Ex-teacher claims memoir led to firing

A former teacher is suing the Chicago public school district, claiming administrators fired him in 2009 after a parent took issue with his memoir, titled “Gabriel’s Fire,” which recounts his own relationship with a teacher in his youth.

The parent had broached what the suit dismisses as a baseless concern about a relationship between her daughter and the Spanish teacher, Luis Aguilera. It says the mother’s anxiety appeared directly linked to the content of the book.

Aguilera’s memoir is about his coming of age on Chicago’s South Side, where at 13, he “began an affair with one of the teachers at the local elementary school,” according to a description of the book on website of the publisher, The University of Chicago Press.

The lawsuit — filed last week in U.S. District Court in Chicago — names Chicago Public Schools and seeks hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, including for alleged discrimination and the violation of Aguilera’s free-speech rights.

A spokesman for Chicago Public Schools, Frank Shuftan, said in an email that officials at the nation’s third-largest school district could not comment because it’s a pending legal matter.

The library at the school where Aguilera worked, the Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, acquired the book sometime after it was published in 2000, according to the lawsuit. It wasn’t clear how the parent got hold of a copy herself.

By January of 2009, months before Aguilera’s firing, the librarian was allegedly told by a school official to deny students access to copies of “Gabriel’s Fire,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims an official report before his firing alleged unspecified, “inappropriate” comments made by Aguilera to the student. The filing does not describe the alleged comments, but it denies wrongdoing by Aguilera.

A message seeking additional details from Aguilera’s Chicago attorney, Deidre Baumann, was not immediately returned Tuesday.