Michener, James A. (192 page)

Senorita Muzquiz jumped on this unfortunate affair as a major topic for her two classes to analyze, and with her careful guidance, the young Hispanics learned of the government's brutality and of the heroism of the Mexicans, legal or otherwise, who had worked their way so far north without having been detected: 'They are the heroes of our conquest. And like my father, they will stay.' Studiously she avoided uttering the word revolution, and even when she voiced it silently to herself she always followed it with pacifico; she did not visualize gunfire or rebellion, because there was no need. Everything she desired was attainable through slow but persistent penetration. For the present she did not include Texas cities as far north as Dallas in her looming confederacy: 'At least not for the remainder of this century. The anglos are too strong. But I can see it happening sometime after 20B0.' When she assured personal friends that it must happen, she called it: 'The inevitable triumph of the marriage bed. Mexican women have many children. Anglos don't.'

In her general activity Senorita Muzquiz conducted herself with strict legality, but without advising her superiors, she operated against the rules as they were intended. The Supreme Court decision Lau v. Nichols, and the subsequent orders which implemented it, known as Lau Relief, had as their purpose the education of very young children in America, whether citizens or not, in their native tongue so that an easier transition into English could be made. Thus, certain large cities throughout the nation —and many with no Spanish-speaking minority at all—were required to teach elementary-school classes in many different tongues, and to accomplish this, they had to find qualified young persons who could teach arithmetic, geography, music and science in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Russian, Polish and some fifty other languages.

As a consequence, the teaching of Chinese flourished, hut that of science and arithmetic did not, for there were few of the hastily-enlisted teachers who had the solid competence in their subject areas that Senorita Musquiz had in hers. 'She's one of the best teachers in Dallas,' her supervisor said. 'Her only fault is that she is slow in getting her pupils to switch over into English.'

This tardiness was not accidental, for after these new teachers of Spanish had been on the job only a little while, they promoted the theory called maintenance, which meant that even after their pupils had reached a stage at which they could switch over to English, instruction in Spanish continued on the principle that the mastery of a second language was so valuable to the United States that proficiency in that language became a goal in itself.

Thus, Senorita Muzquiz's students came to school at age six knowing almost no English, and at seven or eight they were supposed to swing over to the English-speaking classes, but under the new theory of maintenance, they were kept in Spanish right through elementary school, until learning in Spanish, with inadequate mastery of subject matter, became the rule. And in Spanish they learned from certain teachers like the Senorita that they were an oppressed group, discriminated against and obligated to lead the great social changes which would transform their portion of America into a reclaimed Mexican homeland.

Senorita Muzquiz did not have clear sailing in her program, for SMU had a charismatic professor of history who had worked for five years in the Peace Corps in various South American countries, and he had come home with a few hard-won conclusions about life in that world. His name was Roy Aspen—University of Texas, Stanford, University of Hawaii—thirty-seven years old and iron-tough. He first attracted Senorita Muzquiz's attention in 1983, when he gave a widely discussed lecture, 'The Error of Bilingualism,' in which he pointed out with scholarly precision the dangers inherent in establishing even accidentally a two-language nation.

Had he kept to the main point his lecture might have gone unnoticed, but at the end he added two unfortunate paragraphs, which aroused unnecessary antagonism:

'A major corollary to this problem can be expressed in a question which we consistently avoid: "Why did those parts of the Western Hemisphere which fell under Spanish control fail to develop rational systems of self-government 7 And why did those regions falling under English

control succeed? The facts are overwhelming. No American nation deriving from a Spanish heritage, except possibly Costa Rica, has learned to govern itself in an orderly and just manner Those with a different heritage have

'Now, you may not want to admit that the non-Spanish nations have achieved responsible government and a just distribution of wealth, while the Spanish-speaking nations never have, but those are the facts So to encourage a bilingualism which might bring into Texas the corrupt governmental systems of our neighbors to the south would be folly, if not suicide.'

When she left the lecture hall, Sefiorita Muzquiz was trembling, and to the fellow Hispanics she met that night, she said: 'We must declare war on this racist pig. He's reviving the Black Legend that was discredited a century ago.' And she drafted a letter to the editor, which surprised readers with its daring argument:

1 am sick and tired of hearing that Spanish-speaking nations cannot govern themselves. Since Lazaro Cardenas was elected President of Mexico in 1934, our well-governed nation to the south has had an unbroken sequence of brilliant leaders, each of whom has served his full six years without incident. In that same period the United States has had Roosevelt dk in office, Truman, Ford and Reagan attacked by would-be assassins, Kennedy murdered, Nixon expelled, and Johnson, Ford and Carter denied reelection.

Mexico is the stable, well-governed nation The United States terrifies its neighbors by its reactionary irresponsibility.

And as for the vaunted American system of distributing income fairly, we who live in South Dallas see precious little of either generosity or reward.

Her assault was so bold and her data so relevant that she was encouraged by her Hispanic friends to keep fighting, and when Dr. Aspen ended the session with the acerbic comment that Sefiorita Muzquiz should remember that a return passage to Mexico was always easier than an infiltration of our border, her infuriated sympathizers urged her to initiate what developed into the notorious Muzquiz-Aspen Debates of 1984. They focused on bilingual education—and generated intense partisanship.

The protagonists were evenly matched: this dedicated, attractive young woman of Mexican derivation opposing an able professor of Swedish heritage who knew the Latin countries better than she. Each spoke from the most sincere conviction, and neither was reluctant to lunge for the jugular.

She made two points which gave thoughtful Texans something to chew on, and she did so with enough insolence to command attention and enough validity to command respect:

'Let's look at this anglo charge of cultural impoverishment in Mexico. Where in the United States is there a museum one-tenth as glorious as the new archaeological one in Mexico City? It celebrates with explosive joy the glories of Mexico. And where can I go in the United States to see the grandeur of your Indian heritage? Are you ashamed of your history?

