By: Daniel Nardini

Long ago, a prominent First Amendment and library activist named Judith Krug started the concept of Banned Books Week in 1982. When the whole idea of Banned Books Week got off the ground and public libraries in my area and throughout the country started to exhibit books that were supposedly “banned,” I never took it seriously that any library, any institution and any local or state-funded facility would seriously ban books (other than pornographic or extremely violent ones). I found it more as a joke than anything else. Then Arizona banned all Latino and Mexican studies in their public classrooms. While Latino students can still “read” books by Latino and Mexican authors in Arizona’s public schools’ libraries, they are really prohibited from discussing them and debating them as that would cause “discrimination” against non-Hispanics. Clearly, Arizona’s law banning ethnic and racial studies were aimed at the state’s Latino and African American populations. The law does not prohibit study and discussion about the Holocaust and Native American studies.

The point that Latino studies has been effectively banned in Arizona has not been lost to Tony Diaz. Tony Diaz is the organizer of a traveling book caravan called Librotraficante (book smuggler). The book smuggler caravan will present books by Latino authors and illustrators that are banned in Latino and Mexican studies in Arizona. The caravan will start from Houston, Texas, on March 12th, and travel across Texas and all through New Mexico until it reaches Tucson, Arizona, on March 27th. The caravan will indeed provide books by leading Latino writers that are now not allowed to be used in any curriculum in Arizona because these books would tell the truth about the racism, the discrimination, the violence and ugly truth of what was done to Latinos in Arizona. Another reason why Diaz is doing this is not just to bring such books to the attention of Latinos all throughout the U.S. southwest, or do an “in your face” act to the Arizona authorities, but to also warn that such a law banning ethnic and racial studies could also be enacted in other states.

He is not wrong about that possible point. Just as other states have copied Arizona’s immigration law, so then they could just as easily copy its ban on ethnic and racial studies. If ethnic and racial studies are banned in the public schools in other states, think about how it would affect the books used for such studies. They too could be banned. Until now I had never thought that anyone in this country in a position of power might have the means to ban books, and that we would have someone who acts as a book smuggler to bring in banned books for study. I personally wish that Arizona was not an exception to the United States Constitution. The banning of studies is the banning of ideas, and the banning of ideas is the banning of books. Let us hope that Arizona will be the last state to ever get the chance to ban books, and then the bums who voted to ban books in that state will eventually get kicked out of office .