Educational institutions developed in Tucson, Arizona in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, during a critical time in cultural and political shifts of power between Anglo and Mexican elites in Southwestern United States. This qualitative analysis reconstructs language policies in the incipient educational system in Territorial Tucson. This article examines official and unofficial language policies in both public and private schools in Tucson that reflected this accommodation of power and the negotiation of a new racial hierarchy in the context of westward expansion. It argues that the private schools Mexican elites founded in this period maintained bilingual instruction and promoted biliteracy as a means of racially and linguistically distancing themselves from Anglos, Indians and Mexicans from lower socioeconomic classes in public schools.