Aztlán Arizona: Mexican American Educational Empowerment, 1968–1978

Most works on the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s have focused on regional studies of the California and Texas experience. In Aztlán Arizona, Darius Echeverría expands the current literature by examining the educational experience of Mexican Americans in Arizona. Although the author is most concerned with the “Arizonan-Mexican” experience in public schools, Echeverría presents a larger educational profile that “provides an overview of how educational obstacles affected Mexican Americans in their pursuit of equal membership in the U.S. polity”. Echeverría situates his analysis in the current controversy surrounding the ban on ethnic studies in Arizona with the passage of House Bill (HB) 2281 in 2010. The discussion of HB 2281 serves to “historicize the present” and discuss Arizonan-Mexican educational activism as a long and continuous struggle. Grounding his work in current curriculum wars, the author divides his book into two major sections. The first section describes the creation of a public educational system in Arizona that deliberately marginalized the local Mexican American population. As described in chapter 1, in the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans experienced a Jim Crow-like environment in Arizona public schools that defined them as second-class citizens. However, Arizonan-Mexicans were not idle during this period, and their demands for educational access and justice included two legal victories in Romo v. Laird (1925) and González v. Sheely (1951). Unfortunately, the victories resulted in only limited change, as chapter 2 captures. By the onset of the Arizona Chicana/o Movement, Mexican Americans were still lacking representation in every sector of the Arizona public education system. The second section of the book encompasses the Arizonan-Mexican community’s response to educational exclusion from 1968–78.