Make 2026 the Last Year of Funding ICE

The story was always already about an impoverished unmarried couple facing a pitiless bureaucracy, having a baby in a barn, and then having to hide from a tyrant. The baby grew up to say that the poor were blessed and the neighbor is he who shows mercy. You can’t hide from the politics of all that.

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— Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) December 31, 2025 at 12:32 PM

PLAS CEO Marshall Tuck and Mayor Villaraigosa bring Arizona style bigotry to Los Angeles

"We had an African American woman walk up to us and say 'why do you need Ethnic Studies?', and we looked at each other and said, 'that's exactly why we need Ethnic Studies!'" — Santee Students speaking at PLAS protest.

It would be a mistake to think the absolutely tragic stream of bigoted and racist legislation flowering in Arizona is confined to Arizona alone. Sadly, one of the most egregious perpetrators removing access to ethnic studies and heritage language programs in this country isn't Michael Hicks, Tom Horne, or John Huppenthal, but a privately managed organization called Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS) founded by the vehemently anti-public education Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa.

PLAS' latest attack comes in the form of killing the only Ethnic Studies program at the culturally diverse South Los Angeles Santee High School. The announcement shook the community, given the program's popularity and importance in a community desperate to retain its identity and dignity. The following video was taken at a demonstration held in front of PLAS headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. The protest was held by community activists in order to save both the Ethnic Studies program and the program's leader — Social Justice Educator Ron Gochez.

At the heart of the decision is a vindictive reprisal against Social Justice Educator Ron Gochez by Mayor Villaraigosa. Gochez drew Villaraigosa's ire by running for Los Angeles City Council District 9, and — as a principled social justice activist — by being a constant thorn in the Mayor's side. Gochez has been one of the activists instrumental in the Southern California Immigration Coalition and National Lawyer Guild's stand against the Mayor and his cronies seizing and selling the automobiles of undocumented peoples. We've even held demonstrations in front of the Mayor's lavish mansion. Here's an announcement of one such protest:

To protest the continued confiscation of undocumented people's cars. The police continue to use minor violations as a pretext to pull over undocumented drivers and take away their vehicles. Police have repeatedly targeted immigrant communities to establish patrols in areas that are designed not to deter traffic violations but provide a pretext for stopping suspected unlicensed drivers, including in front of schools as parents drop off their children. These stops are tantamount to racial profiling as they repeatedly target immigrants who in many instances have committed no crime.

Ultimately Mayor Villaraigosa's political payback effects not just Gochez, but his students, Santee High School, and the South Los Angeles community as a whole.

The initial decision was surreptitiously announced by one of Villaraigosa's education henchman, ex-Green Dot Schools Corporation flunky Marshall Tuck. Tuck has been PLAS' CEO since the privately managed organization began. Eliminating the only Ethnic Studies program at Santee High School is tantamount to cultural sterilization. Such politically motivated attacks are both racist and ethnocentric. PLAS' Marshal Tuck, Doc Ervin, Angela Bass, Joan Sullivan, and Ricardo Ruiz have a long history of these types of attacks on our communities.

The decision to rob Santee's impoverished students of color of their chance to learn about their culture and history follows on the heels of PLAS killing heritage language programs at two of their other schools. Four years ago they banned the Dual Language Program and the Academic English Mastery Program at Ritter Elementary School, and two years ago they banned the teaching of core subjects in Spanish at Roosevelt High School as they had had as a response to the activism of the famous East Los Angeles Blowouts in 1968.

I asked United Teachers of Los Angeles' Director of Bilingual Education, Cheryl Ortega, for full details on program elimination:

This is the first I've heard of eliminating ethnic studies at Santee, but it makes me think a lot about Tuck and PLAS banning the Dual Language Program and the Academic English Mastery Program at Ritter 4 years ago. Tuck and his people, Doc Ervin, Angela Bass and Ricardo Ruiz worked very hard to pit the Latino and the African-American communities against each other at Ritter instead of promoting unity. It was shameful.

