The housing crisis had crippled Arizona's economy. Legislators had just passed the most controversial anti-immigration law in the country, Senate Bill 1070, which allowed local officers to question people’s citizenship. And the governor, Jan Brewer, had declared (incorrectly) that cartel members were beheading people in the desert. There seemed to be a lot more to worry about than a high-school course.

The focus (or some might say vendetta) on Mexican Americans started when Dolores Huerta, an influential activist with United Farm Workers (of Cesar Chavez fame), told students at a Tucson High Magnet School assembly that “Republicans hate Latinos.” The then-state superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, dispatched an aide to tell students at the majority-Latino school otherwise. As the aide spoke, students raised their fists and turned their backs.

From there on, Horne and his replacement, John Huppenthal, tried with puzzling ferocity to squelch Mexican American studies. The bill designed to eradicate the course said the program taught Latino students to hate other races and that they’d been historically subjugated and mistreated by the government, and that it even encouraged sedition. “When I came into a classroom, they were portraying Ben Franklin as a racist,“ said Huppenthal. “They got a poster of Che Guevara.”

In the spring of 2010, the majority-Republican legislature signed HB 2281 into law.

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Acosta had taught Mexican American studies for several years, and led the development for its design and curriculum. Each day at Tucson High Magnet School, Acosta started his class with a poem by Luis Valdez: “If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself.” Next, students might read passages from a Chicano author, analyze rap lyrics to tie in pop culture, write an essay about poverty or disenfranchisement among young men and women of color, or ponder current issues of feminism and heterosexism. Acosta taught students to view history not just through the lens of Manifest Destiny and the nation’s conquering heroes, but also through the eyes of the displaced and conquered. “All that scary revolutionary crap,” Acosta recently said, jokingly.

In a district of some 55,000 students, only 3 percent took the course each year, according to school data. Tucson High Magnet School is mostly Latino, and nearly half of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. Mexican American studies, Acosta says, was a way to engage those students who found school rote and unexciting, or those who might otherwise drop out. In fact, a year later, the University of Arizona would publish a report that found offering Mexican American studies increased graduation rates, grades, and college enrollment.

Almost immediately after legislators passed the bill on Mexican American studies, activists and lawyers fought back and resisted the directive; they would eventually take the ban to court. But in 2011, in his last days in office, Horne announced that if the school district didn’t drop the course, it would lose significant funding. So many schools dropped or significantly watered down Mexican American studies. Some even banned books for the course.