Tucson Freedom Summer, Or 5 Ways to Fight Back Against an
Unjust Law

by Julianne Hing

ColorLines
July 11 2012

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/07/tucson_freedom_summer.html

Arizona's ethnic studies ban may have shut down Tucson's
Mexican American Studies classes. But this summer in the
southern Arizona city, class is in session. Educators are
holding weekend community forums to educate the city about
the now-banned ethnic studies courses.

It's just one component of what's being called the Tucson
Freedom Summer, a month of events geared toward engaging
Tucson to fight back against the law and revive the program
it targeted. The idea for a month of civic engagement and
community awareness activities was borne out of the need to
keep the fight alive. Tucson Unified shut down the Mexican
American Studies program in January, and since then, the
resistance has been multi-pronged and endlessly creative.
But as educators remain embroiled in a legal fight to
challenge HB 2281, the community needed to come together to
find other ways to resist.

"The emphasis this summer is on building community," said
Ernesto Mireles, an adjunct professor from Michigan State
University and the Tucson Freedom Summer's primary
organizer. "They've been through a period of really militant
direct action to fight back against the ban. The push is to
keep the whole movement going."

So Mireles, with a group of students and dozens of
organizers around the country have descended on Tucson.
Here's what they're doing.

Asking the Community What It Needs First

Organizers of the Tucson Freedom Summer acknowledged they
couldn't start their work without figuring out where the
community is at. So they're going to canvass people to find
out. The goal is to knock on 40,000 doors by the end of the
summer, and just over a week into the month they've hit more
than 3,000, said Sean Arce, the former director of Tucson's
Mexican American Studies program.

Mireles expects that over 100 activists and organizers from
around the country will arrive in town to help with the
canvassing and phone banking. Their surveys begin with a
basic question: do you believe the Tucson Unified School
District is being responsive to our children's needs?

Canvassers are compiling data and bringing their information
back for analysis, which they hope will inform their work
going forward. "As a result of this canvassing I believe
there will be some very rich data and we'll have a real
clear perspective on how we can further engage our
communities," said Arce.

Teachers Can Teach Without a Classroom

In between the door-knocking and voter registration, every
Sunday educators are holding community encuentros, public
education forums. The first Sunday's session was led by
three former Mexican American Studies teachers who discussed
the documented educational benefits of ethnic studies
courses.

Also on the lineup are sessions about bilingual education,
the educational inequities Latino youth face, and the
school-to-prison pipeline. They're all going to be taught by
people who used to teach Tucson's Mexican American Studies
classes, including the recently ousted director of the
program, Sean Arce.

"There are racial disparities that exist in our schools, and
based on the studies that we've done, ethnic studies has
done a lot to eliminate them, whether it be academic
achievement or discipline disparities," Arce said. He hopes
the forums will help educate the community about the power
of ethnic studies as a tool to educate and empower the
district's youth.

Treating Everyone Like a Potential Voter

The ultimate purpose of the civic engagement and forums,
Mireles said, will be to leverage the community's political
power come Election Day. Mireles hopes the canvassing will
help inform local activists about the community's needs so
they can begin to make informed demands on their local
politicians.

Among the big races organizers are watching this fall are
several seats on Tucson's school board.

"we're focused on the school board race," Mireles said.
"There are three board members up, and all of them have
voted to get rid of Mexican American Studies." Mireles said
that for a community of people of color who are not wealthy,
leveraging their power through the electoral process is a
key part of their strategy to change the game. Voter
registration and get out of the vote efforts are on the
calendar for later this summer and into fall.

"we're not millionaires. We don't have a lot of money, but
what we do have is people. The important thing is figuring
out how to move them," he said.

Bringing Art to the People with La Cultura Cura

The cultural is political, as well. Tucson Freedom Summer is
holding music, poetry and art events alongside its
canvassing and civic engagement work. One of the events will
be a two-day poster-making workshop led by political artists
and activists Favianna Rodriguez and Julio Salgado later
this month.

For Rodriguez, it's about more than sharing her visual
communication talents. "Art offers a way to share a vision
for the kind of community we want to create," she said. "Art
can be the tool to expose an issue and fight back. And art
can serve to mobilize others."

The workshop, which is a project of Culture Strike, will be
just one of the many cultural components to the month.
Locals are emphatic that art is central to the work. "Art
has always been a critical component in any social movement,
and it's central to what we're trying to do here," Arce
said.

"Culture speaks to people's hearts, in a way that policy and
legislation cannot," Rodriguez said, "visual art in
particular ... can offer people an alternative way to see
the world."

Cracking Open Those Banned Books

Arizona's Mexican American Studies crackdown included a list
of banned books which were removed from Tucson classrooms.
Shakespeare, Sherman Alexie and Luis Alberto Urrea were
among the authors whose books were deemed too incendiary for
public instruction, boxed up and banned from Tucson's ethnic
studies classes.

Writers whose works were stricken from course curricula
spoke out. Outraged activists called for "wet-book" caravans
to transport those titles back into the city.

But the downtown branch of the Pima County Library hosted a
book club whose reading list was built off those banned
books. The Mexican American Studies Book Club, organized by
recent University of Arizona Ph.D. graduate Marissa Juarez,
held its first meeting in May. As Arce says, his work as an
educator is about practicing the lessons of the textbooks he
assigned his students.

Their first book club selection? Paulo Freire's seminal
work, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed."

[Julianne Hing is a reporter and blogger for Colorines.com
covering immigration, education, criminal justice, and
occasionally fashion and pop culture. In 2009 Julianne was
the recipient of USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and
Journalism fellowship, which funded a reporting project on
the impacts of criminal deportation on immigrant families.
She has covered police brutality issues from Oakland to New
Orleans and in the summer of 2010 reported for Colorlines
from the courtroom where Oscar Grant's killer, BART cop
Johannes Mehserle, faced trial. Julianne became politically
active in high school, and started organizing students in
college around access and affordability issues. She earned
her B.A. in social ecology at the University of California,
Irvine, where she edited Jaded magazine, named 2007
Publication of the Year by Campus Progress. Julianne's
writing has appeared on AlterNet, Truthout, Hyphen
Magazine's blog, The American Prospect's blog TAPPED and Ta-
Nehisi Coates' blog at The Atlantic, Racialicious, The Root
and New America Media.]

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