The Americanization of Tucson's Public Schools

“The Americanization of Tucson Schools” is part of the project “Reporting on Race and Ethnicity in the Borderlands (1882-1924): A Data-Driven Digital Storytelling Hub,” supported by the Mellon Foundation and the University of Arizona. This project’s aim is to offer an example of the ways the University of Arizona Libraries and Special Collections’ digitized resources and technologies can enhance projects relating to questions about race and ethnicity in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. Also see Cristina Urias-Esponoza’s story map  “U.S. Colonists and Corporations during the Mexican Revolution” and Liliana Toledo-Guzman’s story map “The Amiable Invasion of Old Mexico Will Begin.” 

This historical inquiry into the origins and development of public education in Tucson after U.S colonization is born out of our contemporary controversy around the ways public schools talk about race and ethnicity in Arizona. Currently, Arizona representatives continue to fight the English-only school mandate that disallows bilingual and dual immersion programs and perpetuates restrictive notions of citizenship based on language difference. ¹  Only in 2016 did the Arizona legislature repeal the 2010 provision in SB1070 that required law enforcement to request documentation from anyone they suspected entered the country illegally (essentially legalizing racial profiling) ² , and not until 2017 did federal courts repeal HB2188.4– the ban on ethnic studies in Arizona public schools which resulted from Tom Horne’s crusade against the Tucson Public School’s Mexican American studies program. ³  Recent attacks on Critical Race Theory in public schools have reignited calls to take ethnic studies out of Arizona’s public schools.

Unfortunately, Arizona has a rich history of enacting legislation and educational policy that institutionalized restrictive notions of citizenship based on race, ethnicity and language. However, this is not the story of the first public schools in Tucson.

One of the earliest graduates of Tucson’s public schools was a student named Ignacio Bonillas. Bonillas had originally traveled to Tucson from San Ignacio, Sonora in 1870 to attend Tucson’s private parochial schools, but he was recruited by Estevan Ochoa, Tucson’s most prominent Mexican Businessman, and APK Safford, Arizona’s territorial governor, to help build and attend the Congress Street School. Ochoa had personally funded the school's construction because in the midst of his political advocacy for public education in Arizona’s territory, he could not wait for the territorial government to provide funding for education in Tucson. Ochoa hired local residents to construct the new school house: Bonillas was one of those many people.

When the school opened, Ochoa hired John Spring to teach. Spring was a Swiss immigrant that had made his way to Arizona after fighting for the Union in the Civil War. Spring stepped into the one room schoolhouse and began teaching 135 boys ranging from six to twenty-one years of age. Only four or five of his students understood English and maybe fifteen of them had gone to school in Mexico. Many of them were born in Sonora. While Spring was encouraged to teach in English, he realized “teaching arithmetic and geography in English would have been a waste of time.” ⁶  He continued to present concepts in English and then interpret them into Spanish. For the fifteen or so students that spoke and read Spanish fluently, Spring received funding from the territorial government for two dozen of Heinrich Ollendorff’s grammar copy books which provided students exercises in Spanish grammar. Spring would then have students translate those Spanish exercises into English.

In other words, one of Tucson’s first public schools was funded by a Mexican businessman, constructed by mostly Mexican citizens, staffed by a Swiss immigrant that taught in both Spanish and English and used a textbook written by a German author that was originally intended to teach German students to speak French. At the Congress Street School's 1875 graduation ceremonies, Bonillas delivered a commencement speech in both English and Spanish that celebrated Ochoa and Safford’s accomplishment and thanked them for helping to establish a school “where the rich and poor of any nationality and creed could go and, free of charge, receive the rudiment at least of an education.”  ⁸ 

 When the railroad entered Tucson in 1880, it brought an influx of Anglo dominated industry which heightened labor disputes, accelerated concerns for Arizona’s statehood, and evoked racists concerns that education was not accomplishing its “civilizing” effect on Mexican and Indigenous students. Increased Anglo capital led to the marginalization of Mexican communities. Before the railroad entered Tucson, “the Mexican elite ran some of the largest businesses, founded many of the greatest ranches, and held the most important political offices in town.” ¹⁰   Thomas Sheridan’s research on Tucson’s Mexican communities shows that between 1880 and 1920 the overall percentage of residents with Spanish surnames in Tucson dropped from sixty-three percent to thirty-seven percent, and many Mexican owned businesses disappeared. ¹¹  See a visual representation of this population shift below. Click on the image to see population shifts in 1860, 1880, 1900, and 1920.

By 1920, only eight point six percent of Tucson businesses were Mexican owned. ¹²  These economic developments forced long established Mexican families to move outside the walls of the presidio and establish their own neighborhood, Barrio Libre, south of their original homes. This influx of Anglo capital also created a shift in schooling. New school houses were built and the demographics of teachers and students became majority Anglo. Below is a slide map with locations and descriptions of Tucson schools built before and after the railroad in Tucson. The slide map below shows the number of school buildings constructed before and after the railroad. The schools built before the railroad are in the left map and the schools built after the railroad are in the right map. Slide the center arrows to see the change and click on the icons to read brief descriptions of each of school.

