ABSTRACT
The passage of Proposition 227 in California (1998), Proposition 203 in Arizona (2000), and Question 2 in Massachusetts (2002) represents the culmination of efforts by a nationalistic, neoconservative movement in the United States to restrict and repress the use of non-English languages for teaching and learning in school, thereby hampering their promulgation in society. This movement stems from an orchestrated web of historical and contemporary policies designed to advance the causes of cultural assimilation and the restriction of immigration by non-English-speaking working-class peoples, with the ultimate goal of dismantling civil rights policies that, beginning in the 1960s, opened the door to affirming ethnic and language diversity in school (Dixon, Green, Yeager, Baker, & Franquiz, 2000).
