New Mexico in Focus; 2032; Luminarios: Nadine and Patsy Cordova

You Now to talk about the nature program and courage of the kids. They made national news when they were fired for teaching tolerance and Chicano history. Two years later after winning a lawsuit, Patsy and Nadine Cordoba stayed true to their

passion for teaching the truth. They are next on in focus. Hello and welcome to in focus, Amarci Choppa. We continue our Luminario series this week with Patsy and Nadine Cordoba. For years they were considered outstanding teachers at the tiny school in Vaughan, New Mexico. The sisters taught for 17 years until they were suspended for refusing to teach the prescribed

curriculum. More specifically, they didn't want the sisters to teach Chicano history. With the help of the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union, the sisters fought and won. Today Patsy is teaching in Albuquerque and Nadine is at UNM as an administrative assistant for the Chicano studies program. We conducted the interview at Marianne's at the Old Convent Gallery in Bernalillo. Patsy and Nadine, thank you so much for your time today. Now I want to start first of all the day that you were suspended. That was February 28, 1997. The chief of police came into your school, I think Patsy was in your classroom and he brought you a letter from the superintendent, Mr. Martinez saying what? That I was suspended from my teaching duties and the chief of police remained there and he told me he had been given instructions by Mr. Martinez. Martinez is a superintendent that he was not to leave until I handed my keys in, my room keys.

How did that make you feel at that point? You had been there. I think I'd read 17 years, I've been in bond schools, 18 years, well that was kind of a funny feeling. I don't know what they thought I was going to do after 18 years, what was I going to do with their keys. It was a very funny feeling, it's a feeling that you know that obviously they never appreciated the work I put into my job. And maybe what was going through your mind when the chief of police came in? I think we expected it, but it was a shock when it did happen. And when I read the letter of suspension, they said that we had disrespected the superintendent and called him Papa Smurf, I thought this is so ridiculous. Did you call him what? Papa Smurf. It was a nickname given to him by the students and they decided to use that against us also. Now you were suspended for teaching what? That was the whole problem, was that you were teaching Chicano history? Right. We're teaching units, units of history, units of everybody's history, but that was part of our relevant topics that we used in our classroom to reach the skills that our students

needed to learn. The only topic that was censored was the Chicano history though. You had been teaching this kind of, we had this kind of approach from the very beginning. It's not something that you started at the end or a year before you were suspended or fired, right? That's right. How were you teaching? Well, to begin with, I think that it was very important that our instructions help the dropout rate of our kids. That was the number one thing and we do believe that the thing that's missing in education is our own history, who we are, where we came from, and I think that's what gives you your self-esteem. So we had always done those kinds of things in our classroom and because it's left, no one's history has left out like ours. And so yeah, it had to be part of the instruction, part of doing something about the problems our kids face, especially the dropout rate. What do you mean no one's history was left out, but ours, is that what you felt when you were going to school?

Oh, absolutely. I grew up in the same kind of system. I grew up being very ashamed of who I was, being a Mexican-American or a Chicano, I identify as a Chicana, and most of my life, I was very ashamed and I would not speak out. I was very timid. I was very ashamed. It was not until I, as an older person, as an older woman, I learned my history and I knew what it felt like then to be proud of who I am. And I refused at that point to do to my students what had been done to me in the public system. Nadine, did you feel the same way? I feel that way. I feel like the language, our language, our history and our culture, that's our foundation. And without our foundation, we just cannot succeed. Did you see a change in your students when you would teach the way you teach? First of all, explain how you're different than any other teacher so that we can discuss your approach and your technique. Well, then my high school English classes was one thing that the administration tried to focus on, that I was not teaching English skills, is I took all of the English skills at the curriculum.

Our curriculum stated that the state board of education stated all the skills like vocabulary, building research, grammar, critical thinking, all of these skills of English I thought through relevant topics. I chose not to use the grammar book that I feel is out of context. And I chose not to use that. I chose not to use the literature book because I think our children need a frame of reference. I think they need to learn their history, that frame of reference before we go into the Bail Wolf into Shakespeare, I think they need to be taught, but not until that frame of reference has been established for our kids. So I taught relevant topics. We did the teenage pregnancy, we did drugs, we did educational reform, welfare reform, we did welfare mothers, we did the presidential candidacies, we did Louis Farrickon, all the subjects because I used the news week. From those topics that these my students knew something about, they could participate. They had some information, some knowledge on them, when we did those through those relevant topics. I did all the English skills that my students needed to learn.

