Sisters in Arms
Reading by David Hill
Teachers Nadine (left) and Patsy Cordova stand beside a marker on the main highway through Vaughn, New Mexico, 100 miles southeast of Albuquerque. © Wendy Walsh
Vaughn, New Mexico, is a dry, dusty hamlet on the high plains about 100 miles east of Albuquerque. Once a thriving railroad junction, Vaughn now has the faded look of a town that’s barely hanging on. It has eight motels, seven gas stations, two convenience stores, one hardware store, and not much else. The cars on Highway 285 hardly slow down as they pass through on their way to Santa Rosa or Roswell. According to a historical marker on the edge of town, Vaughn has a population of 737, but locals say it’s more like 600, at most. It comes as no surprise to learn that Diamond Rio, a popular country band, filmed the video for their song “Nowhere Bound” on one of Vaughn’s more run-down streets.
Until last winter, few people outside of New Mexico had ever heard of Vaughn. But that all changed in February, when two of the town’s schoolteachers were suspended from their jobs. Vaughn was suddenly thrown into the spotlight, and the quiet little town in the middle of nowhere hasn’t been the same since.
On Friday, February 28, at three in the afternoon, Patsy and Nadine Cordova — sisters and longtime teachers at Vaughn Junior and Senior High School — were in Patsy’s classroom when the town’s chief of police, J. R. Romo, walked in and handed them each a letter from Arthur Martinez, the school superintendent, informing them that they had been suspended, effective immediately. Romo waited until the Cordovas had finished reading the letters and then said, “Mr. Martinez has directed me to stay here until you give me your keys.”
Months later, the sisters are still shaken by what happened that day. Sitting at the dining room table in Nadine’s small house, which rests about 50 feet from the busy railroad tracks that run through Vaughn, they can’t hide their bitterness. “After teaching at the school for 17 years,” Patsy says, “I had ten minutes to gather my belongings and leave. I was floored.” But she stayed calm. “I didn’t fall apart, because I knew I had done nothing wrong.”
Chief Romo, Patsy recalls, seemed uncomfortable with the task he had been given. “He said, ‘Look, do you think you can give the keys to the secretary?’ And I said, ‘Of course I can give them to the secretary.’ So he left, and when I walked out to my car with some of my books, the secretary stopped me and said, ‘Patsy, you have to give me your keys!’ So I took out a few more things, gave her the keys, and walked out of there for the last time.”
Nadine, who had taught at the school for 12 years, followed her sister out the door.
“It’s been a nightmare,” says Patsy, 47, who was also head teacher at the school, which has no principal. “Like I’m on the outside looking in at something that I can’t even believe happened.”
Nadine, 40, shakes her head in disgust. “I gave so much,” she says, “and now for them to treat me this way. . . ” She doesn’t bother to complete the sentence.
Indeed, the Cordova sisters were considered outstanding teachers at the tiny school, which has fewer than 70 students and only eight teachers. In the spring of 1996, superintendent Martinez gave both instructors high marks on their annual evaluations. He called Patsy — who taught seventh-grade New Mexico history and 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade language arts — “a very dedicated staff member,” and he called her sister — who taught seventh-grade math, seventh-grade “Skills for Living,” eighth-grade language arts, and drama — “a hard-working staff member” who “produces positive results with her students.”
But according to court documents, the Cordova sisters were suspended “for insubordination for refusing to teach the prescribed curriculum.” Specifically, they were told to stop using, in the words of superintendent Martinez, “racially divisive” materials in their classes. He and several school board members accused the Cordovas of injecting their own political views into their teaching of Chicano history. “They created racism and promoted stereotypes,” Martinez told a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal. “They divided our school, and morale went down to the bottom. I heard complaints from staff, students, board, and community members. They completely destroyed the educational atmosphere.”
But Patsy and Nadine Cordova, who were born and raised in Vaughn, say they were only trying to connect with their students, nearly all of whom are Hispanic. They deny using divisive materials.
