English-Only Push Revisits Arizona’s Cultural Divide

Three decades ago, this desert city was the birthplace of the national bilingual education movement, a point of pride among many Latinos here. For them, Spanish-language classrooms are as much a part of the local landscape as the saguaro cactus.

This year, Ron Unz came to Tucson launching a voter initiative that would do away with bilingual education in Arizona, a plan nearly identical to the one he wrote and California voters approved last year.

But what really riles the bilingual faithful is that Unz has the support of a small group of disaffected Latino residents: teachers, parents and grandparents, some of them natives of Mexico. They invited the Silicon Valley millionaire here to help jump-start their pro-English cause.

“I came across [the border] when I was 9,” said Hector Ayala, 43, a high school teacher and co-founder of English for the Children of Arizona, which is part of an umbrella group based in California. “None of us got bilingual education. . . . We suspect that we got a lousy education, but our English was there. We became Anglos.”

Critics of bilingual education argue that Spanish-language instruction is the chief cause of the poor performance of Latinos in Arizona public schools.

The presence of Latinos like Ayala in the forefront of English for the Children has added an especially bitter and personal element to the debate here.

Each side has a radically different notion of what it means to be educated as a Latino in the United States. Their debates about the merits of Spanish instruction often drift to seemingly tangential issues of culture and identity--the presence of the Mexican flag in some classrooms, for instance, and the teaching of “Hispanic studies” in Tucson schools.

When English for the Children launched its drive in January to qualify the initiative for the 2000 ballot, angry Chicano activists descended upon their small press conference, shouting a variety of ethnic slurs. “Malinchistas!” they yelled, a reference to the 16th-century Indian woman who helped the Spanish conquer Mexico.

Alejandra Sotomayor, head of the Tucson Assn. for Bilingual Education, called the local English for the Children group “fanatical.” Sotomayor, a bilingual teacher, said: “They want to go back to what they know, when people kept their places. They don’t want to face the future, which is that there’s a lot of Spanish-speaking people in this country.”

State Seen as New Land of Opportunity

Arizona is the first state in which Unz has sponsored an anti-bilingual education initiative since his June victory in California, when Proposition 227 won 61% of the vote. Unz contributed about $750,000 to that campaign.

Unz said it will take less than $100,000 to get the Arizona initiative on the ballot. He is considering an initiative in Colorado. Two other states with large Spanish-speaking populations, Texas and New York, do not have the initiative process.

For Unz, Arizona represents an opportunity that never materialized in California: the presence of an organized Latino group willing to be at the forefront of his movement. “I’ve been very impressed by how many very credible spokespeople we have early [in the campaign] in the Latino community.”

In California, the debate over bilingual education took place against the politically charged climate sparked by the passage of two earlier measures: Proposition 187, which sought to cut services to illegal immigrants, and Proposition 209, which targeted affirmative action programs.

Unz believes the perception that Proposition 227 was the latest in a string of attacks on Latinos cost him support. More than 60% of Latinos voted against the initiative.

“Arizona never had the immigration wars that California had,” he said. “In California, we were disappointed that a lot of Latinos we talked to in private who were supportive never came out to support us publicly.”

Some Say Outsider Taking Advantage

There are plenty of people in Tucson and elsewhere, however, who plan to cast the Arizona initiative precisely as another episode in the nation’s culture wars. For them, Unz is playing the role of the white millionaire from California, a man out to erase an important victory of the Chicano civil rights movement.

“Mr. Unz is taking advantage of this small group,” said Gus Chavez, 50, a college counselor. “He doesn’t understand that he’s walking into a city that has a proud history. This city has been bilingual, and this city will continue to be bilingual.”

It was a group of Tucson educators who drafted the 1965 study that helped lead to federal legislation subsidizing bilingual programs. Their report, “The Invisible Minority,” concluded that the monolingual English classes contributed to an “inferiority complex” among Mexican American children.

“The harm done the Mexican American child linguistically is paralleled . . . by the harm done to him as a person,” the report said.