Did you see that this was having an impact on students in their interest in school because we all hated going to school? Did you see that students were lacking to go to school? Of course. Of course, there was a point when you would discuss, when you discuss relevant topics with kids, you even have to learn how to control them because they have so much to offer. When they're going to write an essay on something that means something to their life, then you can teach subject-verb relationship, you can teach grammar because it's something that they know something about. And yes, it made a difference. We found that our students were very involved in the kinds of things we were doing the classroom. They would film, they would videotape things off a television that they wanted us to do units on. They brought in teen magazines of certain topics that they wanted us to do units on, on racism. Things that meant something to them, they would become a very, they looked for things in the internet. And it came a very big part of what we were doing in the classroom. Is that the kind of teaching you were doing too, and I think? Exactly. I believe that you need to teach kids to love to learn, and a reason to go to research, a reason to want to pick up a book, and I think that's what's definitely missing in

our schools. How do you think that the public schools could be improved? Do you think that this kind of teaching would help with the drop-out rate, with the gang problem in New Mexico? I believe it would. I believe it's not the cure-all, but it definitely would make a big difference. Why? Because I believe that if they have a relevant education, if they see themselves in the textbooks, if they see that their ancestors also contributed to building our country that they will feel like part of the system, and they'll do better in all the other subject areas. Now I read that you were not allowed to teach anything that had to do with Robert Kennedy, Cesar Chavez. What sorts of things were you told once, I guess early on before you were suspended, you had a couple of warnings, right? What were they telling you? To delete the Metcha philosophy, because that's what really started our problems, starting a Metcha organization. Metcha being... It's a movement to the Antil Chicanos Yetzlan, and it's a group that's in many colleges and many high schools, and the main goal is to keep our students in high school, because

what we're doing is trying to take backwards, be left out of the school system, learning our history, and definitely being involved in the community. When our Metcha organization was going to read to the youth, visit the elderly, clean the cemetery, put up luminarias, but a really key part of our group was to learn our history that is, you know, left out of the curriculum. And so when you were warned, what were some of the things that you were... Metcha was one of the things that was approved by the superintendent, right? And then it wasn't. What happened? Well it was... That's what they were attacking me for, the Metcha organization, delete the Metcha philosophy, yet when I would write back and, you know, tell them, well, this is an educational philosophy, you know, you can't separate the two, you know, it's really about, you know, making our students better community members, and, you know, it's all about education, so how do you separate it? And when I would try to ask for a clearer explanation, you know, they would just... They would never explain. They would... They considered me insubordinate when I sent them a letter that told me exactly what

do you want me to eliminate from my classroom. Now, this is a predominantly Hispanic community, did you find it daunting that this would be happening in the school that you could not teach your own history? Well, I did, but there was always some things about the community that were a little bit odd, that it was kind of the identity, you know, I'd identify as a Chicana, I never told anybody that, but we found, during this whole thing, that people, the people in the community were different things, you know, somewhere French-Canadian, some of course were Spanish, some were French, some were German, you know, there was some more Portuguese, and suddenly the community came out with these different, I guess, roots, different identities. And yeah, I didn't know it was as deep as it was, you know, that identity problem. And... But we're all products of the same system that we were not taught our history, and that we've had to go out on our own, and that we were lucky enough to go to college and actually

start learning about our history. Those people that have never been to college have that opportunity, and most of our students are dropping out of high school, so they'll never get that opportunity. But they are all part of the same system we went through. What, okay, let's go back to the date that you were suspended. At that point, what did you do? You were suspended with pay, and then what happened at that point? Well, you know, at that time, the whole country had gone wind of the story, and we were invited to a lot of places, but at that point, most of our concentration was on preparing for a court date, because we knew it was going to go that far, because the school board refused to bend, they refused to listen. And it hadn't even observed us in our classroom, so we knew it was a battle. And so pretty much it was just preparing for our court, getting our information together, and kind of being subjected to a lot of abuse by the school board, and the superintendent,

