MARCELO GONZALEZ was born in Michoacan, Mexico, and for many years worked the migrant labor-stream from Texas to Chicago
with his family. He has worked with several activist organizations in Texas and California and is presently an immigration counselor at One Stop Immigration Center in Los Angeles, California.
________________________________
While students throughout Mexico were campaigning for
democratic rights in the late ’60s, Chicano/Mexican youth in the U.S. were also taking to the streets to protest police
brutality and job discrimination, the Vietnam War and second-rate education. This article examines the struggle for a decent education by Mexicans in the U.S. and focuses on a blatant but little-known example of its denial – the current move by Texas schools and courts to deny free public education to approximately 50,000 children they label “illegal aliens. “
Along with the recent Bakke ruling, and the “tax revolt”
cutbacks in social services taking place in many states, the Texas offensive against undocumented immigrants is a direct
attack against one of the most oppressed sectors of the U.S. working class and, this article argues, must be stopped with a unified and militant response.
For many decades education has been a central and largely unfulfilled demand of minorities living and working in the United States. Education has been sought as a way to rise out of the worst paid and unstable jobs, to aid in breaking through the false and racist consciousness of capitalist society, and to prepare men and women who can both serve
and lead their working class communities. These goals have stood up in sharp contrast to education as practiced in the U.S.: segregated, uncritical of established institutions, and with minorities and the poor in general denied access to higher education and trained instead for menial jobs.
Mexicans in the U.S. (*) in particular have concentrated much of their organizational efforts since the ’60s on insuring an education for their youth – a relevant bilingual and bicultural education to meet the special needs of their community.
_________________________________________
(*)The term “Mexicans in the U.S.” in this article refers to Chicanos and Mexican-Americans.
_________________________________________
The U.S. government has made some concessions under pressure from blacks, latinos, native Americans and other minorities, and implemented several significant reforms in the educational system. Partly as a result of special minority admissions programs and scholarships from President Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” the percentage of Mexican students enrolled in
California colleges rose from less than one-tenth of one percent in 1965 to 6.2 percent in 1970 – an important gain, but still a far cry from the 16 percent they comprise of California’s population.(1)
Relevant education, however, and school systems that respond to the needs of the particular minorities have not been secured and appear to be even more out of reach than they
were ten years ago. Recent events during the current economic recession indicate a pattern of serious cutbacks and reversals of the few concessions won in the ’60s and ’70s. The reversals reflect what the NAACP has called “a neo-conservative blanket that quietly but steadily creeps over the nation,”(2) and what
United Auto Workers’ President Douglas Fraser recently labeled “one-sided class war” by business interests.(3)
The most well-known and far-reaching reversal has been the recent Bakke decision by the Nixon-appointed U.S. Supreme Court, eliminating the quota system as a means of assuring minority enrollment in higher education and ruling it “reverse discrimination,” inverting the very logic that forced the reforms originally.
While the commercial media and liberal politicians are trying to sell the split-decision as a victory, commentators representing those who will be most affected – women and
minorities — point to dozens of cases through-out the nation in which Bakke will be used as the excuse and legal precedent for cutting back on affirmative action on the job and in the
schools. As education expert Arturo Madrid has written about the Bakke decision’s impact on higher education,
As a consequence once again there will be a return to a
stifling process, in which the fortunate (and privileged)
few pursue programs of study at choice institutions and
the unfortunate many are left to struggle for admission
in a more unfriendly environment and under decidedly more
disadvantageous circumstances than was the case a decade
ago.(5)
Another assault on the hard-won gains of the late ’60s are the “tax reforms” that are being pushed by conservatives in many states with the fervor of a holy crusade. They are patterned
after the Jarvis/Gann-sponsored Proposition 13 in California, where over-taxed and angry middle-income homeowners were led to support a so-called “reduction of property taxes” that turned out to be a reduction of jobs and services for the working class and a $4 billion windfall for real estate and other corporate interests.(6) In the area of public education,
Proposition 13 has reduced budgets, closed entire schools, limited bilingual and other programs essential to minority students in particular, shrunken financial aid and caused
teacher layoffs.
TEXAS OFFENSIVE
Within this national campaign to make the poor bear the brunt of the economic depression, the Mexican people in Texas – among the poorest populations in the country in one of the richest states — are under direct attack by the state’s educational system and local courts. Backed up by a Texas Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1977, Texas officials moved to deny free public education to an estimated 50,000 Mexican undocumented children in the state by imposing an annual fee of $1000 per child, a sum their parents cannot possibly afford. Although it is not yet a national issue, this
precedent-setting move has sparked a major legal and political battle in Texas that will not only decide the future of the 50,000 children but could affect the educational rights of
thousands of other immigrant children through-out the country.