© Wendy Walsh
Back when they were in high school, the sisters say, no one bothered to teach them about the history of their own people. “There was a lot of shame in my generation, a lot of shame in being who you were,” Patsy says. “You didn’t want to be associated with being Mexican.”
“It makes me so mad when I look back,” Nadine adds. “Why didn’t anybody teach me about Chicano history? I don’t want my students to walk away and say, ‘No one ever tried to teach me.’ At least they know I tried to teach them something relevant. Students today do not have the same kind of attitudes that the older generation has. I mean, they’re really proud to learn about César Chávez and the people who took part in the Civil Rights Movement.”
“They taught us stuff that was going on in the world,” says 14-year-old Naomi Chavez, a ninth-grader at the school. “And they asked us what we thought. The other teachers, whatever they tell us, that’s how we’re supposed to think about it. They don’t tell us different views.”
Under threat of being fired, the Cordovas stopped using the disputed materials. Instead, they decided to incorporate parts of a curriculum package called The Shadow of Hate: A History of Intolerance in America, published by Teaching Tolerance, the education arm of the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center. This, apparently, was the last straw for Martinez and the school board members. At a special board meeting, they told the sisters to stop using the new materials, but the Cordovas said they would do so only if the order was put in writing. Two days later, they were suspended with pay. In July, the board voted 3–2 to fire the teachers.
The Cordovas say it all started with the MEChA club. In June 1996, Nadine offered to sponsor a MEChA club for junior and senior high-school students. The fledgling group already had 23 members, but they wanted it to be officially recognized by the school administration.
MEChA, which stands for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, is a national student organization founded in 1969, at the height of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. Although some local chapters still espouse radical political rhetoric, most MEChA clubs have joined the mainstream, and they are common at many high schools and universities, particularly in the Southwest. The goal of the Vaughn club, according to a mission statement, was to promote “an understanding through knowledge, awareness of, and sensitivity to culture, tradition, history, and issues of the Chicano people and our communities.” Organizers hoped to provide “a positive, sensitive, and supportive environment in which Chicano youth can network and learn about each other.”
Superintendent Martinez approved the club for the 1996–97 school year. On August 19, the first day of school, MEChA’s two student leaders — Naomi Chavez and Daniel Ayala, who is Nadine’s son — spoke at a school assembly and urged more students to join the organization. When they finished, a girl in the audience raised her fist up in the air and shouted, “Viva la Raza!” (“Viva la Raza,” or “Long Live the People,” has long been the rallying cry of Chicano activists.)
“I don’t remember anybody responding to her,” Patsy says. “We didn’t know she was going to do that. It just came out. But pretty much from that point on, we never heard the end of it.”
According to Nadine, Andrew Cordova, who at the time was president of the school board, complained about the student’s behavior — and about MEChA — to superintendent Martinez, who passed on the information to Nadine. The next day, Nadine and several MEChA members met with Cordova and explained to him why they wanted the club to be recognized by the school district. But Cordova was unconvinced. “He said that we were making the students forget that they were Americans first,” Nadine says. “And that if they wanted to say ‘Viva la Raza!’ it should be behind closed doors at their own meeting, and not in public.”
Two weeks later, according to Nadine, Andrew Cordova met with Martinez and told him that no school funds or equipment were to be used for or by MEChA, even though all other approved student organizations were given such privileges. When Nadine protested that Cordova was acting beyond the scope of his authority as a school board member, Martinez allegedly told the teacher that he did not want “to go against Andy’s wishes.” Subsequently, Martinez ordered that MEChA — which had become the school’s largest student club — could no longer use the school bulletin boards or hallways to post announcements of its meetings. In a letter to Nadine, he said that there could not be “any instruction nor activity involving students that reflects the MEChA philosophy during the school days.”
“Our MEChA kids couldn’t even talk about MEChA in the halls — that’s how bad it got,” says Patsy, who had become cosponsor of the club.
