TUCSON, Ariz. -- 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.
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 Latinos' poor performance in Arizona public schools.
The presence of Latinos such as 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 activists descended upon the small news 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 Association 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."
Arizona is the first state in which Unz has sponsored an anti-bilingual education initiative since his victory in California in June, when Proposition 227 won 61 percent of the vote. Unz contributed about $750,000 to that campaign.
Unz says it will take less than $100,000 to get the Arizona initiative on the ballot.
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."
Pub Date: 3/08/99