Guerrero, Adalberto (1929-)

Adalberto “Beto” Guerrero was a member of a small group of educators in Tucson, Arizona, in the 1950s and 1960s who have been called “pioneers of bilingual education” because of their influence on the passage of the federal Bilingual Education Act in 1968. Other members of the group were Paul Allen, Rosita Cota, Martina García Duran-Cerda, Henry “Hank” Oyama, Paul Streif, and Maria Urquides. Guerrero's life and career are described in this entry.

Guerrero was born on December 11,1929, in Bisbee, Arizona, one of seven children of Ramón Quiñones Guerrero and Guadalupe Méndez Guerrero. Ramón Guerrero was an underground miner who survived the Depression by augmenting his income from sporadic mining work by selling scrap metals, bricklaying, grave digging, selling door to door, and storekeeping. When war threatened in Europe in the 1930s, full-time underground employment was ensured. Subsequently, because of persistent inequities and racial discrimination, he became deeply involved in the union movement, a legacy of which Beto Guerrero is extremely proud. Guadalupe and Ramón instilled in their seven children a love of reading through her graphic narrations of stories and novels, fairy and folk tales, historical anecdotes, riddles, and games, as Beto Guerrero later recalled.

Guerrero dropped out of high school in 1944, his freshman year, to work at Fort Huachuca. He returned in 1945 but quit for good after completing one year, to follow “the only life for a real man, working underground.” He married his wife, Ana, in November 1950, and was inducted into the army in January 1951. After his discharge in 1953, he returned to mining. At the urging of his father and his wife, Guerrero applied for and was granted admission to the University of Arizona without a high school diploma. Working nights at Hughes Aircraft, and studying days, like many other married University of Arizona students, Guerrero received a bachelor's degree in education in 1957 and began teaching at Pueblo High School in 1958.

At the time, Pueblo had only one additional full-time Spanish teacher who became a mentor and friend to the novice teacher. Although approximately 50% of the school's students were native speakers of Spanish, they were systematically placed, with disastrous results, Guerrero recalled, in classes designed for students learning Spanish as a second language. Consequently, with the encouragement and guidance of his mentor, Guerrero initiated a 4-year program of Spanish for Spanish speakers. He believed that if he could instill in the students pride about their linguistic and cultural origins, they would visualize themselves as succeeding in other subjects as well.

As a young man in Bisbee, Guerrero had noticed that the most fulfilled and successful people were those who were aware of and comfortable with their Mexican cultural and linguistic roots. In contrast, those who were embarrassed about being Mexican and speaking Spanish, and who had abandoned their culture and language to assimilate, ironically, were still rejected by the Anglo-Saxon work world, as Patricia Preciado Martin explains in her historical account of bilingual education in Tucson. Guerrero felt that his own cultural identity was strengthened through the academic study of Spanish, Mexican, and Latin American literature. He wanted to give his Pueblo High School students the same feeling of security by studying and learning the cultures and languages of Mexico and the United States.

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