In “liberal” Berkeley and other parts of California, for example, the practice of public school officials reporting suspected undocumented children to the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) has only been temporarily stopped by community pressure and will be affected by the Texas case.(7)
The legal campaign to disenfranchise immigrant children began in 1974 when the Houston Independent School District first demanded the $1000 fee. The Texas State Attorney General
declared the Houston practice illegal, but was overruled by the May 1977 Texas Supreme Court decision which declared constitutional the State Education Code, which guarantees
free public education only to U.S. citizens and legally admitted foreigners.
Subsequently, instructions were sent to Houston teachers to ask all students of Mexican heritage to prove their legal status or pay a mandatory $90 each month. The INS police, la
migra, began patrolling the schools and following Mexican children home in order to discover their place of residence. This harassment caused many U.S.-born Mexicans to leave schools for fear that their undocumented relatives might be
deported.
There is the case, for example, of 14-year-old Alma Leticia Oliva of Houston who has never attended school, even though she and her mother crossed the border over eight years ago.
Neither of Alma’s two U.S.-born sisters and brother have been inside a classroom either, for fear that going to school could lead to the deportation of the rest of the family.(8)
THE VALLEY OF TEARS
The plight of thousands of Mexican families in the lower Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico is even worse. The region is called el Valle de Lagrimas by the Mexican people there, or the Valley of Tears, because of the extreme poverty. A lush fertile area of field crops, citrus orchards and oil and gas deposits, El Valle has a 75 percent Mexican population which is among the poorest in the U.S. Annual per capital income in borderline Hidalgo County, for example, is $621, with more than half of the farmworker families earning under $3000 per
year picking fruit, doing stoop labor and waiting for the next temporary job.(9) Wages are often as low as $1.50 an hour, from which rent and board are deducted on the biggest ranches.
Nevertheless, many of the largest ranchers in the Valle prefer to hire undocumented workers recently arrived from Mexico since they can be more easily forced to work for miserable wages, while under the threat of deportation by the cooperative INS.
This practice of hiring the undocumented continues to attract immigrants from nearby Mexico, entire families sometimes walking hundreds of miles from Monterrey or San Luis Potosi to be able to work on the ranches of El Valle. The shacks they must use for shelter are often old chicken coops or stables. The recently arrived settlers, who number over 100,000 in El
Valle, live in makeshift settlements that dot the border called colonias. There is no running water or sanitation and infant mortality is 125 percent higher than the national average.(10)
Efforts to organize among these field workers have met with frenzied violence from the plantation-style landowners. Union drives in 1966 and 1967 were beaten back by “tough tactics” of the Texas Rangers. And when the United Farm Workers began to organize melon pickers in 1975 an irate farmer, C. L. Miller, Jr., opened fire on a group of union sympathizers with an automatic shotgun, wounding ten.(11)
In this hostile and oppressive environment, the migrant farm workers have little chance to educate their children properly. From May to October each year the families migrate north to
follow the crops, and education must take second place to basic food needs. Consequently, these children attend three or four schools in one year and are often held back from advancing to the next grade. When they reach 7th grade at the age of 16 or 17 they feel awkward and often instead find a job at a local citrus fruit processing plant.
The situation is not much better for the children who are not forced to migrate. Schools in the region are overcrowded and neglected by state officials. It is commonplace to see children studying in the halls, in trailers or in the school yards because of lack of facilities. Not surprisingly, Hidalgo County has the lowest education grade-level among adults in the entire U.S., an average of 4 1/2 years per person. This is
perpetuated by the fact that even though 80 percent of the first graders in the region speak little or no English when they begin school, bilingual education classes are very deficient and “no-Spanish” rules still persist in some
schools.(12) In many places this racist practice has been stopped by community pressure but until 1969, Texas – as well as California and other states – prohibited school instruction in any language except English and corporal punishment for violators was condoned. Currently, the fight to secure free public school education for all children has come to the forefront in Texas.
COUNTERATTACK IN TYLER
After an unsuccessful suit to stop the discriminatory $1000 fee in Houston, a group of Mexican parents and community organizations came together to defend their children. They called upon the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) to file another suit that could be fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. MALDEF agreed.
Ironically, the San Francisco-based legal organization did not choose the barrios of Houston nor the colonias of El Valle for its crucial test case, but rather the medium-sized town of Tyler, 120 miles north of Houston, where Mexican students make up only 400 of the 16,000 students in the school district.
