The Civic Education of Ignacio Bonillas: Revising Ambient Notions of Citizenship in the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands

Abstract

This article details the experiences of Ignacio Bonillas, one of the first Mexican students to graduate from Arizona’s territorial schools and explicates how those experiences impacted his perceptions of U.S. and Mexican citizenship. Bonillas’s story illustrates how definitions of citizenship in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands were permeable and dynamic before the era of Americanization and encourages teachers and students to interrogate the ways restrictive notions of citizenship are reproduced in public schools. This article goes on to argue for inviting students to access local archives and create case studies of figures whose experiences challenge the Americanized histories of their region.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Cristina Ramirez for her mentorship on this project. I also wish to thank Liliana Toledo-Guzman, Cristina Urias-Espinoza, aems emswiler, Leah Bowshier, Moises Delgado, Astrid Liu, Martin Cardenas, Larissa Runyan, and Josie Portz for offering comments on earlier drafts of this essay. This research was partly enabled by a fellowship in 2022 through a Mellon-funded digital borderlands project at the University of Arizona awarded to Drs. Katherine Morrissey, Anita Huizar-Hernandez, and Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I want to thank RR peer reviewers, Annie Mendenhall and Duane Roen, for their support and guidance on this article.

2 Peña’s call for students to see themselves as social agents stems from her arguments for the family as “the first society, the first government, and the first institution to which her readers must pledge their loyalty,” which acts as a justification for requiring Mexican students in Mexican families to understand Mexico’s government system (151).

3 One significant contemporary marker of Bonillas, Ochoa, and Safford's resonance in the history of Arizona schools is that there are schools named after them. The Ochoa Community School was built in 1921. The Safford K-8 Magnet School was initially constructed in 1888. The Bonillas Traditional Magnet School was constructed in 1954.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles McMartin

Charles McMartin is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric Composition and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. His research and teaching focus on contemporary and historical examples of students and teachers who lead coalitions to transform their education systems. His work has been published in Composition Studies, Peitho, and LLIDS. He currently serves as the graduate coordinator of the community writing pathways program Wildcat Writers. As a former high school English teacher, he advocates for turning the focus of universities toward their local high schools and empowering students with the skills necessary to become leaders in their communities.