UNIDOS was the center of the youth movement in support of MAS, and their takeover of the TUSD school board meeting (4/26/11) made national headlines. The students engaged in civil disobedience because the state found TUSD out of compliance and the school board was going to take the first steps toward eliminating the program without substantive public input. This chapter details those events from a firsthand account, the massive militarization of subsequent school board meetings (e.g., 150 armed officers, many in riot gear, at a meeting of 500 people), and the subsequent conspiracy theories that rose to prominence (e.g., that former Ethnic Studies professor Ward Churchill orchestrated the whole thing).

This chapter details the ways that core anti-MAS leaders in Arizona and throughout the country helped foment attacks on the program through a massive, loosely coordinated misinformation campaign involving official public statements from elected officials, legislation, television appearances, op-eds, and rightwing radio shows. The rhetoric is directly compared to that used to currently attack and sometimes ban Critical Race Theory throughout the country.

Three Stanford-educated Chicanos took the stand in support of MAS, and these witnesses were central in Judge Tashima’s final ruling. Specifically, they detailed in a scholarly way the academic integrity of the department, the efficacy of taking the classes, and also demonstrated how state representatives used racist “code words” in cementing their opposition to the program. We detail their times testifying, how the state desperately tried to trip them up.

This chapter links the creation of MAS to the historical creation of Ethnic Studies – setting the record straight on the nature of this type of education amidst massive amounts of local and national misinformation. It details what MAS was, the effects of the program on student academic success, while examining how critically engaged, educated Mexican American students came to be seen as such a “threat” to the state.