Organizers from Unidos, a youth group that opposes the Mexican-American studies ban that went in to affect January 1st in Tucson, have started organizing their own weekly ethnic studies classes.

“We’re teaching the traditional curriculum, if a student was in the Mexican American history perspective classes they defaulted to a traditional history class,” Sean Arce told Feet in Two Worlds. Arce is the co-founder and director of the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American studies program.

“We want to plant a seed, to keep learning about our history and culture,” Jesus Romero a member of Unidos told Feet in Two Worlds.

Sixty percent of the over 55,000 students in the Tucson school district are Latino.

Below are images courtesy of Chris Summitt.

Republican Congressman David Rivera last week filed the Adjusted Residency for Military Service (ARMS) Act, H.R. 3823, that will provide undocumented immigrants who entered this country as children a path to legalization if they join the military.

“If these young people are willing to die for America, then certainly they deserve a chance at life in America,” Rivera said in a statement.

“Currently, long-term United States residents who entered this country as children, and who do not have a legal status, cannot enlist in the United States military. The Adjusted Residency for Military Service, or ARMS, Act would give them the opportunity to serve in the United States Armed Forces and earn legal status in America,” Rivera went on to say in a statement.

Rivera’s ARMS Act comes after both leading GOP presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney said they would support a version of the DREAM Act if it only included the military component.

“In recent days undocumented youth I’ve spoken with have asked why it is that the only way they can serve the country they’ve grown up in is by joining the military. Undocumented youth argue that they are fully capable of serving the country in many other ways,” Colorlines.com immigration reporter Julianne Hing said after Gingrich made his nuanced statement about the DREAM Act.

Gingrich avoided the draft and has not served in the military. Romney, did not serve in the military but did serve the Mormon Church on a 30-month mission to France.

When Chester Brown learned he had been recruited to University Of Georgia’s football team he was so excited that he got the commitment date tattooed on his left forearm. That tattoo will now also serve as constant reminder of the date the Samoan-born offensive lineman had to decommit himself because he couldn’t prove his immigration status in the United States.

An anti-immigrant measure passed by the state Board of Regents in 2010 requires “the verification of a student’s lawful presence in the United States” in order to enroll in any of the state’ public universities. Brown’s family is unable to produce any documentation, according to ESPN’s college football blog.

And it gets more complicated because most people didn’t know Brown was undocumented and he suffered humiliation when he decommitted. More details from ESPN:

Brown, who attends the Bradwell Institute in Hinesville, Ga., initially cited “personal reasons” for decommitting, saying that he didn’t want “anything bad to happen to me, anything bad to happen to my family and most of all I don’t want anything bad to happen to Georgia.”

But Brown had no choice, said a family spokesperson, who added that the decision left him heartbroken after developing relationships with Georgia recruits, coaches and members of the team. He had been talking up the Bulldogs to other would-be Georgia commitments for the Class of 2012 for months.

“It has been rough on Chester,” the Brown family spokesperson said Tuesday night. “He went to school today and he just got bashed from all of these teachers calling him dumb and stupid for decommitting. He came home and just cried. And they don’t know the situation.”

Brown’s family emigrated from Samoa in the mid-1990s and lived in Long Beach, Calif., upon arriving in the United States. “They moved to Hinesville in 2004, attempting to escape the crime and gang activity that was prevalent in their community,” ESPN reports.

“As far as inside the state of Georgia, there is no way. It is just going to run into a dead end. There is nothing else we can do,” a family spokesperson told ESPN about Brown’s college options. “What I am hearing, and (what) coach Ball told Chester today, was, ‘Get ready, because big-name colleges are coming after you. You will see what I am talking about.’ “

Georgia is the second state, after South Carolina, to enact a ban on undocumented students at public colleges.

On Jan. 1, Arizona’s ban on the Mexican American Studies curriculum used in Tucson high schools went into effect. The weeks since have been marked by confusion and backtracking as the district leaders and teachers scramble to comply with the state law. The fight is far from over, though, with a federal lawsuit pending and ongoing organizing taking place.

Initially, the Tucson Unified School District Board of Education seemed poised to refuse compliance. But it quickly caved when State Superintendent John Huppenthal, who thought up this whole thing, slapped the district with a $4.9 million penalty by cutting its state funding retroactively to last August.

How do you get rid of a program that has, by all educational standards, been successful for more than a decade? Apparently, the first step is to strip that curriculum of the material that gives it heft. This week, the district began removing seven books from MAS classrooms, which were boxed up and stored in a warehouse where books go to die. That list includes “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” “Rethinking Columbus,” “Critical Race Theory,” Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and “Chicano!: the History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.”

The removal is to be thorough–teachers are not allowed to keep even personal copies of these books in their classrooms. Students and teachers described their fear and heartbreak at an emotional community meeting over the past weekend.

