Red Scare in the Red State: The Attack on Mexican-American Studies in Arizona and Opportunities for Building National Solidarity
The attack on ethnic studies in Tucson is a local struggle with broad implications. This essay poses that Arizona is a testing ground for neoliberal laws, policies and practices, including HB2281, an anti-Latin@ law banning ethnic studies courses in public schools. Given that many such political “experiments” have been successfully exported from Arizona, we raise concerns about the implications of this legislation. HB2281 represents contradictions inherent to a wide ranging anti-Latino@ political strategy that deploys an ethic of color-blindness to legitimize attacks on anti-racist projects and produces a rhetoric of new and recycled “enemies” to garner public support for increasingly anti-democratic public policy. We examine some of the stakes of building transformative educational projects in local settings, and pose questions about possibilities for building national networks of likely allies with the capacity to defend and support rigorous, critical public education in the United States.