What is Wrong with Kansas! Student suspended for speaking Spanish
Kansas, most frequently in the news because they insist on teaching religion during science classes, has decided to move on to a new front in the culture wars. A principal in Kansas recently suspended a student for speaking Spanish.
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Zach Rubio, who speaks English with no accent (and lots of “like”s thrown in) was just suspended for speaking two words of Spanish (‘no problema’) in the hallway between classes. According to a report in the Kansas City Kansan, Zach’s father Lorenzo said “I went to the school and spoke to Mrs. (Jennifer) Watts and asked her if this was school policy. She told me, ‘no,’ but said ‘We are not in Mexico, we are not in Germany.’” Perhaps not, but one might wonder if one had gone back in time to Germany of the 1930s or something.
This reminds me of how the French government enacted coroporal punishment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to force children in annexed and conquered areas to speak French rather than, say, Picard or Basque or Breton. The historian Mona Ozouf recounts how as a child in Brittany of the 1930s and a daughter of a schoolteacher and Breton nationalist, she was hit by her father in school for speaking Breton and hit by him at home for speaking French.
There is a bright spot in this story. Native born Kansans may have forgotten inconvenient aspects of the US Constitution and its ammendments that guarantee free speech and the separation of church and state, but it appears that immigrants have not. Lorenzo Rubio has lived in the United States for 25 years and is a US citizen. According to the Washington Post report, Rubio senior said he stood up to principal Watts because:
“You can’t just walk in and become a citizen… They make you take this government test. I studied for that test, and I learned that in America, they can’t punish you unless you violate a written policy.”
I let my ACLU membership slide after I moved, but I finally renewed recently as it seems like our basic freedoms are increasingly threatened these days.
Sources:
- Spanish At School Translates to Suspension, by T.R. Reid, WashingtonPost.com, December 9, 2005; Page A03.
- Youth suspended for speaking Spanish, by Carmen Cardinal, Kansas City Kansan, December 9, 2005.
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