you know, a lot of lies, a lot of accusations of racism. And what sort of things were they accusing you of? Racism, anti-anglo, anti-American, that what we were teaching by teaching our history was all these things that were racist, and that we were tearing down the white race, that we were trying to build up our Hispanic students by tearing down the white race. And if we were to teach this, if we were to teach our history, we're to do it behind closed doors, and we were to teach it using books that were written by the Anglos. That was what the school board president at that time told us in those exact words, because it was safe. That's how he ended it, because it's safe. He was a book written by Anglos. Teach our history by using books written by Anglos. And what did you think at that point? I knew something was pretty screwed up at that point, because actually that's how we teach it, and the textbooks, the books we had brought in were written by the Chicano perspective,

or the Mexican-American perspective. But you know, it's like Nadine says, you know, the school board president, he's also a product of the system. And we were, I think we were taught to believe that that is safe. There's just this teacher's perspective, because the other one makes us think, and it makes us uncomfortable and makes us think, well, maybe the United States isn't as great as they've been teaching us. And so I think that has a lot to do with it. But yeah, we were told, and we were supposed to do it behind closed doors, though. And when we were suspended, you know, we started depositions, we started the depositions of the Superintendent Arthur Martinez, and by the time they fired us in July, those three school board members had every opportunity to read those depositions where he had absolutely no facts to what he was accusing us of, where he had not observed us. They all had the opportunity to read those depositions, and they did not. You were considered outstanding teachers that Superintendent himself gave you and your evaluations very high marks.

And so what were the grounds? Why, why, for firing you? Well, you know what I think, the first day of school, that year that they fired us, when our Mitchell officers went up to talk about the Mitchell program, encourage other kids to join. And on the way back to the bleachers, one of our kids, Janice Ullivari, she was an eighth grader at that time, and she just had this feeling of pride, and on her way back to the bleachers, she yelled, and that pretty much brought on the biggest problems, you know, that yell, that chant, and by then I think they started to scrutinize in everything we did, you know. And, but you know what, we have to have policies before you fire a teacher. And one of them is you need to observe me, you need to have proof of what I'm doing. And I was never observed, I was not observed one minute, but I do believe that the Superintendent knew if he observed me, he could not fire me. So I, and it had a lot to do with the president, the school board president, Andy Córdoba, and Jovi Sente, he's, you know, they're big, you know, landowners, you know, they have

money, and they didn't, Jovi Sente says that he did not like my perspective of history, my opinion of history, which was, I was teaching that the Spaniards came to the Southwest and stole land, tortured Native Americans and killed Native Americans. And when they asked him what his version was, he says, my people came into the Southwest, and these were his exact words, and we saw a vast amount of occupied land and chose to live here. And that is the version he wanted me to teach. And he had a lot to do with it. He was also the brother-in-law of the superintendent. So obviously he had a lot of clout with the school board. And because of his status in the community, and because he had all this money, he didn't believe he had to follow the policies. In other words, when we got to Spaniard in February, there was like, there were phantom parents complaining about us. We had never had a parent teacher conference. We found out, you know, later when they were deposes, Jovi Sente, that he was the main, you know, force behind us getting fired, him and Andy. But he felt like he could go straight to the superintendent until I'm out of like the way they're teaching.

So fire those women. And that's exactly what he did. But I believe that the superintendent knew that we were doing nothing wrong, that we were excellent teachers, but I believe he became their puppet. This sounds like the Wild West. It is. It is like the Wild West. They not feel that they were going to be accountable for their actions, that they couldn't just fire you, just... I think they had, it was in their head that school boards could do anything, pretty much anything they wanted. They didn't have to be accountable because Mr. Martinez and his deposition said, they asked him about school policies and he said that he didn't, he did not have to use school policies if he deemed them unnecessary. He said in his deposition. So yeah, they believe they didn't have to follow policies. The policies and the free, the rights that we have that were made to protect us from people like them. They didn't think they had to. Like the West, they didn't like what we did, so bring a rope. Because they would ask Mr. Martinez during the depositions, well, what exactly did they do in their classroom that was racist and he goes, well, I can't think of anything specific now.