According to MALDEF lawyers, this was done intentionally because in the event of a decision against the children, the jurisdiction of the court would only cover the northeastern part of the state, and not the central and southern areas that are predominantly Mexican. Chief attorney on the Tyler case Peter Roos explained to NACLA,
We waited until the right case came along.When we got the
Tyler request I went right down because we knew that
Judge Justice [sic] was a good judge. He ruled on the
famous U.S. vs. Texas case which was used to desegregate
all of Texas’ schools in the early ’70s.(13)
Of the 400 Mexican children in Tyler schools, only 40 are without the documents of a permanent resident alien, according to school officials there. Yet in July 1977, the all-white
Board of Trustees voted to charge the $1000 yearly fee for the 40 children, “out of growing fear that Tyler would become a haven for illegal aliens,” as School Superintendent James Pyler later testified.(14) Parents were notified and all but two of the children were withdrawn from school, their families unable to pay the fee.
A few days after the fee went into effect, on September 19, 1977, MALDEF filed suit against the Tyler school district on behalf of the 40 children and demanded an injunction against the fee until the case was decided. The court granted the injunction based on the following arguments made by MALDEF of why the children were “entitled to free education”:(15)
-all the plaintiffs’ parents have lived in Tyler for 3 to 13 years;
-they all rent or own homes, drive cars, pay federal, social security and sales taxes and thereby contribute to taxes that support education;
-the policy is implemented only against children of Mexican origin, violating both Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution;
-Tyler could not prove the undocumented children had a negative effect on the schools and based their action on fear and discrimination;
-Tyler has no authority to act as its own INS since this is the jurisdiction of the federal government;
-the fee creates “a distinct class of poor, undocumented children living within the borders … absolutely deprived of any education whatsoever by virtue of their poverty.”
Despite the initial favorable ruling of the District Court on the MALDEF injunction, lawyers for the children expect it to be a difficult case. They point to the previous ruling of the Texas supreme court, the conservative political climate of Texas and especially the anti-Mexican atmosphere that has long existed there and which has recently been aggravated by the Ku Klux Klan and the press along the border.
A federal ruling on the Tyler case is expected soon. If it is in favor of the children it would overrule the Texas statute and strike down the $1000 fee in Houston and throughout the state. But if it fails it would leave the previous decision intact and have to be appealed first to the 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans and then to the increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court.
Civil rights and immigration activists as well as conservative school officials all over the country are keeping a close watch on the Tyler case. Says activist Salvador Murillo of Berkeley, California, “If school officials see the momentum in Texas to crack down on our community, then it won’t be long before they do the same here.”(16)
130 YEARS OF CONQUEST AND STRUGGLE
The Texas statute and the Bakke decision are just the latest blow received by non-white people trying to achieve basic democratic rights in the United States. For Mexicans in the U.S. this history spans 130 years. By tracing briefly the struggle for education from the middle of the last century to the present – in particular, noting the rise of the chicano student movement in the mid-60s and its evolution since –
we can better understand the significance of the current battle for equal rights and education.
In 1848 the U.S. took more than one-half of Mexico’s national territory after defeating its southern “neighbor” in an expansionist war. In this sense, the first Mexicans were not
immigrants at all, but conquered subjects to be colonized, proletarianized and superficially integrated into the Anglo-ruled states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah. Institutionalized racism in the southwest took the form of political disenfranchisement, segregated schools and exclusion from higher education. The denial of democratic rights “justified” low wages and subhuman living and working conditions.
In the fifty years that followed the annexation of northern Mexico, Mexicans north of the new border were denied education. Instead, the “education” they received was at the hands of “rinches [Texas Rangers] and gringo soldiers, [who] used guns and whips to enforce obedience and subservience from the population.” The exclusion of the Spanish language from the schools that were later developed was to have many future implications for Mexicans in the southwest. Spanish was called”dirty,”an inferior language. Those who were unable or refused to speak English were looked down upon by anglos, while those who spoke English, or assimilated as best they
could, were treated less harshly. Children “learned” to be ashamed of their language, and, by extension, of their culture and their families. And Spanish became associated with poverty and cultural pride as an impediment to advancement.
After World War II, returning veterans formed civic groups such as the GI Forum which fought for integration and educational equality for the Mexicans throughout the ’50s and ’60s. In spite of the terrorist tactics of the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups – lynchings were not uncommon in Texas – the schools were partially integrated, although the
proportion of anglos to Mexicans and blacks remained consistently unbalanced.