After Bonillas had graduated, W.B. Horton, the superintendent of Tucson schools, hired him as the head teacher for boys’ education. Horton also hired Miss Packeral to lead instruction for the girls' school. John Spring tutored Packeral in Spanish as she began her post. Tucson’s curriculum maintained a bilingual approach until 1881 when George C. Hall replaced Horton as the new superintendent. Hall made a series of important changes. He insisted on teaching boys and girls in the same classrooms. He set up three divisions of schooling: primary, grammar, and high schools. He also endorsed a monolingual approach to teaching English. He removed Spanish from the core curriculum, fired both Bonillas and Packeral from their posts, and in his 1881 school report argued that teachers’ inability to speak Spanish was a benefit to students because it forced them to “employ all their knowledge of the (English) language, and to seek a better acquaintance with it, in order to make themselves understood.” ¹⁵  These developments led to a school system breaking its promise to create public schools “where the rich and poor of any nationality and creed could go and, free of charge, receive the rudiment at least of an education.” ¹⁶ 

As Arizona attempted to win statehood, its educational policies became more assimilationist. The pressure to implement these policies came from federally funded surveys of Arizona schools. For example, Albert J. Beveridge, the head of the congressional subcommittee in charge of determining Arizona and New Mexico’s statehood in 1902 determined:

... the committee feels that in the course of time, when education ... shall have accomplished its work; when the mass of the people ... have become identical in language and customs with ... the American people; when the immigration of English speaking people ... does its modifying work on the Mexican element; ... the committee hopes and believes that this mass of people, unlike us in race, language, and social customs, will finally come to form a creditable portion of American citizenship. ¹⁷ 

 In the decades after the Beveridge Report, Arizona’s education system focused primarily on assimilating ethnically Mexican and Indigenous students. Below is a sampling of the headlines that circulated at the height of Americanization. Click the information icon at the top left of each headline to see the newspaper and date of publication for each article.

On a national scale, conversations around assimilating newly arrived European immigrants centered around Americanization. These conversations and strategies around Americanization were replicated in Arizona but targeted at Mexican and Indigenous communities. The following graphs measure the word frequency rates of the terms "American," "Americanism," and "Americanization" in two Arizona newspapers. These graphs were made using text mining tools. For an introduction to text mining, see Megan Senseney's storymap  Intro to Text Mining .

We see these Americanizing strategies laid out repeatedly in Arizona newspapers. One of the most comprehensive and explicit plans for Americanization came in 1918 when the Arizona State Council of Defense led by Senator Mulford Windsor conducted a statewide survey on the needs for Americanization efforts. The report made several recommendations: increase funding for night schools to teach the 100,000 "foriegn born" residents to speak English, enlist the help of foreign language newspapers to spread Americanization propaganda, create social programs and civic centers that promote American ideals, and focus efforts to Americanize the mothers of "foriegn born" families who act as the arbiters of their family's cultural heritage. ¹⁹  Each of these strategies was focused on enacting a comprehensive view of Americanization which the report defined as:

Americanization is more than teaching an immigrant the English language. It is the reconstitution of his civic consciousness. It is an adjustment of all his attitudes of mind of his ideas, habits of thinking, traditions, customs and ideals to American standards. It is the elimination of all in him that is anti-American and the preservation and stimulation of all that is' capable of becoming American. It is the appropriation of every element which can contribute to the upbuilding of a greater American civilization. ²⁰  

There was a strong political opposition to Americanization from ethno-nationalists or “nativists” that did not believe immigrants could become American citizens. ²¹  Nativists used biologically based racist hierarchies to argue that immigrants were intellectually inferior and therefore did not merit citizenship. Similarly, nativists remained perpetually skeptical of immigrants’ loyalty to the US. They were constantly afraid of the potential political threats immigrant communities posed to their social status. 

The circulation of Americanizing strategies and the celebration of Americanization efforts were attempts to convince nativists that anyone regardless of their background could become an American citizen. Arizona newspapers were filled with celebrations of Americanizing work. In particular, these celebrations pointed to the work of public schools.

The following headline from the Tucson Citizen offers an example of how newspapers celebrated the Americanizing work of schools. However, this particular article is unique in that it celebrates the work of a specific teacher, Mother Aquina, in a parochial indian school. The predominantly Anglo public schools and mostly Mexican American parochial schools had not always gotten along. The religious and cultural differences between protestant Anglos and Mexican Catholics frequently caused tensions, but Anglo educators during the era of Americanization overlooked these differences to promote English language instruction. This particular article seems appropriative considering that it presents Aquina's teaching and missionary work as a form of 'Americanization' when she had been doing it for over thirty years--long before the term 'Americanization' existed. However, as the article details how Mother Aquina, a teacher at a parochial school, did a better job 'Americanizing' Indigenous communities than any Americanization program in any Anglo city, it is clear that the article is meant to motive Americanization efforts among Anglos by appealing to their prejudice against Mexican run parochial schools.