Then he would ask him, well, what exactly did the students do that they were considered militant? And he would say, well, you know, I don't have any specific examples. You know, if you're going to accuse of racism and being militant, then you better have specific examples. You better have documented evidence of these accusations. And being militant and racist is a very powerful accusation that they had no proof. Well, did you see a change in the students when you were teaching this? Did you find that they were intrigued by the subject matter? Well, they loved it. Of course. Of course. It's the same thing with even adults, relevant education. If you go to a conference and it's not relevant, you hate it. You didn't get anything out of it. That's when you take off from a conference and go to Walmart to shop. One of our students that used to be the co-chair of Mitch, her name is Naomi Chavez. And she would, you know, after we were fired, she'd go to the superintendent and say, we're on board, you know, we're not doing anything that's, you know, relevant. And he told her, you should go to college and become a teacher and come back and make a difference. And she told him, yes, but I would come back and teach the same way the court of us did and I would get fired. So I think it made a big impact on some of the students.

Kids students know the problem with education. They're the ones that know the best. Well, why do you think that the school system does not want you to challenge students to critical thinking? I mean, because that's what it sounds like to me. It just, it sounds like they didn't want you to make them think in any way. You know, Mr. Martinez wrote on one of his letters that to teach these things to, I guess to make them critical, fingers was like putting a giant chip on their fragile shoulders. And I sometimes think that's how adults see kids, that they're fragile. They can't deal with honesty. They can't handle problems and that's the furthest thing from the truth. Kids are strong enough. They need to be taught with honesty. And yeah, they can handle the truth. And you never gave in. I mean, you were warned several times to quit teaching this. Why? Why didn't, weren't you afraid because we knew what we were doing was right. We knew we were following school policy. We knew that we were, you know, teaching according to state benchmarks. We knew we were doing right.

And no, we were not afraid. And we believe that, you know, we knew we were teaching exactly the opposite of what they were accusing us of, that we, that we were teaching tolerance. And that was, you know, a theme throughout our classes, you know, teaching about these issues. And if you graduate a student from a school with a 4.0, but you graduate them without compassion for other people, we continue to fail. And I think that's the cause of the violence, of the gangs, of drugs, especially as bad as it is these days. I think we are graduating kids without compassion, without critical thinking skills, without problem-solving skills. And I think that's a great big part of our, because even now when we talk about the drop out rate, we want to correct all these problems, we open up the community center at three o'clock. Well, our kids are not dropping out at three o'clock, they're dropping out between eight and three. That's where we need to change the things that are going. So what needs to happen? What needs to happen in the schools to help with the problems that we have now? The drop out rate is so high, particularly among Hispanics. What do the school boards not see?

What do the teachers not see? I mean, what needs to start out? There are a lot of good teachers, but they teach in fear. And we are a good example of why they teach in fear. And we have, and so when you teach in fear, you're not teaching. I think they need to take the drop out rate seriously. I think they need to wake up as to where why the drop out rate is there. They're dropping out of our classes, they're not interested in our classes. You get a lot of notoriety for a lot of reasons. This became a national story. What do you hope? And then you also won this lawsuit now. I'm sure that you felt that you were going to win that one because of the school board had no grounds to fire you. What do you hope to do now with this new notoriety and with, I think, with this, actually, I think you have some power at this point? I just hope that we start changing minds, changing hearts that administrators will start listening.

Because even in Albuquerque, it's real evident. The South Valley schools, the drop out rate is, you know, really high, yet up in the heights, Alakueva, it's like a 1% drop out rate, and who are the ones going to the Valley school? You know, so we need to start looking at, you know, let's start listening to the students and the parents for a change, you know, instead of just, you know, making up things, you know, like opening a community center or blaming the parents or blaming poverty or blaming single parents, you know, that's like a broken record already. You know, it's obvious that it's more than that and it's something going on with the school system. So we hope that by talking about it that people will start listening and can change even one heart at a time. Well, in the newspaper this week, it was saying that New Mexico is the 48th worst place to raise a child, and you are right, they do blame it on poverty. Should we not blame poverty? I think a certain percentage of it, yeah, we could blame poverty and we can blame single parents, but, you know, not like, if it's a 30% drop out rate, we can't blame 30% drop out rate on poor parents. I mean, because just because we're poor, just because we're Mexican, it's not, we're not from families that, you know, don't want our kids to succeed.