It was in this environment that a generation of Tucsonians like Sotomayor and Chavez were educated. Back then, Spanish-speaking students of all ages were placed in remedial classes called “1C.”

“If we were lucky, we were promoted to first grade,” said Leonard Basurto, who now runs Tucson’s bilingual education programs.

Eventually, Tucson and other Southwest cities adopted most of the recommendations in the invisible minority report. Culturally sensitive curriculum was developed, Spanish-speaking instructors were hired.

Those gains were pushed through by a generation of activists who embraced the term “Chicano” as an edgier synonym for Mexican American. They left their stamp on Tucson in other ways, forcing the city to build the El Rio Neighborhood Center for barrio youth next to the exclusive El Rio Country Club. Artists painted colorful murals at the center celebrating their Aztec heritage.

Fast-forwarding the reel of history to 1999, a visitor would find that the desert sun has bleached many of those murals of their bright hues. And on a recent winter morning, they would have found an unlikely group staging an event there.

That Unz, Ayala and English for the Children would hold their campaign kickoff at El Rio--hallowed ground for Chicanos here--infuriated local activists. Perhaps that explains why some took to shouting “Coconuts!” (brown outside, white inside) at Unz’s Latino supporters.

One harried member of the pro-English side retorted, “Go back to Mexico!”

Maria Mendoza, a grandmother and co-founder of Arizona’s English for the Children, wasn’t a bit perturbed by the catcalls.

“They told me I was selling out my race,” she said. “I feel they are the ones selling out the children.”

In the 1970s, Mendoza was a plaintiff in a landmark desegregation suit against the Tucson Unified School District that led to a busing program and the hiring of more Latino administrators.

“I believed that once we put [Latinos] in these positions, they would be able to dictate changes,” she said. “Now we’re fighting our own race. How do you like them apples?”

The group’s detractors say that in recent years Mendoza had become little more than a gadfly who spoke out at meetings of the school board, to little effect. Then she met Unz.

“It’s not a grass-roots group,” Basurto said.

English for the Children activists said they have a mailing list of 300 parents who support their cause, including some in Phoenix and Nogales. Most, however, are residents of Tucson’s barrio, a collection of dusty neighborhoods beneath Sentinel Peak.

One of those parents is Amparo Martinez, a 34-year-old mother of two and Mexican immigrant from Chihuahua. She said it took her a year of hassles to get her 7-year-old son transferred to an English classroom.

The family has lived in Tucson for six years and her son is fluent in English, she said. But in his classroom, “the only thing they would do in English is salute the flag.”

Ayala said he finds it ironic that many of the most fervent supporters of bilingual education are, unlike the Martinez family, second-generation Mexican Americans whose own Spanish has atrophied.

“The Chicanos harbor this romantic notion that they want to maintain their culture and their language even though they never had it themselves,” Ayala said. “In their longing for it, they’re forcing it on the kids.”

Tucson school officials like Basurto argue that studies show bilingual education is the best way to teach immigrant children English. (The Tucson district is 43% Latino, and about 1 in 5 students is in bilingual education.) In the years since “English immersion” was eliminated, dropout rates have declined. Still, the district’s own statistics show that, of the 12,000 students in bilingual classrooms, only 3.2% learned enough last year to be “reclassified” as English-fluent.

The state school chief, Lisa Graham Keegan, has called bilingual education in Arizona “a mess,” badly in need of reform.

For Gloria Martinez, a supporter of English for the Children, the “mess” is mixed up with the “Mexicanization” of Tucson schools. Among other things, she is upset that her grandson’s school did not teach him the meaning of Veterans Day--Martinez’s husband, Gilbert, served in Vietnam.

Instead, she said, “my grandson came in with a Mexican flag. I was so mad I tore it up. . . . We will continue to fight to take back our school to make it an American school for our American children.”

To qualify their initiative for the ballot, English for the Children will have to gather 110,000 signatures. For now, however, the small Tucson group isn’t circulating many petitions.

“It’s a little slow. We haven’t been able to get too many people” to volunteer, Ayala said. “We might have to call on paid people.”