Importantly, Mother Aquina's teaching differed from Anglo approaches to Americanizing education. While she taught Tohono O'odham girls to sew and socialized Tohono O'odham mothers into western culture, she took the time to learn their language.   Before she began teaching, she spent three years learning the "Papago language." ²² 

Advocates of Americanization also used public celebrations like the Fourth of July to demonstrate the effects of Americanizing education. These celebrations were not only used to show Anglos that immigrants could become Americans but also to show immigrants how an assimilated American should act and speak. Events like this usually centered speeches from assimilated immigrants that spoke about their love of and loyalty to America. For example, when Ignacio Bonillas graduated from Tucson's public schools in 1875, he gave an address at the Fourth of July celebration. The Arizona Weekly Miner described Bonillas as "a young Mexican of about seventeen years, and who has so well learned (within four years) the English language and American history." ²³  These visual celebrations of Americanism were constantly received with skepticism by nativists. Many of these ethno-nationalists believed that outward signs of patriotism were not enough to prove that the “disease” of foreign allegiances and affinities had been cured. ²⁴  Rhetorical scholar, Leslie Hahner, calls this skepticism “the paradox of visibility” which pressured immigrants to “show signs of loyalty” while “public discourses stipulated that this evidence was never quite enough to demonstrate a full commitment to Americanism.” ²⁵  Ultimately the success of these events did not come from proving that all immigrants could become “American”; the real aim of these celebrations was to constitute “the conditions through which Americans were recognizable.” ²⁶ 

Superintendents in Tucson published annual reports in the local newspapers during Americanization efforts. As the school district grew and enrollments increased, the school board had to actively make the case for increased funding to build new schools and hire new teachers. Accordingly these reports detailed enrollment numbers that included students' demographics and results on standardized tests. School reports from 1919 and 1920 include significant discussions of Mexican and Indian students struggling to pass these standardized tests.

A 1919 school report published in the Tucson Citizen opens by articulating the strange age distribution among first grade students in Tucson. Sixty-five percent of students were label “retarded” meaning they failed the standardized test to pass first grade. ²⁸  Similarly 216 of the 331 second grade students were repeating the second grade. The reason for this issue was the “bilingual source from which the pupil supply of Tucson is derived.” ²⁹  The school district used students' linguistic diversity as their reasoning for unofficially segregating schools. The report explains that the district employed “the establishment of the bilingual method of teaching in those schools where the predominant pupilage is of Spanish descent.” ³⁰  The Drachman School was an example of this segregation. Only twenty of the 400 students at Drachman school spoke English at home. ³¹  These policies marked an important shift in Arizona's educational history. The assimilationist efforts of Americanization evolved into systematic efforts to marginalize students of Mexican and Indigenous descent through de facto segregation.

A prominent historian of Mexican American education, Carlos Blanton, explains that the rise of racist intelligence testing on Mexican American students justified segregating schools and resulted in deficit models of understanding Mexican American students’ culture. ³²  However, there were many Mexican American and African American communities throughout Arizona that fought against legislation that allowed for the segregation of public schools. Below is a short list of cases related to segregation in Arizona schools. These cases demonstrate the resilience and advocacy of Mexican American and African American communities in Arizona.

Historian Laura Muñoz explains that two factors caused the shift away from Americanizing education. First was the unwillingness of school districts to train teachers to attend to ethnically Mexican and Indigenous students' culture and language. Second was the fact that, "Anglos could not conceive of a citizenship in which Mexicans could participate." ³⁹ 

This history of Americanization in Tucson schools offers a chance to pause and question how influential those two motivations continue to be. How willing are we as educators, parents, community members, and voters to invest in an education system that attends to Mexican and Indigenous students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds? Are we willing to reflect on how our notions of "American" citizenship continue to restrict the political participation of Mexican and Indigenous communities?

Current and past students in Tucson's school should have a voice in answering these questions. To end, it is worth noting how one student from before the era of Americanization answered these questions.

In 1875 a seventeen-year-old boy named Ignacio Bonillas gave a speech for Tucson's Fourth of July celebration. He was born in San Ignacio, Sonora, and moved to Tucson only four years earlier. He read his speech first in Spanish and then in English. He began by praising the United States for the equal opportunities it provided "the down-trodden and the oppressed," but he makes an appeal to embrace a vision of Mexico and the United States as “sister republics'' that are entwined together through their love of  “liberty, equality and peace.” ⁴⁰  He writes:

 We will twine the garlands of our affection around the hallowed Fourth of July that gave birth to the American Independence, as also the Sixteenth of September, a day which marks the Independence of Mexico from the crown of Spain; and may the two republics go on, hand in hand with brotherly unity in the march of prosperity, and may the purity and freedom of their governments become beacon lights to lead all other nations from tyranny and despotism to liberty and equality.  ⁴¹