Two years ago Marina Salas, chair of the Bilingual Ed Committee, and I visited Roosevelt HIgh, a PLAS school, at the request of the CC and the ESL teachers. They were outraged that they were no longer permitted to teach core subjects in Spanish as they had done for a generation. If an English Learner takes a math course, for instance, in Spanish, the student will receive credit for the A-G. The same student could take the math class in English and receive the same A-G credit if he/she passes the course which is unlikely because of the language challenge. So the EL student is put in a general math class which, although, is just a rigorous from a language perspective, is a lower level math class which does not generate A-G credit. So dozens of kids, many newcomers, perfectly competent to take algebra or chemistry cannot get graduation credit for those classes. PLAS has denied thousands of EL students access to core curriculum because of their limited English skills. The year before that, PLAS eliminated the Dual Language Program and the AEMP program at Ritter ES in Watts in spite of parent protests. The people that the mayor has running PLAS, Marshall Tuck, Doc Ervin, and formerly Angela Bass, are, at best, completely insensitive, and, at worst, purposely undermining the chances of student success in minority communities. I always felt that the mayor had distanced himself from the actual running of PLAS, leaving it in the hands of these people.

I would opt for they are "purposely undermining the chances of student success in minority communities." The elimination of the only Ethnic Studies program at the culturally diverse Santee is further proof of the cultural genocide that PLAS inflicts on the most needy children in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

Fighting this type of sophisticated racism is just as important as the struggle against the outright ignorant racism of Michael Hicks, Tom Horne, or John Huppenthal. PLAS is part and parcel Villaraigosa and his wealthy cadre of school privatizers' pet project. For a Latino Mayor, who is on record for rightfully criticizing Arizona for it's nativist bigotry, to allow the same thing to go on in his own schools is the height of hypocrisy.

Stop cultural genocide! Contact the following and demand that PLAS retain the Ethnic Studies program at Santee High School and that social justice educator Ron Gochez be restored to his position.

Honorable Antonio Villaraigosa
Mayor of Los Angeles
200 N. Main St. Rm 303
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 978-0600
mayor@lacity.org

Joan Sullivan
Deputy Mayor on Education
Office of the Mayor
200 N. Main St. Rm 303
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 978-0662
Joan.sullivan@lacity.org

Marshall Tuck
Cheif Executive Officer
Partnership for Los Angeles Schools
1541 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90017
(213) 201-2000
marshall.tuck@partnershipla.org
sergio.flores@partnershipla.org
Patrick.Sinclair@partnershipla.org

Book banning, book burnings. Same symptoms, same system.

In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now. — Sherman Alexie

A week or so ago someone on the Southern California Immigration Coalition mailing list reprinted both an old letter and a recent essay from celebrated scholar and author Rodolfo Acuña regarding the neocolonialism and program of cultural suppression in Arizona. I had been wanting to repost them here, but with my schoolboard run and all the other activism I'm neck deep in, I've been too busy to even consider it.

For whatever reason I kept thinking about the Tucson book banning all day and at the same time I kept picturing the Säuberung (maybe because I recently accompanied my wife to the Museum of Tolerance for her school assignment). The parallels between how the early 20th century fascists handled literature counter to their false world view and today's reactionary political climate have been pointed out before. On a lark I checked the date of the Nazi book burnings and was shocked to learn they occurred on this date 79 years ago (May 10, 1933). Serendipity of sorts?

Compelled to tweet the sad fact that the state adjacent mine is engaged in unabashed racism and oppression, I included our good friends from the Zinn Education Project in my tweet. They promptly thanked me and created a facebook post documenting the event.

We need to remember that whether it's Arizona Book Banning, Texas Textbooks, or Common Core Standards, reactionaries will find ways to try and keep the oppressed from learning their agency and working for their liberation.

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Be Careful What You Wish for ‘Cause It Might Come True

By Rodolfo Acuña

My dream was to live in Tucson. In the early 1970s I even applied for a job at the University of Arizona, but the interview invitation was withdrawn after I participated in a protest there the weekend before my interview. I woke up.

The saying, “Be Careful What You Wish for ’cause It Might Come True,” could have not have been more prophetic.

