In 1923, Tucson educator Nona C. Rodee published Teaching Beginners to Speak English, a book designed for teachers working with children classified as non-English-speaking or “foreign.” Although developed in Tucson, the book circulated well beyond the city and became part of a broader Americanization project directed particularly at Mexican immigrant and Mexican American children in the United States Southwest.

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Inside the Americanization Classroom returns Rodee’s book to circulation more than a century after its publication. This electronic edition reproduces Rodee’s complete text, accompanied by historical context and commentary by historian Lydia R. Otero. The commentary examines the assumptions embedded in Rodee’s lessons about language, race, gender, childhood, citizenship, and what it meant to become “American.”

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Americanization practices became embedded in the schooling of Mexican American children for decades. In Tucson, children from Mexican American barrios continued to be placed in 1C classrooms well into the twentieth century, including children who were already English dominant. Otero’s own placement in 1C in Tucson in 1961 connects Rodee’s 1923 book to educational practices that persisted for decades.

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Rather than treating Rodee’s book simply as a relic of outdated teaching practices, Otero reads it as evidence of an educational system whose assumptions about language and Mexican American children persisted long after 1923

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Subjects and keywords: Americanization; Mexican immigration; Mexican American students; Mexican American education; school segregation; teaching manuals; public schools; English-language instruction; language and cultural assimilation; race and education; gender and education; Arizona; Tucson; United States Southwest.