Urquides, María (1908–1994)

María Legarra Urquides, whose career is discussed in this entry, played a pivotal role in the passage of the federal Bilingual Education Act in 1968. In 1965, Urquides organized an important survey of programs serving Mexican American students in the Southwest, cowrote the report of survey findings, and helped [Page 870]convene a national symposium in Tucson, Arizona, to publicize the report. The report and symposium encouraged Congress to enact Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Urquides was born on December 8, 1908, in Tucson, Arizona, to Hilario Urquides and Mariana Legarra. Maria was the youngest of eight children and the only one to make education a career. As a child, she attended segregated “Mexican only” schools, but always maintained that she did not feel overt discrimination, partly because of excellent and caring teachers throughout her school career. Her teachers encouraged her to work hard and attend college. After graduating from Tucson High School in 1926, Urquides attended Arizona State Teachers College (now Arizona State University). Completing college was an economic struggle for the young woman, if not an academic one. In 1928, she graduated with a teaching certificate as valedictorian of her class.

Urquides's first teaching assignment was at Davis Elementary School, a segregated school in Tucson with a population of nearly 100% Latino and Yaqui students. At Davis, Urquides was remembered both as a strict disciplinarian and as a teacher who encouraged her students to be proud of their Mexican heritage.

In the early 1950s, Urquides began to study secondary school curriculum at the University of California, Berkeley. She later transferred to the University of Arizona and completed a master's degree in education in 1956. She began teaching at Tucson's newly constructed Pueblo High School the same year and taught English and reading to the school's large Spanish-speaking population. By then, Urquides had been teaching for 40 years. At Pueblo, her own gradual political and ideological transformation fueled her growing advocacy on behalf of students. She worked tirelessly to make the school's curriculum and teaching methodologies more responsive to students' needs.

She was particularly troubled that Mexican students fluent in Spanish were nonetheless unable to read and write it. As a consequence, she began to work closely with Adalberto Guerrero, a Pueblo colleague who was attempting to create a Spanish honors class for Spanish-speaking students. The class became so popular and its students so successful that in 1965 the school received the National Education Association's (NEA) Pace Maker School Award, as reported by Patricia Preciado Martin. Urquides strongly supported the Spanish for Spanish-speakers classes, and when Pueblo received the award, she lobbied the NEA concerning the need to address other difficulties faced by Latino students. In a very real sense, this was an early program of bilingual instruction although it did not bear that designation at the time.

The NEA agreed to fund a study on constructive approaches to educating Mexican students and asked Urquides to direct it. The teachers who were surveyed saw Spanish and Mexican culture as assets rather than as deficits. They believed that the Spanish language could facilitate the acquisition of English and that there were many benefits to becoming bilingual and bicultural. Urquides became the chair of the study group, ultimately called the NEA Tucson Survey on the Teaching of Spanish to the Spanish Speaking.

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