'Don't tell me about the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the Mellon in Washington. They're fine buildings, but they're filled with the work of Europeans, not Americans. Impoverished intellectually? Who is impoverished?'

Her second bit of evidence received wide circulation and verification from various social agencies:

'If you check with social services here in Dallas, you will find that they carry on their books three hundred and sixteen otherwise responsible anglo men who ignore court orders directing them to help support children whom they have abandoned, while your post office reports that Mexican workers in this metropolitan area, poorest of the poor and under no compulsion other than human decency, send home to their families south of the border more than four hundred thousand dollars monthly. Which society is more civilized?'

Dr. Aspen, realizing that he could not best Senorita Muzquiz in the disorderly brawling at which she excelled, sought to bring the debate to a higher level by convincing SMU to organize a powerfully staffed symposium entitled 'Bicultural Education, Fiction and Fact.' From the moment the brochures were printed, everyone could see that this was going to be an explosive affair, and experts from many states crowded into SMU, filling the university dormitories and occasionally standing at the rear of conference halls in which every seat was taken.

The United States as a whole had a profound interest in this subject, and national newspapers carried summaries of the opening address, in which a United States senator said.

'I voted for the legislation which spurred the initiation of bilingual education, and of course I applauded the Supreme Court decision of Lau v. Nichols. I did so because I believed that all young people in this country, whether citizens or not, deserved the best education possible, the soundest introduction to our system of values.

'I now realize that I made a dreadful mistake and that the Supreme Court decision, Lau v. Nichols, is one of the worst it has made in a hundred years. Together we have invited our beloved nation to stagger down a road which will ultimately lead to separatism, animosity and the deprivation of the very children we sought to help. I hereby call for the revocation of the system we so erroneously installed and the abolishment of the legislation sponsoring it.'

There was an outcry from the floor, and a man from Arizona who supported Senorita Muzquiz's theories demanded the podium for an immediate rebuttal, but with a calm which infuriated, Professor Aspen ignored the clamor and called for the second speaker, an elderly Jewish professor from Oregon, who gave a most thoughtful analysis of past American experience:

'I will be forgiven, I hope, if I draw upon my family's experience, but my grandfather came to New York in 1903 from the Galician region of what was then Austria but which had through most of history been Poland. He landed knowing not a word of English, and when in 1906 he was able to send to Galicia for the rest of his family, his wife and three children, including my father, landed at Ellis Island, again with no English.

'My grandfather spoke abominable English, my grandmother never learned. But the three children were thrown into the American school ■ system and within four months were jabbering away. Both my father and my aunt Elzbieta were writing their homework in English by the end of that first year, and both graduated from grade school with honors.

'That was the grand tradition which produced a melting pot from which poured an unending stream of Italian, German, Polish, Slavic and Jewish young people prepared to grapple on equal terms with the best that Harvard, Yale and Chicago were producing. In fact, my father went to Yale, and others from the various ghettos went to Stanford and Michigan and North Carolina.

'To change a system which has worked so well and with such honorable results is a grave error and one which, having been made, requires immediate reversal.'

Again there was an outcry from those whose careers had been enhanced by the introduction of bilingualism, but once again Professor Aspen ignored the hullabaloo, taking the podium himself to speak of his experiences:

'If one looks at the linguistic tragedy that impends in Canada, where French speakers want to fracture the nation in defense of their Ian-

guage, or in Belgium, where French speakers fight with Walloons who speak Flemish, or in the Isle of Cyprus, where Turk and Greek quarrel over languages, or in South Africa, where a nation is rent by language differences, or in India, where thousands are slain in language riots, or anywhere else where language is a divisive force, one can only weep for the antagonisms thus inherited

'These countries bear a terrible burden, the lack of a common tongue, and more-fortunate nations ought to sympathize with them and give them assistance in seeking solutions to what appear to be insoluble problems. Charity is obligatory.

'But for a nation like the United States, which has a workable central tongue used by many countries around the world, consciously to introduce a linguistic separatism and to encourage it by the expenditure of public funds is to create and encourage a danger which could in time destroy this nation, as the others I spoke of may one day be destroyed.

'India inherited its linguistic jungle; it did not create it willfully. History gave South Africa its divisive bilingualism, it did not seek it. Such nations are stuck with what accident and history gave them, and they cannot justly be accused of having made foolish error, but if the United States consciously invents a linguistic dualism, it deserves the castiga-tion of history.

'Let us focus on the main problem If we continue to educate our Spanish-speaking immigrants and native-born in Spanish for the first six years of their education, and if we teach the vital subjects of literature and history in that language, we will see before the end of this century exactly the kind of separatism which now plagues Canada, but our example will be much worse than theirs, because our sample of the disaffected will be larger and will have on its southern border a nation, a Central America and an entire continent speaking that language and sponsoring that separatism. Let us face these ominous facts and see what we can do to counteract and forestall them.'

At the close of his address, reporters immediately crowded about Aspen: 'Do you oppose Miss Musquiz personally?' and he replied amiably: 'Not at all. She serves a most useful purpose in providing Mexican immigrants with leadership. Texas profits from its Mexican workers, and they're entitled to her guidance. But when her ideas are so erroneous that they might lead our entire nation into irreversible error, they must be corrected.'

'What did you think of her statement that if history had been just, Los Angeles and Houston would now be Mexican cities?'

He considered this for a moment: 'Interesting speculation. The cities might be Mexican but they would not be Los Angeles and Houston. Under traditional Mexican mismanagement, they'd be more like Guaymas and Tampico.'