I did much of the research for my dissertation in Tucson. The pueblo’s charm was seductive and eclipsed its flaws: Whites and Mexicans rode separate bus lines and housing patterns created two Tucsons. Yet, change was possible and white and brown progressives coalesced on many issues.

In the late 1960s there were not many Mexicans at the U of A. Most professors there seemed to believe that Arizona history began in 1853 when US minister James Gadsden told Mexico, sell us southern Arizona for $10 million or we’ll take it.

Western history was Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral. A well-known U of A history professor taught his classes with six shooters holstered at his side, wore cowboy boots and had a swagger to his walk and talk.

Aside from exceptional anthropologists such as the great Edward Spicer, the U of A reminded me of what Tombstone would have looked like circa the 1880s.

Things over the years went from bad to worse and by the 1980s vigilantes on the border resembled the unshaven characters in the movie “Deliverance” that abused Bert Reynolds’ friends.

Over the years there have been changes – somewhat. An example is the outlandish statements Tucson Unified School District Board Member Michael Hicks made on the Daily Show. Hicks is important; he sets policy for the school district.  His embarrassing statements that can be heard on the internet (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-2-2012/tucson-s-mexican-american-studies-ba ) are not an aberration. They are a repetition of what Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and State Superintendent of School John Huppenthal often say.

From reading comments addressed to the Hicks interview, it seems that his remarks did not offend most Tucson viewers. They only objected that Jon Stewart had made them public. I guess they prefer the business approach of TSUD Superintendent John Pedicone and his cabal at the Southern Arizona Leadership Council.

This week Pedicone’s business style showed itself as he mimicked the baptism scene in the “Godfather.”  In a matter of hours, the SALC mob wiped out its enemies just like Michael Corleone settled family business.

The first victim was Tucson Citizen blogger David Morales, AKA “The Three Sonorans.” David is a doctoral candidate in Applied Mathematics at the UA who works in the field of anthropological genetics.

Mark Evans, the administrator of the Citizen’s bloggers, said he shut down the blog because of a “reckless disregard for the truth.”  (Evidently Evans does not read the Citizen or for that matter Arizona newspapers).

Evans explained that “This decision wasn’t taken lightly. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of weeks after (Morales) took out recall petitions on (TUSD Governing Board member Michael) Hicks.” This is the same Hicks of Daily Show fame that has made a career of bashing Mexicans. Incidentally, he is reputedly a member of the Tea Party.

David’s departure is a tremendous loss. He stands almost alone in opposition to SALC mob. True that he has ticked off many politicians, Mexican Americans included. However, this is the nature of free speech, a free press and democracy.

Aside from my academic work, I was a columnist for the now defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the Los Angeles Times and La Opinión. I know that people in high places get perturbed — that comes with the territory. In conversations with professional journalists, I have been told that the only time you have to worry is when the advertisers get upset.

In Tucson, it is SALC who is the major advertiser in the City, controlling local institutions such as the city and county governments, the colleges and university, and yes, the TUSD, which Pedicone, a former vice-president of SALC, heads.

David upset them with his courageous defense of the TUSD Mexican American Studies Program and the Mexican community. For him, Barrio Viejo is a symbol of what is being done to the Mexican’s presence in Tucson.

The next target was the lynchpin of MAS, Sean Arce, its coordinator who has fought courageously against the censorship of books used in the program and against its dismantling.  Sean committed the sin of whistle blowing and exposing the chicanery of the system and those who run it.  He also spearheads a federal case challenging HB 2281 and is calling attention to the district’s avoidance and defiance of federal court orders.

Sean is a recognized national scholar whose program has resulted in keeping students of all colors in school. His pedagogy works. For this he has been honored by the Howard Zinn Project and supported by thousands of people nationwide.

Christine Sleeter, President of the National Association for Multicultural Education, calls Arce a “steadfast pillar of an outstanding program that was unlike what he had access to as a student.” She and other educators attest to the program’s success.

If and when the federal suit is successful Arce’s leadership will be needed to rebuild the program which is what Pedicone and company fear. To make sure that the program is not resurrected my inside sources tell me that Pedicone has put six other MAS teachers on an elimination list.

