University hosts showing of civil rights film

It’s a heated public school issue more than a 1,000 miles away — one that deals with power, race, politics and civil rights. But University of Oregon education studies professor Edward Olivos says it’s something we should be paying attention to right here in Oregon, something we shouldn’t ignore as the Latino population of the United States continues to grow.

“I think it’s important because Oregon is changing rapidly,” Olivos said, citing state Department of Education numbers that show the number of Latino students in Oregon public school classrooms has doubled between 1999 (51,543, or 9.5 percent of all students) and 2010 (115,103, or 20.5 percent of all students).

That’s why Olivos has invited the creators of a recently released documentary, “Precious Knowledge,” to the UO law center on Wednesday for a screening of the film, which chronicles a public school battle raging in Arizona: the right of the Tucson United School District to offer ethnic studies to its 50,000-plus students, more than half of whom are Latino.

The film, produced by Eren McGinnis and directed by Ari Luis Palos, who will be here Wednesday and answer questions after the viewing, debuted in Tucson in March. It tells the tale of the controversy over a law passed in Arizona last year that bans school districts from offering any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, or are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity, according to recent stories in Arizona newspapers. School districts can lose 10 percent of their state funding for violating the law.

The law was pushed by Tom Horne, the state’s attorney general since January, who previously was Arizona’s schools superintendent. And it was born of the controversy of a Mexican-American studies class that is still offered in Tucson schools. The Tucson School Board, set to vote on removing ethnic studies, tabled the topic at a meeting with heavy police presence earlier this month after several attendees had to be removed for disruption, according to Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star newspaper.

Horne wrote a letter to Tucson residents in 2007 saying, “The evidence is overwhelming that ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District teaches a kind of destructive ethnic chauvinism that the citizens of Tucson should no longer tolerate,” according to a New York Times story last year. The story said Horne sent an aide, a Republican Latina, to the Mexican studies class at Tucson High in 2007 to rebut an earlier speaker who told the students that “Republicans hate Latinos.” The students reportedly walked out on the aide.

Olivos says the Arizona ethnic studies law resembles the measure proposed in Oregon in 2008 by anti-tax activist Bill Sizemore. Measure 58, which voters rejected, would have prohibited public schools in Oregon from teaching English learners in their native language after one year of elementary school or two years of high school.

The trailer for “Precious Knowledge” shows a clip of a Latino student saying, “You pick up a history book, and you don’t really see any other cultures in there but Caucasians and white people.” There’s a clip of Republican state Rep. John Kavanagh talking in the Arizona Legislature, saying, “If you want a different culture, go back to that culture. This is America.” And there are clips of Latino students holding signs, as well as a man setting fire to a demonstrator holding a Mexican flag.

Opponents of the Arizona law say ethnic studies courses in Tucson have led to more Latinos graduating and going on to college.

“It really ties into what we want our students here at the University of Oregon to know about,” Olivos said of the film and the issues depicted in it. Many UO education students will end up teaching in states with significantly different ethnic populations than Oregon, Olivos said.