As late as 1976, for example, one of the elementary schools of New Braunsfels, Texas, did not allow blacks or Mexicans. They had to travel to a mixed school on the other side of town. Only after a ten-year legal battle initiated in 1966 was the school finally integrated by court order.
“LA CAUSA”
Education was only one of the many issues of the ’60s underlying the heightening of consciousness and resistance from the Mexican communities throughout the southwest and
midwest. The farmworkers union of Cesar Chavez brought the economic and political message of la causa to farm communities and urban barrios from Sacramento to Phoenix to Brownsville – union solidarity, sacrifice, struggle and unity of black, brown, asian and white workers.
Meanwhile in Crystal City, Texas, La Raza Unida Party demonstrated in 1966 that a predominantly Mexican community, traditionally controlled by a handful of anglo ranchers and merchants, could capture the local school board and city government through voter registration and unity at the polls. One of the first things Raza Unida did was to make radical
changes in the schools. With the help of federal funds, bilingual/bicultural education was instituted, instilling pride and a sense of self-worth in the children. The high school drop-out rate dropped from its previous 30 percent and local school officials boasted that an astonishing 80 percent of its predominantly Mexican high schools graduates were going on to college.
In 1967 the dispossessed hispanos of northern New Mexico organized the Alianza de los Pueblos Libres, which carried out the famous Court House Raid for which leader Reis Lopez Tijerina was jailed, making him a nationally known leader of La Raza. The daring action electrified civil rights forces around the country and brought attention to the conditions in New Mexico. The Alianza based its land claims on the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, while chicano activists pointed to both the Treaty and the New Mexico state constitution as unfulfilled promises that the state government and its schools must be bilingual and bicultural.
Another charismatic and nationalistic leader, Corky Gonzalez, arose from the struggle of urban chicanos in Colorado against police brutality, unemployment and racist education. La Cruzada por la Justicia went on to form an independent school, Escuela Tlatelolco, which continues to serve the needs of the Mexican/chicano community in Denver. The name is a constant reminder that the bonds to the struggle in Mexico are strong.
CHICANO STUDENT MOVEMENT
It was in the context of the generalized social upheaval that the chicano student movement emerged, its new name symbolic of a proud and militant consciousness. Most of the students were just a short step away from the back-breaking stoop labor or monotonous cannery and sweat-shop jobs of their parents and were often the first in their family to attend college. They had one foot in the working class and one foot on the staircase of education and advancement. Forged in the working class and imbued with the cultural experience of their community, they made new demands for relevant education and community service that few of the middle- and upper-class-oriented schools were willing to fill. One of the
student leaders of the volatile “blowouts” that occurred in East Los Angeles Schools in 1967-68 recalled,
There was a time when you could see the news every day
on blacks burning down ghettos, and it got people to
thinking, “We’re living under the same type of
conditions; we’re going to have to initiate some type of
social change.”…
People were looking there at the schools, seeing that
they were going to classes in condemned buildings, seeing
an atrocious drop-out rate of about 50%, where those who
did graduate [had] a third- or fifth-grade reading
level.(17)
In the southern California area where the chicano student movement was particularly strong, campus groups evolved as support groups to boycott grapes and send food caravans to the UFW strike in Delano, to support and in some cases lead the walk-outs and “blow-outs” that were rocking the high schools, and to promote other pro-community events on campuses. By 1967 there were 35 chapters of chicano student organizations in
southern California, with a dozen more spread throughout the state. They demanded higher minority admissions, more third world faculty, and a statewide chicano-initiated plan for
higher education.
By 1970 the growth of the anti-war movement, and the increased awareness that 20 percent of the U.S. war casualties were
Spanish-surname pushed the student movement off campus and into the streets. Led by chicano draft resisters, the Chicano Moratorium march in Los Angeles amassed 20,000, the largest
demonstration of chicanos in the history of the U.S. The L.A. Police Department unleashed tear gas and clubs to disperse the crowd. Three protesters were killed, including popular chicano journalist Ruben Salazar, killed blocks away by a deputy sheriff. The incipient rebellion that followed marked the end of a spontaneous stage of the student movement. The decline, though not the collapse, of student activities led some students to reevaluate how education was being obtained. One participant wrote,
So long as educational programs are not part of an organized
political unit which can articulate and direct the struggle
for Chicano liberation, all efforts will eventually lead to
half-measures, compromises or cooptation.(18)
Many community activists also came to the conclusion that successful struggles required better organization and a more scientific approach. From these student and community forces emerged several organizations that began to raise working-class demands in the movement – a topic outside the scope of this article.
