Oyama, Henry (1926-)

Henry “Hank” Oyama, Jr., has been a vigorous proponent of cultural dignity and civil rights throughout most of his long life. A quiet and dignified activist, Oyama fought for the educational rights of Mexican American students for more than half a century. Oyama made his mark in bilingual education as a contributor to a landmark report on the educational needs of Mexican American students in the Southwest. The report, titled The Invisible Minority, was published by the National Education Association in 1966 and led directly to the passage in Congress of the Bilingual Education Act in 1968.

Of Japanese descent, Oyama was born in Tucson, Arizona, on June 1, 1926, and was raised in a Mexican American barrio, speaking only Spanish at home. His mother was born in Hawai'i but grew up in Mexico. She did not speak Japanese or English. Later, she met and married Henry Oyama, Sr., in Tucson. In 1942, the Oyama family was sent to a Japanese relocation camp near the Colorado River. There, after 1 year and 4 months, Oyama was permitted to leave after he agreed to work in places where there was a great hiring need. This included a hotel, and paper and aluminum factories in Missouri and Kansas. In 1945, he was inducted into the army at the age of 18. During basic training at Camp Hood, superior officers assumed Oyama spoke Japanese and announced their intention to send him to the South Pacific as an interpreter. He explained his lack of fluency in Japanese, and he was sent to a Minnesota language school, where military authorities discovered that he spoke fluent Spanish and posted him instead to the Panama Canal Zone as a bilingual counterintelligence officer.

After the war, Oyama returned to Tucson, where he attended the University of Arizona. In 1956, he became a teacher of history and Spanish at Pueblo High School, where he joined a remarkable group of educators, among them Adalberto Guerrero, Maria Urquides, and Rosita Cota. In the late 1950s, these forward-thinking educators pioneered the creation of Spanish Honors and Spanish for Native Speakers courses at Pueblo High School, in the Tucson Unified School District, as a way to maintain and enhance the Spanish language proficiency of Mexican-origin students. It was an early form of bilingual education.

Oyama's efforts for social justice were not limited to the field of education. In 1959, his quiet struggle for racial equality and social justice became personal. That year, he met and fell in love with Mary Ann Jordan, a White woman, whom he was prevented from marrying by an Arizona state law (Arizona Statutes, 1942, Section 25–101, on Void and Prohibited Marriages). That law forbade “the marriage of persons of Caucasian blood with those of Negro, Mongoloid, Malay or Hindu blood.” Oyama and Jordan challenged the law, which was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1962.

Meanwhile, Oyama continued to work on behalf of Mexican-origin students. In 1965, he was invited by [Page 638]the National Education Association (NEA), together with Guerrero, Urquides, and Cota, to participate in the “Tucson Survey on the Teaching of Spanish to the Spanish-Speaking.” Conducted in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, the survey documented the success of bilingual education programs under way at the time.

...