In order to mute the opposition, Pedicone is frantically trying to buy out the Fredo Corleones in the community and in the school district.

Fredos are easy to come by. People have their motives for compromising: they get tired of struggle; they rationalize that they can do it within the system; money and power seduce them.  There are very few people like David and Sean who don’t have a price.

I have been told countless times, “I have to think of my family.”  I feel like telling them, “I also have a family, cabrón.” But over the years I have learned that this does no good. Changes come about because of the sacrifices of a few. Still, I feel like grabbing their faces and screaming, “You broke my heart, Fredo.”

To sum up, I am fortunate that my dream did not come true.  I live in a state where we have unions and where academic freedom for the time being exists. Sean has been a teacher for over a decade and a half and he has to have his contract renewed annually. It is a state where academic freedom is qualified; where the Constitution is being nullified.

When I taught in the Los Angeles Unified Schools, I openly opposed the Vietnam War and was critical of the system’s race policies.  Fortunately, I was never threatened with dismissal, I belonged to a union.

In my forty-two years at California State University Northridge, I clashed violently with administrators, criticized them in the press, and appeared on television denouncing them. But, the late President James Cleary always defended my academic freedom and responded to vicious red-baiting.

The co-editor of “Robert’s Rules of Order” Cleary respected the traditions of the academy. He respected the institution. He did not bend to the CSU Chancellor or the lynch mob that wanted to fire me.

As mentioned, Hicks is not an aberration in Arizona.  He mirrors those in power who have media consultants that filter their words. They are the biggest threat to traditions of free speech that made this country different.

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Letter to the Editor of Tucson Citizen regarding Arizona’s “Big Lie” Law, SB 1108

By Rodolfo Acuña

Letter to the Editor:

Unlike many of the present day squatters in Arizona, I have deep feelings for Arizona. My mother’s family, the Elíases lived there for centuries.

But recently I have been swimming in a sea of emails alerting me to Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, amendments to Senate Bill 1108 that would permit Arizona to confiscate books, ban Chicano studies and exclude the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanos de Aztlan (MECHA) from Arizona’s campuses.

I am 75-years young and have lived through the McCarthy era and read about similar thought control crusades which history has exposed as idiotic. In the 1920s the words to the pledge of alliance were changed from “my flag” to the “flag of the United States” so aliens would not cross their fingers and salute a foreign flag. The present proposal ranks along side these kinds of idiocies.

If Pearce has his way, Arizona schools would ban courses “denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization” and would teaching practices that “overtly encourage dissent” from those values, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance. Rep. Pearce who is not the sharpest knife in the box then would bar public schools, community colleges and universities from allowing organizations to operate on campus if it is “based in whole or in part on race-based criteria.” Among the books designated for burning is my book Occupied America: A History of Chicanos which has received the Gustavus Myers Award for an Outstanding Book on Race Relations in North America.

I am personally offended by Pearce’s labeling my book as seditious. Unlike Pearce I served in the armed forces and did not claim deferments. I was a full time student in good standing at the University of Southern California during the Korean War. I volunteered draft. Pearce and many of the thought control cadets took another route. Moreover, many of the statements Pearce attributes to Occupied America were in quotation marks. Having taught well prepared students from the University of Phoenix, I know that Phoenix teaches its students what quotation marks mean. .

For Pearce’s information, history is probative. It builds. That is why the content of U.S. history courses change from elementary through high school. University courses which Pearce should are much more complex.

What I am more concerned about are Pearce’s attempts to smear MECHA. Adolph Hitler was a proponent of the use of the Big Lie as a viable propaganda technique. Hitler said that the bigger the lie the more adapt people were to believe it.

Pearce implies that MECHA excludes other races and promotes racism, which is just not true. For Pearce’s information, MECHA organizations on every campus are chartered by student affairs. In order to be chartered, the organization has to be open to all students regardless of their race, ethnicity or religion. Every campus differs. I have visited hundreds of campuses throughout the country and have found that on some campuses the majority of the members were non-Mexican American.