Since 1975, however, there has been an apparent revival of activity among chicano students. One of the revitalizing influences has been the movement to defend undocumented workers among both student and Mexican immigrant communities. The government’s increasingly reactionary stance toward immigrant workers coincided with the economic crisis and increased study of Marxism both of which deepened the class analysis of students and community activists.
The other major impetus for renewed campus activity has been the campaign by conservative forces in and outside the university to tear away at the educational gains made in the more lenient and affluent ’60s: scholarships have been cut, ethnic studies programs dropped, minority faculty forced out or squeezed into the bourgeois mold of the university and, above all, the legal precedent against affirmative action has been established by the Bakke case. Together with the issue of
undocumented workers, and the student mobilizations against the apartheid regime in South Africa, the fight to stop Bakke has brought new life and urgency to the student movement. Now
the students have to defend what they earlier struggled to achieve. As historian and exstudent activist Juan Gomez Quinones has summarized,
The student movement is moving forward again in general
tempo with a resurgence of militancy. At their best,
students are key contributors to struggle, at their worst
they are a self-indulgent disorganizing element. The
history of the student movement indicates that it has been
strongest when not alone, not behind not ahead but when it
is as one piston which fires in time with the other pistons
which drive the engine of resistance.(19)
REGAIN THE OFFENSIVE
Working people and the unemployed in the Mexican community will fight back with or without a formal education. They must defend their democratic rights against these attacks with more than spontaneity, however. Responses must be well planned and carried out in conjunction with struggles of all oppressed
people. The educated youth can be a vital component of regaining the offensive in the struggle for democratic rights and total liberation. They must remember that it was the
community struggle that “opened” the college doors and it is these masses of people that the educated must serve.
In view of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bakke decision and the strong possibility that the Tyler case to defend the rights of undocumented children could go to the Supreme Court before the end of 1978, now is the time to prepare the offensive. Not only must the Mexican and other immigrant communities in
the U.S. raise the demand of education as a democratic right. The entire working class and its allies in middle sectors must come to the defense of these children whose parents are forced by the world capitalist system to migrate from place to place in search of work.
The exclusion of the most oppressed sectors of our class and of our peoples from organizational struggle cannot be permitted. To fight for the undocumented is to fight for
Mexican and all minorities, and it is the fight for equality and democracy of the working class as a whole.
Before this case reaches the Supreme Court we must make our demand known, and its echo must be heard among all people:
EDUCATION IS A RIGHT, NOT A GIFT!
________________________________________________
REFERENCES
CLOSING THE DOOR
1. Ronald W. L6pez, Arturo Madrid-Barela, Reynaldo Flores Macias, Chicanos in Higher Education, Monograph No. 7, Chicano Studies Center Publications, UCLA Los Angeles, 1976, Table 17,
p. 73.
2. San Francisco Chronicle, July 3, 1978.
3. San Francisco Chronicle, July 20, 1978.
4. New York Times, July 8, 1978.
5. Arturo Madrid, “The Bakke Case and Its Implications for the Future of Chicanos in Higher Education,” unpublished manuscript, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, 1978, p. 18.
6. Some of the top ten corporations in San Francisco, for example, received these windfall profits from Proposition 13: Pacific Telephone $8.3 million, PG&E $6.7 million, Bank of America $3.2 million.See The Rebel Worker News Journal, Vol.2, No. 5, Aug. 1978.
7. See Maria de Lourdes, P.B. vs. Riles and El Centro School District, Nov. 10, 1975, Indio California. Also, interview with Salvador Murrillo, Berkeley, California, Aug. 1978.
8. Gonzalez vs. Houston Independent School District, 1974.
9. Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1975.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Texas Board of Education statistics.
13. NACLA interview with Peter Roos, July 27, 1978.
14. Doe vs. Pyler, Findings of Fact, MALDEF, p. 11, 1977.
15. Ibid.
16. NACLA interview with Salvador Murrillo, Aug. 7, 1978.
17. Ray Santana, Mario Esparza, “East Los Angeles Blowouts,”
in Parameters of Institutional Change: Chicano Experiences in
Education, Southwest Network, Hayward, 1974, p. 1.
18. Carlos Vasquez, “Social Functions of Education under Capitalism,” in Ibid., p. 184.
19. Juan G6mez-Quifiones “Mexican Students Por la Raza, the Chicano Student Movement in Southern California 1967-1977,” Aztlan publications, UCLA, 1977.
