Subject: So you like bilingual education...
From: "J. Manuel Urrutia" <urrutia@ucla.edu>
Date: 1997/07/10
Message-Id: <33C52227.41C6@ucla.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.mexican.american
and how has it affected you?
It seems that we, as a community, are again in the sights of the those who don't really, really don't like us (to paraphrase Sally Fields). And, unfortunately, as California goes, so goes the nation.
Two items:
1) a Senate bill (S.B. 6) just passed the California State Senate that will give carta blanca (el mandato, menso, no la cheve) to all the school districts to do decide how and when to impart bilingual education to all those children of the new lower class, the immigrants. While it requires that school do eventually teach the kids English and prove that they do (another cottage industry for evaluators?), it does allow for "complete immersion" ("sink or swim," in my opinion) programs. Should this bill be allowed to pass the Assembly and have our wonderful governor sign it into law?
2) An initiative tiled [sic] "English for the Children" is being pushed by Unz (Wilson's opponent in the last primary and opponent of 187 and 209 !?!?) and a peroxide blonde from Texas by way of Santa Ana, CA named Gloria Matta Tuchman. Most particularly galling of this initiative is that its poster child bills herself as LULAC Woman of the Year for 1988 (as a LULAC friend told me, "there are vendidos en todas partes") and that it claims that "today's immigrant children will be given the same opportunity to become educated, productive members of society that our own immigrant ancestors enjoyed" if it passes.
From my point of view, since the children of previous immigrant waves are fairly assimilated (that is, they speak English and are quite uppity), there is a need to create a new generation of serfs. What better way to do it than put them in a environment where most of them will fail ("sink or swim")?
We have to start thinking about this and decide whether a united front is to be made to these assaults. Please talk it out among your family, friends, acquaintances, etc.. Publicize your efforts in the mailing lists, this and other chat boards, and all over the Internet. Get the word out and make people think. Otherwise it will be a repeat of 187 and 209.
And, yes, the "organization" pushing the initiative has a Web site. Go look at it and see that I am not making this up:
http://www.OneNation.org/
If you want info on S.B. 6, go to:
http://www.ca.gov/s/govt/official.html
and navigate down to:
http://www.sen.ca.gov/htbin/ca-billpage/SB/6/gopher_root2:[bill.current.sb.from0000.sb0006]
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