Connecting Circles

In 1952 Congress made it a crime to hide a worker who crossed without papers. Then it added a single sentence that let the farm owners off the hook.

That sentence said employment does not count as harboring. Growers in Texas demanded it, and Congress delivered it.

So the law punished the worker and left the boss alone. A man could be hauled away at dawn, while the farm that hired him kept the crop and paid nothing.

The provision stood for thirty four years. Congress did not repeal it until 1986.

The arrangement was deliberate. Somebody wrote that sentence, and somebody wanted it.

Nearly eighteen thousand children passed through the gates of one school in northern Oklahoma.

Chilocco Indian Agricultural School opened in 1884 and, over almost a century, took in students from more than one hundred and twenty nations. Modeled on Carlisle, it was built to remake Native children into farmhands and domestic workers, far from their families, their languages, and their ways. Days were split between the classroom and hard labor in the fields, and the youngest children were the farthest from home.

Chilocco finally closed its doors in 1980. The people who lived it carry memories that range from friendship and survival to loneliness and lasting grief.

Every one of those children had a name, and a family who loved them. We remember them. 🕯️

California became a state in 1850. That same year it started taxing Mexicans who were already American citizens, as foreigners.

The Foreign Miners Tax passed on April 13, 1850. It charged twenty dollars a month for a license to mine. It applied to anyone who was not a native born citizen. Twenty dollars was most of what a man could pull out of a claim in a month.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had made Mexicans in California citizens two years before. That did not matter at the creek. Collectors judged by face, dress and accent. They charged Californios along with everyone else. Sonoran miners had taught much of the camp how to work dry diggings. They got hit hardest of all.

In May thousands gathered at Sonora to refuse it. The tax fell apart. The legislature repealed it in March 1851. By then the damage was done. Sonora had emptied out, and many families never went back.

In October 1925 a Tempe rancher walked his four children up to the white school and asked to enroll them. The principal said no.

Adolfo Romo raised cattle and farmed outside town. His kids went to the Eighth Street School, the one built for Mexican American children. It had no state certified teachers. Student teachers from the Tempe Normal School ran the classrooms instead. The district called this separate but equal.

Romo sued the school board. His lawyers did not argue that separate was wrong. They argued that separate was not equal, and they had the teaching records to prove it. The judge agreed. He ordered the district to admit the Romo children to the Tenth Street School.

This was 1925. It is the first known Mexican American school desegregation case won in this country. It did not end segregation in Tempe, and the district found ways around it for years. But four kids walked through a different door that fall.

As students across New Mexico get ready to head back to school, we’re fighting to make sure our Tribal schools and teachers get the funding they deserve! https://www.abqjournal.com/news/stansbury-hopes-new-bill-will-boost-teacher-salaries-at-tribal-schools/3090804