We don't send them off to school and say, you know, well, if, you know, if school's no good, you should drop out and be a failure, we want our kids to succeed. We want, we have dreams for our children, too. You know, we don't dream of our, you know, children, one of these states ending up in the pit of entry. We have dreams for them, too. It's not in our blood. And even in New Mexico, United and over 90% of the people in the prisons are our kids. That's what goes to the prisons. And we don't come from families any more criminal than anybody else. What's going on with society, too, is that it's so much easier to lock up our youth. You know, let's harass them, let's lock them up because it's easier to, you know, to do that than to educate them. I mean, look at Heather Wilson, when she was running for her office, she was going to get tough on crime, on juvenile crime. And what did she have? She had a chain link fence behind the chain link fence where all these chicanos, you know, being punished. Why did she put, you know, like a college and show all these chicanos graduating from college? Why did it have to be the negative? Because it is.

And there's a really messed up in New Mexico when you spend $32,000 to house a chicano in prison, but you only put $3,000 to $5,000 in their education for a whole year. There's something wrong. Because we don't have money in schools to provide programs, to provide better teachers, to pay teachers more. But we have all that $32,000 to put them in prison. Do you think the voucher program is the answer? I don't think so. No. I think it's just what happens to those kids that don't get to go. Right. We're still fixing the problem of the school system, the curriculum, the textbooks. Well, I know that you were telling me earlier that when you were going to school, nobody was teaching you history, the chicano history, and that you were even ashamed to speak Spanish or to even admit that you were a Mexican, is this, you wanted to turn the tide, is that what you wanted to do? At least have, give students some pride at an early age to feel proud of who they are, at least give them a knowledge base so that they can make those, you know, sort those things out in their mind, because I knew when I was growing up, when I was little, my dad told me you are a Mexican and you speak your language, even though everybody around

me was Spanish, and I knew there was a hatred towards Mexicans, but my dad told me I should be proud, and I was proud, but I didn't have the knowledge to go with it until I was 23. Then I started understanding why he, you know, pushed that. That's it, did you feel the same way? Well, of course. You know, I was very ashamed of my life, I was ashamed. And like I said before, I don't want to do that to the students because if you, and it doesn't matter, if you have black kids, Native Americans, kids, Asian kids, if you do not first work on their pride and their self-esteem, you're not going to teach them anything else. That's the most important, what they feel in their heart. They've got to be, they have to know that their teacher and everybody believes they're worth something, without that we have nothing. We have about a minute left, and I know that both of you were winners in this situation and I congratulate you both, but there are losers in this, who lost in this whole scenario. I think our youth in Vaughn, because we had, you know, like a lot of, you know, dreams for them and we really wanted to work with them, we believe that they lost.

Do you feel that way, Pat? Of course. I think that's probably, even though great things have happened for me, that's the only sad part that I feel is my students in Vaughn. But you can still make a change, right, you're hoping that maybe you're going to retire soon and you're going to do workshops, hopefully, on teaching teachers how to do this interactive curriculum or integrated curriculum, and Nadine, you're with the Chicano Studies at UNM. And we're working, you know, for each Chicano Studies in the high school, although we believe it needs to be K-12, and it is a movement throughout the country. It's going on in Denver, they already have Alma de la Raza, it's a K-12 curriculum. It's going on in Tucson, it's going on, you know, in California, you know, but we're just hoping that it'll happen in New Mexico, that we do get a K-12 curriculum. Any final thoughts? I just hope that what we can succeed at is because my sister and I are very, very blunt. We hold nothing back, we fear nothing, and I think we tell the truth about education,

and we hope some people will listen. I hope, at least that we can play that part, that people will listen to what we're saying and make a change. Well, thank you both for joining me today.