Today we would call such pretentious do-gooding a wicked sort of "cultural genocide." Yet contemporary advocates of state-sanctioned bilingualism err when they claim that assimilationists wish to destroy knowledge of Spanish. The problem, instead, is not that our aliens know two languages, but that often they are not literate in even one.
What, then, did we actually learn in school that so quickly helped all of us assimilate - or rather, what made the other forty students in our homeroom class of 1961 become more like us six Anglos than we like them? Take our lessons on the Civil War: We all were told that thousands of Americans had died to end slavery, an evil institution that was as old as civilization itself. We admired the romance and pluck of the South, but concluded that its cause was inseparable from slavery and so morally wrong that it had to be ended - if need be, through bloodshed. Americans, it seemed, could be terrible to one another, but eventually there were more good than bad people, who could use a wonderful system to eradicate man's sins. The "North" or the "Union" was presented as the spiritual predecessor to our own efforts to get along and overcome race in the turmoil of the early 1960s. Our class often sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic" - with a heavily accented Mexican English.
We all got the message of racism, slavery and oppression clear enough while still learning something of Grant and Sherman and Jefferson Davis. I don't think we needed to be told that humans were imperfect - how else could the Constitution of the United States have tolerated slavery for nearly a hundred years? We had all seen the demons within our very selves out on the Darwinian playground and knew that their exorcism was the work of all good citizens. Even in rural California of the 1960s, "racial prejudice" was stigmatized as a great sin, something "unfair" that gave "advantages" to those who had not earned them. "You're prejudiced" was a charge whose sting was the assertion that one was dishonorable rather than merely bad.
Jimmy Hall was the class racist with a strong southwestern accent, rotten teeth and battle scars. He lived in a shack in a subsection of the barrio at the edge of the school, a rural shantytown ("Sunnyside") where Okies and blacks had settled in the 1940s and not yet fully abandoned by 1963. If there was hostility shown to students by our tough faculty composed of World War II veterans, it was usually directed against him. "Be nice to Jimmy - his family is ignorant and doesn't know any better," we were told in condescending tones. "They are white trash who never made it," our Texas- and Oklahoma-raised teachers said about Jimmy. "I've seen his kind back home, so be careful, you guys," our principal warned.
The underlying assumption in making such comments to our majority of Mexican students was that they had a real culture and family stability that could lead to success, while white-trash, dysfunctional families like the Halls - a "needle and syringe," the rumors went, had landed Jimmy's sometime father in the "state pen" - were beyond redemption. The prejudice toward Okies is now romanticized and airbrushed, but I remember it as visceral and unending until the 1960s. My wife, who has this drama in her family background, claims that it persisted well into the 1980s.
Did our education neglect the labor unions and the struggle of the oppressed? Not at all. As the nascent United Farm Workers movement was capturing national attention by staging strikes daily right outside town, our seventh-grade history teacher was sketching out the dreadful struggle of the coal miners and steel workers, and reminding us how in a free and capitalist society the poor always had to organize to find redress from the powerful. Other mentors explained the unhappy saga of the immigrants - Irish, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Mexicans - not to teach the cheap lesson that America was racist and oppressive, but in the belief that our country was better than others because our parents and grandparents had taken it upon themselves to improve an unjust situation.
Caesar Chavez was, of course, hated by the local farming establishment - unreasonably so, for his initial cause was just and long overdue. At ten, I saw him walk with his followers along the old Highway 99 with a bullhorn and banners. At seventeen my brother and I once, out of curiosity, drove out to one of his rallies, got lost, ended up at a disputed orchard, and were roughed up by Tulare County sheriffs who appeared out of nowhere, drawling, "What are you white boys doing on this side of the picket line?" The less vehement slurs from small indigent farmers were mostly that Chavez was "lazy" and "never worked," rather than the corporations' wild charges that he was a "communist" or a "Marxist." Tad Abe, who had helped form the Nisei Farmers' League - a group of Japanese small grape growers and family tree-fruit farmers who wished to stop UFW vandalism - said that if he was once forced to live in an Arizona internment camp at fifteen, then by god the union agitators should be put there too.
Still, in the public schools we got a vague message that this hated Caesar Chavez was "standing up for his people." What that precisely meant, we were never told other than that it was a very American thing to "stand up for your people." I distinctly remember putting a "Huelga" and a "Boycott Grapes" sticker on the bumper of my cattleman great-uncle's car, which he unknowingly drove around with for two days, to the perplexed looks of his reactionary friends. But the fact was that the