“And who decided that MEChA was not going to be officially sanctioned?” Nadine asks. “They never had a board meeting where they decided that. Everything they did was done behind closed doors. Everything they did went against school policy.” (Martinez, Cordova, and the other school board members declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Nadine says she was unaware of any complaints about her teaching, so she was baffled by Martinez’s order to cease “any instruction. . .that reflects the MEChA philosophy.” She sent the superintendent a letter asking him to spell out exactly what she could and could not teach in her classes, but she never got a reply. However, on October 4, she and her sister met with Andrew Cordova, who, they say, accused both teachers of trying to build up their students’ self-esteem by “tearing down the white race.” He also allegedly told them that if they wanted to teach Chicano history, they should use books written from “an Anglo point of view.”
Virginia Dugan, a lawyer for the school board, says that Martinez had, in fact, been getting complaints from members of the community about the materials being used in Patsy and Nadine’s classes. But the sisters say they were only doing what they had always done: integrating Mexican-American history in their regular classes in an attempt to motivate their students. And yes, self-esteem was part of the reason. “We thought this would make our students want to reach higher than maybe they normally would,” Patsy says.
During the 1995–96 school year, for example, Nadine had shown the acclaimed PBS documentary Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement to several of her classes. Martinez, she says, had approved the use of the video. Further, during the spring of 1996, Nadine had submitted proposed curriculum outlines for the 1996-97 school year. Certain classes, she said, would include materials on Mexican-American history, racism, and discrimination. Martinez approved the outlines.
Patsy Cordova (left) and Nadine Cordova hold a poster from a PBS documentary Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement, a film Nadine showed her high school students in the 1995–96 school year.
They must have been doing something right, for at the end of the 1995–96 school year, Martinez gave them outstanding scores on their annual evaluations. Both teachers received a score of four — the highest mark — in the following categories: “The teacher accurately demonstrates knowledge of the content area and approved curriculum” and “The teacher appropriately utilizes a variety of teaching methods and resources for each area taught.”
Nonetheless, throughout the fall of 1996, the Cordova sisters — Nadine in particular — found themselves increasingly under fire for their teaching methods. On October 22, Martinez sent a letter to Nadine in which he explained that he and the school board members had concluded that she was teaching “racial intolerance,” advocating “a biased political agenda,” and promoting “a militant attitude” in her students. He warned her that if she did not “delete the MEChA philosophy” from her classes, she risked being charged with insubordination and fired.
However, two weeks later, on November 5, when Martinez met with Nadine and Patsy, the superintendent was apparently less strident. According to Nadine, Martinez admitted that he had no evidence that either teacher was promoting racial intolerance or militancy, and he told them that they could continue to use the same materials provided they were presented in an unbiased manner. But he reiterated his demand that the Cordovas remove “the MEChA philosophy” from their teaching.
Meanwhile, the embattled MEChA club disbanded. “We had a few meetings,” Nadine says, “but we were under so much attack that we really couldn’t get it together.”
Enter the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union, the state chapter of the ACLU. In October, the organization had agreed to represent Nadine in her dispute with the school administration. “It seemed like such a clear First Amendment case,” says Richard Rosenstock, one of the NMCLU lawyers. In mid-November, Rosenstock’s colleague, Andrew Vallejos, sent a letter to superintendent Martinez asking for more specific information about what Nadine could or could not teach in her classes. (It was still unclear whether Patsy’s teaching was also being scrutinized.)
Martinez responded on January 8, 1997. He sent virtually identical letters to both Nadine and Patsy, in which he detailed his specific objections to their teaching methods and materials. “You do not have the authority to continue to teach matters that are judged by the board and myself to be ethnically divisive and demeaning and using derogatory stereotypes that are racist in describing majority populations,” he wrote. “This must stop immediately.”
Martinez told the teachers that he had received “many complaints from the community, staff, and students, and the complaints deal with objections to the racism and the preoccupation with colonizers and other matters related to the ‘movement.’” “Students in their classes,” he continued, “had received literature that refers to Anglos as racist empire builders. In such literature, the Vietnam War is described as one in which the rich and powerful Anglos used the communist threat to make young Hispanics fight and die. The children are taught that Mexicans are noble and honorable while Spanish and Anglos are greedy and hurtful people.” The material, he added, uses such phrases as “the gringos” and “Anglo colonizers.”
