In 2006, Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American studies curriculum was relatively unknown. The program -- a series of middle and high school classes highlighting Mexican American contributions to U.S. history and culture -- had shown promise in lifting Latino students out of lower test score brackets and boosting graduation rates. Only a handful of detractors had shown up at school board meetings to grouse about the curriculum's race-focused teachings.

Then, Jonathan Paton, a Republican lawmaker representing Tucson at the time, got ahold of a recording of labor organizer and Chicano rights icon Dolores Huerta telling an auditorium of Tucson High School students, "Republicans hate Latinos." Suddenly, GOP lawmakers in Phoenix were decrying "Raza Studies," as the program was known, as a plot to indoctrinate children with ideas about white people as racists and people of color as their victims. [...]

Proponents of the program saw it as a way not only to engage students but to ensure that past wrongs against marginalized communities wouldn't be repeated. "At one time in the history of our nation, part of our 'American values' were the enslavement of other human beings," Linda Lopez, a Democratic representative, shot back. "It was through dissent and through the revolution of the minds of the people of this country that we were able to do away with those kinds of American values."

The contours of Arizona's Mexican American studies debate a decade ago will sound familiar to anyone following the current sparring over the teaching of concepts lumped together as "critical race theory" -- which some two dozen states have introduced legislation to ban. Republicans back then saw teachers indoctrinating children to do the left's political bidding, building a Marxist youth program to fight the power and the white man. Educators and their Democratic backers saw an opportunity to inspire underperforming Latino students by overhauling the way American history is taught. The focus today is on the teaching of slavery and the history of discrimination toward Black, rather than Latino, Americans, but the language and the politics have clear echoes.

Yet, when Arizona lawmakers turned their eyes toward their own "critical race theory" ban this past spring, few seemed to remember how the previous attempt to prohibit race-related studies in schools had turned out here. In 2010, Gov. Jan Brewer signed a law banning Tucson's Mexican American studies program. But today, 15 years after the curriculum first caught the attention of Republican lawmakers and a decade after they outlawed it, the courses -- or at least a version of them -- live on, thanks to a court-appointed monitor overseeing TUSD'S longstanding federal desegregation order, a dark reminder of the district's own discriminatory past. A federal court later ruled that the 2010 ban violated students' constitutional rights. Today, the program is larger than it's ever been.