It isn’t just the books but also the context in which they are being taught that is problematic for the district. As the list has made its way around the country, the district immediately objected to accusations of banning books. In a statement, the district said that it had not banned the books, but simply removed them from classes that had been banned. The books could still be found in other classrooms across the district, and in its libraries.

Jeff Biggers, who has done excellent, consistent journalism on this issue, reported the following availability: two copies of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” one copy of “Critical Race Theory” in the online catalog and of 16 in-district copies of “Rethinking Columbus,” none are in Tucson High School, the home of the Mexican American Studies curriculum.
So these books can still be read and taught, says the district, just not in the context of Mexican American Studies and racial politics.

That is the problem, for instance, with “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s play about colonialism and slavery. Teacher Curtis Acosta, who designed much of the banned curriculum and led its implementation, recorded a meeting with district administrators last Wednesday. Everyone is clearly confused, and trying to protect the district. So administrators tell Acosta in the meeting that it would be best not to teach “The Tempest” using the “nexus of race, class and oppression” or “issues of critical race theory.”

In an interview with Biggers, Acosta notes that he was told to avoid texts and lessons with race or oppression as central themes. He further notes that there may be penalties if students independently address these themes: “We also have not received confirmation that the ideas, dialogue, and class work of our students will be protected…. if I avoid discussing such themes in class, yet the students see the themes and decide to write, discuss or ask questions in class, we may also be found to be in violation.”

Three things strike me about this situation.

First, I’m impressed with the rigor of this curriculum. I have read most of these books, and the “Critical Race Theory” anthology is challenging even for me, with 25 years of such theory and a lot of practice under my belt. No wonder this program raised grades and graduation rates so successfully.

Second, I think of books as living entities that come alive when a reader engages them. It hurts me to think of lonely books stuck in storage.

Finally, and most importantly, I understand that in this process, the state and the district will come up with all kinds of maneuvers to replace this curriculum against the will of the teachers, administrators, students and parents who have benefitted in myriad ways from its existence. The powers that be will constantly make and unmake regulations because there is no easy way to do this. All that inconsistency will make no difference to the Hornes and Huppenthals and Brewers who put it in place, because their objective has already been met–to put the Mexican American community on the defensive by reinforcing its un-American image, and to prevent any progressive discussion of racial politics in the state. They aren’t opposed to racial politics, just to a brand that counters their own.

When I was in Tucson last fall with the CultureStrike delegation, I toured historic South Tucson with Salomon Baldenegro, a local civil rights hero who is featured in “Chicano!”. Baldenegro, now in his 60s, told us he was an early reader and fluent English speaker, but when he started school, all kids of Mexican descent, no matter how deep their roots in Arizona, were put into Americanization programs where they “learned” English and American games. When Baldenegro’s mom registered him for school, the principal tested his reading. The little boy read out loud a book for first graders, then one for second graders and then one for third graders. The principal accused him of having memorized all the books and refused to put him in the proper class for his level. Some 60 years later, the state of Arizona, having had to desegregate its schools, has come up with a new way to Americanize Mexican Americans.

The state will fail, just as they did with Baldenegro’s generation. Tucson activists, while understandably angry and disappointed, project an optimism that we often don’t expect from people who have been so put upon for so long, and they are far from giving up. But they can’t protect their right to knowledge alone. The rest of us need to back them up, by following their fight, by talking to our own friends and neighbors about it, and by taking action when we are asked.

On Wednesday, a group of students at UC Riverside presented a proposal to UC President Mark Yudof that would abolish tuition – and he’s actually considering it.

“We will give it a close look,” Yudoff said after praising the students’ “constructive idea,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

“I have directed Executive Vice President Nathan Brostrom and our best number crunchers to review it thoroughly,” Yudoff went on to say.

The University of California system is the state’s public university system with a combined student body of about 235,000 students. In recent years it’s seen it’s state and federal funding diminish and it’s instituted regular tuition increases. They’ve also eliminated course sections, initiated staff lay offs and skip maintenance projects. (UC Police have also been busy pepper spraying students.)

The plan the students have devised could actually result with UC system getting billions of more dollars in the end. The San Francisco Chronicle describes the UC Student Investment Proposal”:

Instead of paying tuition – currently at $12,192, not including mandatory fees, room, board or books – the “UC Student Investment Proposal” would require that students commit to paying 5 percent of their annual income for 20 years after graduating.

“Under this plan, no undergraduate student would have to worry about paying for their UC education while they are in school,” Chris LoCascio, president of Fix UC – the group of UC Riverside students that developed the idea – said in a presentation to the regents.

The students calculate that, under the most conservative estimates, UC could triple its revenue over the next two decades to $4.6 billion. The plan would be phased in over several years, and students say UC would begin receiving more income from graduates than from tuition by year seven.

The Chronicle crunched the numbers and found that a UC graduate making an annual salary of $50,000 for 20 years would end up paying $50,000 for tuition in the end–slightly more than the $48,768 they would currently pay over four years if UC tuition were frozen at its current level.