Patsy Cordova’s use of the widely respected photo collection, 500 Years of Chicano History, drew a stern rebuke from school officials. © Wendy Walsh
“To teach [students] that ‘Anglo colonizers’ are their enemy is to place a giant chip on their fragile shoulders,” he wrote.
The superintendent was apparently referring to 500 Years of Chicano History, a textbook edited by Chicana activist Elizabeth Martinez and published by the SouthWest Organizing Project, described in the book as “a multiracial, multi-issue community organization that seeks to empower the disenfranchised in the the Southwest so that they may realize racial and gender equality and social and economic justice.”
In her introduction to the book, which contains mostly photographs and captions, Martinez does indeed assert that the Vietnam War “benefited no one except the rich and powerful, who used ‘the communist threat’ to make our youth fight and die.” The book purports to tell “the real story of La Raza and other truths so long denied,” but it is so tendentious that high school students might have a hard time separating the propaganda from the facts.
© Wendy Walsh
Nonetheless, Patsy decided to use the book as a supplementary text in both her seventh-grade New Mexico history class and her 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade language arts classes. She insists, however, that she never presented the material in the book as the absolute truth, but rather used it to show her students an alternative point of view. She encouraged her students to compare the book with other, more mainstream, textbooks. “That’s how we used it,” she said. “I never told them what to think. They have to do it on their own.” Nadine says she never used the book in any of her classes. (Copies of the book, incidentally, had been purchased by the Vaughn school district for use in other classes.)
Superintendent Martinez, Nadine says, “just picked out phrases from the book, took them out of context, and used them against us.”
The superintendent told both teachers to stop using the textbook, and he told them to eliminate from their language arts classes “any run-off sheets copied from different sources that promote ‘La Causa,’ any further study of the Farm Workers Movement with César Chávez, [and] the bulletin board displays depicting the ‘movement.’. . .” (“La Causa,” or The Cause, and the “movement” both refer to the struggles of Mexican Americans.)
To Nadine, he included a copy of a previously approved outline for her Skills for Living class on which he had circled several discussion topics that were now to be eliminated from the curriculum, including “racism,” “discrimination,” “oppression,” and “militia groups.” He did not, however, circle “Chicano civil rights” or “Chicano or Mexican-American heroes,” but he did tell Nadine to eliminate one of her objectives for teaching Chicano civil rights: “Provide a missing element from our students’ lives, that is, a knowledge about their own history.”
Martinez also directed Nadine to stop teaching her students about, among other subjects, Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. Constitution, Chicano activist Dolores Huerta, and the concept of justice.
In the end, the board voted 3–2 to fire Patsy and Nadine Cordova. The vote was met with applause and boos. Some students cried. And when the meeting adjourned, many in the audience raised their fists in the air and shouted, “Viva la Raza!” The story that began on August 19, 1996, at the school assembly had come full circle. ■
Update
Sisters leaning on fence: Patsy (left) and Nadine Cordova share a light moment outside Nadine’s home in Vaughn, New Mexico. © Wendy Walsh
In 1998, Nadine and Patsy Cordova won a $520,000 out-of-court settlement stemming from their firings. All derogatory references to the teachers were also expunged from their records. Represented by the ACLU, Nadine reported that this was a “complete victory for teachers who stand up for their rights.” Because of the hostile environment, the Cordovas chose not to pursue reinstatement. Patsy went to teach in Albuquerque, and Nadine in the Chicano studies department at the University of New Mexico.
Related Story
There was a similar effort to ban the successful ethnic studies program in Tucson, Arizona in 2011. We recommend the documentary film, Precious Knowledge, on the fight to save the program.
© 1997 Teacher Magazine. Reprinted with permission from David Hill, “Sisters in Arms,” Teacher Magazine (September 1997).
David Hill is a senior writer for Teacher Magazine.
