Inside The Tucson Unified School District Battle

La Raza eventually will win:

The Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) book ban was part of the district's shutting down of a curriculum and a department. Even more importantly, in collusion with the state and its anti-ethnic-studies law, HB 2281, it banned a worldview, or at least attempted to do so.

That effort included the banning of books, yet it is important to understand two things. First, when the state began its assault on Tucson's highly successful Raza Studies Department, there was nothing wrong with the department, except its size: It was too small. Second, that assault was undeniably predicated on the idea, compliments of then-state Superintendent of Schools Tom Horne, that Raza studies resides outside of Western civilization.

...Perhaps only Horne, Huppenthal and Pedicone know the real reason the program was dismantled, but we know Horne waged a campaign to eliminate Raza studies because he claimed the material being taught in the department was not rooted in Greco-Roman thought.

In that sense, he was right. The department's curriculum, including my works, contained material that is rooted in maíz-based culture - in knowledge that is indigenous to this very continent. The philosophical foundation for Raza studies was the concepts of In Lak Ech - you are my other me - and Panche Be - to seek the root of the truth. These concepts are thousands of years old and absolutely not rooted in Greco-Roman culture. However, Horne's fallacy was to argue that knowledge outside of so-called Western civilization (outside of civilization itself, actually) is anti-American and therefore such knowledge should not be taught in US schools, in particular, not in Arizona schools.

In one egregious example of the consequences of this assault, a principal walked into one classroom of Norma Gonzalez, who was teaching from the "Aztec Calendar," and instructed her to take it down and cease teaching from it.

...The theatrics of Horne, Huppenthal and Pedicone - of trying to restrict or ban knowledge - is futile, at best a delay of the inevitable. That knowledge, and its corresponding worldview(s), cannot be eliminated. Despite hundreds of years of European efforts to eliminate it, it is still with us.