Last January before her death, TUSD Governing Board member Judy Burns said that she would not entertain any negative testimony about the district’s Mexican American Studies classes, until her fellow Board members ‘rounded up a bunch of Mexicans’ and had them come before the Board.
Due to real fear in the Hispanic community of retaliation against anyone concerned about the classes, Gabby Saucedo Mercer stepped up before the Board and told them what others could not. She has done it again, but this time she isn’t taking on the school board, but a U. S. Congressman. “Grijalva is lying” said Gabriela Saucedo Mercer, a long time advocate for children in Arizona.
Saucedo Mercer is challenging the truthfulness of the claims Grijalva makes in a letter he sent to federal education officials. Grijalva, the co-chair of the Progressive, and Hispanic Caucuses in Congress, sent a letter demanding an investigation into an Arizona state law; A.R.S. 15-112, that prevents schools from re-segregating classrooms based on the color of a student’s skin or ethnicity. Grijalva supports segregated classrooms and the Critical Race Theory based Mexican American Studies curriculum for grades K-12.
In his letter, Grijalva repeats the refuted claim that the classes improved graduation rates and were successful. Saucedo Mercer challenges his claim by pointing out that even TUSD Board member Dr. Mark Stegeman, an MIT graduate and University of Arizona professor, has questioned the statistics used to assert success by the classes’ proponents like Grijalva. “To the contrary,” Saucedo Mercer says, “This program is only successful at breeding hate and resentment.”
Grijalva continues his assault on his constituents by making the claim that “Using the law to attack the MAS Program, with its proven educational successes, will only serve to exacerbate the already harmful anti-Latino sentiment in Arizona.” Saucedo Mercer argues that there is nothing anti-Latino in the law, but there is “much that is anti-American in the curriculum and pedagogy, used in the classes. These people who pretend to be educators are predators. They prey on vulnerable children, put them in segregated classrooms, and feed them anti-American propaganda.”
Grijalva told KGUN 9 News reporter, Valerie Cavasos that the classes work to keep students in school. There has been no verifiable data showing that that is the case, and it a relatively new claim now that the claims of improved graduation rates have been debunked.
When Grijalva was asked about the fact that the classes segregate students, he responded by asking why the other ethnic studies departments were not being eliminated. However, unlike the Mexican American Studies program the other ethnic studies programs do not offer classes targeted to children of one ethnicity.
Despite the fact that Federal Judge Wallace Tashima, of the Ninth Circuit, dismissed the MAS teachers’ lawsuit against Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal and the Arizona Department of Education, Grijalva’s letter which was co-signed by CHC Chairman Rep. Charlie Gonzalez (D-Texas), urged “in the strongest terms possible” for the DOJ, and Department of Education, “to open an investigation of ARS 15-112 and to ensure state compliance with federal law.”
Saucedo Mercer finds Grijalva’s claim that “Public education isn’t supposed to be politicized in this country, but that’s exactly what’s happened in Southern Arizona and the students are losing out because of it,” when in fact it is Grijalva, while on the TUSD School Board years ago and later at the University of Arizona, who fought to offer these politicized classes that according to one of the MAS curriculum developers, “racisimize” students.
“Grijalva has used our Latino children to wage his war against our proud Mexican-American culture in favor of a radical Chicano culture that rejects all that is good and exceptional in our great country,” asserted Saucedo Mercer. “I will not allow our classrooms to provide soapboxes for radicals, and incubators of hate.”