For Nellie Bustillos and Gloria Limón, it's déjà vu all over again, as a noted baseball philosopher was said to have lamented.
Limón and Bustillos, however, aren't lamenting over baseball. That would be nice and easy.
Instead, the two friends are distressed over the rollbacks and attacks on public education, particularly advances that they, along with others, struggled to attain in the 1970s and 1980s.
Specifically, the two women are wary of moves to dismantle programs and services implemented by Tucson Unified School District as a result of the 1978 desegregation federal court order. The historic court intervention, brought on by Chicano and black parents, forced the TUSD to rectify decades of racial and spending inequalities in schools.
While their activist days are behind them, Bustillos and Limón spent an hour Monday educating a new generation.
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At a Mexican-American Studies class of racially diverse students in the César E. Chávez Building on the University of Arizona campus, the women recounted the fight for educational equality in the TUSD.
"Parents were hitting their heads against the walls," said Bustillos, a native of East Los Angeles who moved to Tucson in the 1970s.
Limón lived in Barrio Hollywood on Tucson's west side with her husband and sent their three children to neighborhood schools. She said parents were fed up when they decided to challenge the school district's history of indifference and underfunding of west-side schools.
"We had the worse books, the worse equipment," she said.
When the parents, sympathetic educators and community leaders united, they faced deep resistance in the TUSD, the political elite and even within the Chicano community.
Limón said: "It was a rude awakening of what was going on."
Bustillos told the students that the establishment liked its position and didn't want to yield. But the coalition prevailed, aided by the court order.
As a result, more money was diverted into the historically money-deprived schools where mostly black and Chicano students attended.
Ethnic studies, expanded bilingual programs and greater recruitment of ethnic minority teachers flowed from the court order and continued pressure on the school board and administration.
In addition, the community forced the TUSD board to abandon its plan to shutter Davis Elementary School in Barrio Anita. Davis was saved and converted into a bilingual school.
These incremental steps, said Limón and Bustillos, bolstered the community and parents who felt that the TUSD was finally listening to them. Parents began to feel that they had a say in the schools' administration and policies.
This period of empowerment also inspired Limón to enroll in college and become a bilingual education teacher.
In the ensuing years, more Chicano students graduated from TUSD high schools and went on to college. More Latino teachers and administrators were hired. Progress in many areas was achieved.
However, poor testing results and low graduation rates for Chicano students have persisted as have social ills, poverty, ill-equipped and poorly trained teachers, and parental neglect.
With the impending removal of the desegregation order, uncertainty is emerging.
Limón and Bustillos told the students that they fear the school district will move backward if parents and students remain quiet.
They urged the students to do their homework, research issues and organize.
"If you want a change, you have to do it yourself," Limón told me a day after her presentation.
Parents, especially minority parents, cannot afford to remain uninvolved in their children's education.
"Complacency will mean a rollback to when we didn't have a voice," Limón said. "We don't want to have to go back and reinvent the wheel."
