Two other excerpts:

"“By ordering teachers to remove ‘Rethinking Columbus,’ the Tucson school district has shown tremendous disrespect for teachers and students,” said the book’s editor Bill Bigelow. “This is a book that has sold over 300,000 copies and is used in school districts from Anchorage to Atlanta, and from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. It offers teaching strategies and readings that teachers can use to help students think about the perspectives that are too often silenced in the traditional curriculum.”"

AND

"Other banned books include “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by famed Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos” by Rodolfo Acuña, two books often singled out by Arizona state superintendent of public instruction John Huppenthal, who campaigned in 2010 on the promise to “stop la raza.” Huppenthal, who once lectured state educators that he based his own school principles for children on corporate management schemes of the Fortune 500, compared Mexican-American studies to Hitler Jugend indoctrination last fall.

An independent audit of Tucson’s ethnic studies program commissioned by Huppenthal last summer actually praised “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” a 40-year-old textbook now in its seventh edition. According to the audit: “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos is an unbiased, factual textbook designed to accommodate the growing number of Mexican-American or Chicano History Courses. The auditing team refuted a number of allegations about the book, saying, ‘quotes have been taken out of context.’”"

Really, I don't get it--

WHAT is with this Latino-phobia?

I mean, it's not as if I'm someone in Maine or someone asking this (with respect to any who might be livjg there) I'm a Los Angelino! MY state has at least as much Latino contact and influence as Arizona, probably more, and we...erm...

Well, we have our problems, but I have to say, I think we get along at least decently, there are gang wars, but that's how it goes with any mixture of races, it has nothing to do with Latinos or blacks or whites so much as poor living conditions and poor areas and poor education and the like, but in any case...

Los Angeles isn't perfect, but So Cal. would go NUTS if this sort of treatment were handed down (I seem to recall protests a few years ago when there was that massive One-Day Boycott...my friends at the time and I had to go to school, but we saw people taking their kids and we were shouting cheers and encouragement...)

I mean, really...what the hell?

Those kind of texts were in my High School...and they're at my college...

What's the problem, Arizona?

(And being the English major I am and Shakespeare freak, I'd like a bonus answer...how the HELL did someone read "The Tempest" and lump that in with Latino Lit and then ban it? ...HOW? Shakespeare's about was white-bred as it comes, guys! This isn't Gabriel Garcia Marquez--AWESOME Latino author!--or Cervantes, this is an English author through and through, who never even HEARD of Mexico in his life...who dragged Shakes into this?!) O.O