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After making national headlines for one repressive new law on undocumented immigrants, the Arizona Legislature sent Governor Jan Brewer another bill that passed last Thursday banning ethnic studies programs in public schools in the state. As of this morning Brewer has given no indication if she will sign or veto the bill and has until May 11th to make a decision. One of the law’s primary proponents is Arizona State Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Horne who has been pushing to dissolve ethnic studies since 2007 claiming that the program encourages “ethnic chauvinism, encourages Latinos to rise up and create a new territory out of the southwestern region of the United States and tries to intimidate conservative teachers in the school system.” Meanwhile, the state’s Education Department announced school districts to remove anyone with “very heavy accents” or “ungrammatical speech” from the classroom. Many of Arizona’s teachers whose first language is Spanish were recruited from Latin America in the 1990s as part of a broad bi-lingual education program. Meanwhile here in California, students at UC Berkeley have begun a hunger strike in protest of Arizona’s anti-immigrant laws, and demanding protection for their Ethnic Studies Department.

GUESTS: Sean Arce, Director of the Mexican American Studies Program for the Tucson Unified School District. Kathy Vega, a third year political science major at UC Berkeley, member of MeCha, which is part of a broad coalition of Latino and Chicano students and workers on campus

Find out more about TUSD’s Mexican American Studies Program here: http://www.tusd1.org/contents/depart/mexicanam/index.asp