I entered education because I wanted to give gang kids an alternative – I loved the kids but hated gangs. Many former gang members are today lawyers, medical doctors and teachers because of Chicano studies and MECHA. Indeed, in California 85 to 95 percent of all Latino elected officials are alumni of this organization. Frankly, people like Pearce relish in the portrayal of Mexican Americans as gang members rather than university graduates because they can step on us.

The Big Lie strategy of Pearce and company is effective because most people become paralyzed in the face of the Big Lie. During World War II, most Americans turned a deaf ear to the herding of over 100,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps. As a Mexican American I am proud of 16-year old Ralph Lazo from Belmont High in Los Angeles who said that this is not right and declared himself of Japanese decent and went to Manzanar with his friends. That is in Occupied America.

Mexican Americans should realize that these attacks are today directed at them because Pearce looks at them as weak. He has not yet taken on the Hillel or the Newman Clubs on college campuses who like MECHA do fine work and incidentally have Jewish Americans and Catholics as their core members.

Hopefully, Arizonians will wake up and people like Pearce will suffer the same fate as the Pete Wilsons did in California. His attacks are race specific and based on the Big Lie. And history will unfortunately judge Arizonians.

Rodolfo F. Acuña, PhD

Chicana/o Studies Department

California State University at Northridge

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RODOLFO ACUÑA, a professor emeritus at California State University Northridge, has published 20 books and over 200 public and scholarly articles. He is the founding chair of the first Chicano Studies Dept which today offers 166 sections per semester in Chicano Studies. His history book Occupied America has been banned in Arizona. In solidarity with Mexican Americans in Tucson, he has organized fundraisers and support groups to ground zero and written over two dozen articles exposing efforts there to nullify the U.S. Constitution.

"Almost equal" in Arizona

"It think this is a great country. In some countries I might be actually locked up for teaching the way I have, but in this country, I'm just banned from doing it." — Curtis Acosta (TUSD Teacher)

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Tucson's Mexican-American Studies Ban
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Tucson's Mexican-American Studies Ban is the Daily Show's humorous, but poignent look at the racist reactionary ban of ethnic studies in Arizona.

Sherman Alexie "Arizona has made our books sacred documents now."

"A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible to transformation." — Paulo Freire

The Progressive has been compiling the responses of authors whose books were banned by Arizona bigots and arch-reactionaries Tom Horne and John Huppenthal's racist HB 2281, which, among other things, banned Ethnic Studies in Arizona schools. Of course Huppenthal and Horne's vicious legislative colonization didn't actually ban ethnic studies, it just limited Arizona's curriculum to the oppressive historical narrative of "wealthy white male studies."

Today former Schools Matter contributor Kenneth Libby tweeted the response from author Sherman Alexie, which is among the most brilliant I've seen in response to the cultural sterilization and oppression that is Arizona's pogrom against brown peoples:

Let's get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I'm pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.

Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and filmmaker. His book "The Lone Ranger and Tonto's Fist Fight in Heaven," was on the banned curriculum of the Mexican American Studies Program.

From NCATE Capitulation to Glenn Beck's McCarthyist Ravings: A Morality Tale

During the reign of Bush II, conservatives from George Will to Lamar Alexander to Rush Limbaugh were partially successful in turning social justice into a partisan issue and, thus, were instrumental in expunging even the words from the literature of many institutions that claimed a non-partisan status. The most prominent example in education was the elimination of even the term "social justice" from showing up anywhere in the NCATE standards.

This appeasement, in turn, gave cover to teacher education programs, already under attack for not giving Milton Friedman equal billing with John Dewey, to pull social justice from college course and program descriptions. For the bigots who see social justice as a threat to the power relations that preserve the status quo of a society still corrupted by overt and covert racism and classism, it was a heady time. (Such demonization and marginalization of language continues today, as evidenced this week in the National Review's new bogeyman watchword, "sustainability." God save us, after all, from those who argue for passing on an inhabitable world to our grandchildren.)

The refusal to stand up to dweebs like George Will a few years ago have now opened up new territory for Tea Party fuse, Glenn Beck, who recently took up the cause of killing social justice with his daily listeners and viewers. Finally, perhaps, we may see where appeasement to injustice leads.