"This is not right": Rural Arizona women challenge segregation and ethnic division, 1925-1950

In the late 1930s homesteader and teacher Eulalia Bourne staged her country school's Christmas play in Spanish so that parents and community members of Pima County, Arizona, could understand and appreciate her students' efforts. Disobeying educational policy that directed only English be spoken in school, Bourne, a Euro-American, reached out to the majority Mexican American population to honor their culture and language.' Her efforts demonstrate one strand of thinking in rural Arizona where some women, acting as school board members, concerned parents, and teachers, worked to dismantle segregation and break down ethnic division between 1925 and 1950, even as others worked to maintain the status quo, segregation and division.2 Those who challenged the status quo were motivated by a variety of factors, including the role of motherhood, humanitarian concern for their neighbors, and their desire to create less divisive, more equitable communities. This study explores their actions, using oral histories, school boards minutes, government documents, and memoirs.3 This variety of sources is necessary to the understanding of women's different types of resistance and the social and historical context in which they acted.

This study demonstrates that even when institutional structures enforced segregation and a form of assimilation that denigrated minorities' heritage, some women acted very deliberately and consciously to undermine these goals. They acquired power and influence to resist segregation through their volunteer activities, work as teachers, and personal persistance. Those who successfully challenged divisions between ethnic groups were all economically secure, although not well-off. They were of varied ethnicity, including Euro-American, Mexican American, and African American women. Common occupations included farming and teaching. During the 1930s and 1940s they worked individually, outside of an active Civil Rights movement, which did not come into existence until the late 1940s in Arizona.4 Their stories add to the developing understanding of ethnic relations in the multiracial American West.5

In the diverse state of Arizona, with 39 percent of its population made up of people of color (see Table 1), intercultural relations played out in small town and country schools. In rural areas, schools served many functions: as centers for education, as sites of socialization, and as reflections of the towns' values. As the main community institution, schools often reflected the fears and racism of the majority population of Arizona.

Although Eulalia Bourne's country school classroom included Mexican American and Euro-American students, in Arizona towns and cities the de facto segregation of Mexican Americans in schools was standard practice. Additionally, Arizona legislated more severe segregation of African Americans than any other state in the Rocky Mountain or Pacific West.7 Segregation of American Indians occurred due to their confinement on reservations and attendance at boarding schools such as the Phoenix Indian School. Between 1925 and 1950, few American Indian children attended public schools in the counties focused upon in this study. Consequently, American Indians' educational experiences are beyond the scope of this article.8

This study concentrates on three rural counties of southern Arizona-Pima, Pinal, and Cochise-where many of the nonurban African Americans and Mexican Americans resided.9 These counties comprised multicultural populations and represented the common economic mainstays of the state: mining, ranching, and cotton.10

Ranching and farming had long characterized this part of the Southwest that became a U.S. territory through the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico in 1854. During the 1860s and 1870s, the Mexican population in southern Arizona exceeded that of Euro-Americans, and historians have found cooperative, mutually beneficial relations existed between the two groups in Tucson, the major population center. But there were also conflicts in southern Arizona because Euro-Americans wanted to take more Sonoran land. Violent clashes led to 172 deaths between 1857 and 1861.11

Although attempts by Euro-Americans to gain more land in Sonora failed, they gradually increased their dominance over Mexicans living in the Arizona territory. Many early Mexican residents of the territory of Arizona were business people or land owners, and some large ranches date back to the early nineteenth century. However, after the railroad reached the area in the 1880s and the population expanded, Euro-American entrepreneurs acquired more wealth and began to exert economic dominance over Mexicans in Tucson and rural areas. At the ideological level, this dominance was supported by Euro-American stereotypes of Mexicans as lazy and inferior while Mexicans, in turn, viewed the Euro-Americans as materialistic and crude. After the 1880s, intermarriage between the two groups declined in Tucson. Organizing for mutual support, Mexicans in Tucson and Florence formed lodges of the Alianza Hispano-Americana.12