help build the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroad networks. The guidelines also neglect to mention the movement of almost 900,000 Mexicans across the U.S. border into Arizona and other Southwestern states in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. They fail to touch on the Mexican emigrants’ subsequent settlement in the US as legal residents. Indeed, there’s nothing on the Mexican Revolution itself in either the United States or world history standards, an astounding oversight considering Arizona’s proximity and the conflict’s spillover effects. Finally, the Arizona standards skirt the anti-Hispanic nativist reaction that led to the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol and efforts to limit cross-border migration.
In dealing with the Great Depression and the Second World War, there’s not a word in the standards on the mass deportations of Hispanics from Arizona and elsewhere in the Southwest under the euphemistically named “Mexican Repatriation Program”—in which upwards of 60 percent of those pushed out were U.S. citizens—or of the admission during World War II of hundreds of thousands more Mexicans to the region under the Bracero workers program. There’s a vague reference for fourth grade to “Native American and Hispanic contributions” to the war effort, but that’s as far as it goes (see below for more on American Indian versus Hispanic Arizona standards coverage). There’s nothing on the wartime anti-Mexican hostility in the Southwest that led, for example, to the “zoot suit” riots that occurred in neighboring California during the war. And it is notably odd that there is no mention of the FDR-era “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Mexico and the rest of Latin America—including why it was necessary as a corrective to previous policies in the first place.
As for the Civil Rights era, the Arizona standards duly mention Jim Crow laws, non-violent protests, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the like. But again there is nothing on the Hispanic-American experience, save for three brief references to agricultural union organizer Cesar Chavez, who led a march to the U.S.-Mexico border in 1969 to protest American growers’ use of illegal immigrants as strike breakers. (Chavez’s act has become a conservative talking point on the issue of immigration control.) The standards offer nothing on the 1954 “Operation Wetback,” the Immigration and Naturalization Service agency’s roundup of over a million illegal Mexican immigrant laborers in the Southwest, including many thousands in Arizona. They evince no awareness of the long history of the segregation of Hispanic children in Arizona’s public schools. Concomitantly, there’s no guidance concerning the court rulings that brought about the end of Hispanic school segregation, such as California’s Méndez v. Westminster (1946) and particularly the Arizona’s Federal District Court’s Gonzales v. Sheely (1951), which was the direct legal antecedent of Brown v. Board of Education.
Especially curious is the yawning gap between the Arizona standard’s coverage of Hispanic American and Native American history from the Civil War era through the early 20th century. Concerning the latter, the guidelines include the Indian Wars and the American government’s removal policies and establishment of reservations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The list of notable Native-American figures in Arizona during this period includes the likes of Chiefs Geronimo, Manuelito and Cochise. Contrast this with the complete absence of historically prominent Hispanic Arizonans like Henry Garfias, the first marshal of Phoenix, and Estevan Ochoa, the first Hispanic mayor of Tucson. (Unsurprisingly, contemporaneous Anglo-Arizonans like Charles Poston, the Arizona territory’s first Congressional delegate, and Sharlot Hall, the first woman officeholder in Arizona are listed in the standards.)
We’re left to wonder what these omissions of Hispanic Arizona and Hispanic-American history are all about. The most charitable reading is that they signify an honest—if terribly unfortunate—historiographic blind spot, rather than Anglo-Arizonan sub-nationalism, or Texas-style conservative dogmatism, or a blatant manifestation of anti-Hispanic sentiment, or rank state Republican primary politics.
In the spirit of charity, let’s assume it’s the former, rather than any of the unpleasant latters. The solution for Arizona’s public school social studies standards is thus straightforward: add in what is missing, as non-ideological historical narrative and analysis, not as polemic or ethnic esteem-building exercise. Over to you, Superintendent Horne.
Finally, the question of how to effectively integrate Hispanic-American history into social studies curricula is not merely a Southwest regional issue, but a national one. Hispanics make up over 15 percent of the total US population. There are substantial Hispanic populations in formerly unlikely states: they comprise over four percent of the population in Iowa and Minnesota, over five percent in Arkansas, and over seven percent in North Carolina, and a slightly higher percentage in Wyoming (Wyoming!), where Hispanics outnumber African-Americans, American Indians and Asians put together. There are more Hispanics than Asians in Washington State (9.8 versus 6.7 percent, respectively) and more Hispanics than blacks in Alaska (6.1 versus 4.3 percent).
Arizona’s problems dealing with the Hispanic historical experience in the United States should spur all of the states to review their history standards on the subject. Hispanic-American history is American history, and all of the nation’s public school students, and concomitantly the American commonweal, will benefit from a straightforward, nuanced examination of the subject and its complexities. Hispanic schoolchildren across the country will have an enhanced context for their residency and citizenship, which in turn can only aid the acculturative and assimilative process that some worry is inhibited in the Hispanic community. Just as important, they and all other students will add significantly to their understanding of America’s grand, tortuous, ongoing story of E Pluribus Unum.