CHRIS CODUTO/Arizona Daily Wildcat UA administrators are not sending e-mails to graduates this year; rather, they are asking officials at each college to advise against tortilla-flinging. Students, like this December 2003 graduate, have thrown tortillas at commencement ceremonies for years.

UA officials say tortilla-tossing can be offensive to Mexicans, American Indians

Instead of sending e-mails to graduating students asking them not to throw tortillas, administrators are asking officials at each college to advise students not to engage in the practice at this year's ceremonies.

President Peter Likins said he has asked the deans of each college to persuade the graduating seniors not to throw the tortillas during the ceremony.

"These are intelligent young men and women who are graduating from our university," Likins said. "They're not deliberately giving offense. They're just having fun."

But Likins said the fun should end when it is at the expense of others.

The practice of throwing tortillas during the ceremony offends people, he said, especially people of certain ethnic groups.

"In some people's memories, tossing the tortillas is a historic slur. It's stereotyping the Mexican-American community in ways that some people find offensive," Likins said.

Last year, Likins and Provost George Davis sent e-mails to graduating students requesting that they not to throw tortillas because the practice had gotten out of hand.

Likins said when he started at the UA in 1997, students threw tortillas in the air at the end of the ceremonies to celebrate their graduation, but in more recent years, tortillas seem to constantly fly everywhere.

He said the airborne tortillas unnerve speakers who are unfamiliar with the practice, and embarrass the university because it is a "childish" and wasteful act that graduating students should stop.

"For some speakers, it's just not a problem. ... But for other speakers, it's unimaginable," Likins said. "You feel like you're getting tomatoes thrown at you when you're trying to deliver a speech. You don't know quite how to handle that."

Likins said he found the act amusing back in 1997 but has since realized that the practice is offensive to the Mexican and American Indian community.

"It was for me a combination of the tortilla-throwing getting to be more and more of a continuous activity, and I began to get negative feedback from the community," he said.

Socorro Carrizosa, director of Chicano/Hispano Student Affairs, said she does not like the practice because it is wasteful and reflects poorly on the attitudes of the students at the UA.

"I find it more offensive in that it's such a waste, that it makes such a negative statement about our American culture, our youth," Carrizosa said.

Angel Ramirez, a political science senior, said he finds tortilla-throwing more wasteful than offensive.

"The fact that people are sneaking it in is a little disrespectful. It is a waste of food," he said.

Ramirez, who is graduating, said he doesn't plan on sneaking any tortillas into the ceremony.

Graduating communication senior Lizz Bozorgmehr said she does not think the practice is rude or offensive unless it's deliberately demeaning.

"I would think it's a form of celebration," she said. "If they threw baguettes, would the French people get mad?"

Although the immediate end to the practice is not in the near future, Likins is encouraged by the fact that last year, no one from the College of Education threw any tortillas.

"That's what I think we have to accomplish here, college by college," he said.