First published in 1999. This study looks at the relationship between the quest for Chicano community empowerment in the Winter Garden region, the development and implementation of the bilingual/cultural education program in Crystal City, Texas, and bilingual education policy change.
First published in 1999. This study looks at the relationship between the quest for Chicano community empowerment in the Winter Garden region, the development and implementation of the bilingual/cultural education program in Crystal City, Texas, and bilingual education policy change.
La Gente traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities. Though diverse in their cultural and generational backgrounds, la gente were constantly negotiating acts of resistance, especially when their lives, the lives of their children, their livelihoods, or their households were at risk. Historian Lorena V. Márquez documents early community interventions to challenge the prevailing notions of desegregation by barrio residents, providing a look at one of the first cases of outright resistance to desegregation efforts by ethnic Mexicans. She also shares the story of workers in the Sacramento area who initiated and won the first legal victory against canneries for discriminating against brown and black workers and women, and demonstrates how the community crossed ethnic barriers when it established the first accredited Chicana/o and Native American community college in the nation. Márquez shows that the Chicana/o Movement was not solely limited to a handful of organizations or charismatic leaders. Rather, it encouraged those that were the most marginalized—the working poor, immigrants and/or the undocumented, and the undereducated—to fight for their rights on the premise that they too were contributing and deserving members of society.
Much of the history of Mexican American educational reform efforts has focused on campaigns to eliminate discrimination in public schools. However, as historian Guadalupe San Miguel demonstrates in Chicana/o Struggles for Education: Activisim in the Community, the story is much broader and more varied than that. While activists certainly challenged discrimination, they also worked for specific public school reforms and sought private schooling opportunities, utilizing new patterns of contestation and advocacy. In documenting and reviewing these additional strategies, San Miguel’s nuanced overview and analysis offers enhanced insight into the quest for equal educational opportunity to new generations of students. San Miguel addresses questions such as what factors led to change in the 1960s and in later years; who the individuals and organizations were that led the movements in this period and what motivated them to get involved; and what strategies were pursued, how they were chosen, and how successful they were. He argues that while Chicana/o activists continued to challenge school segregation in the 1960s as earlier generations had, they broadened their efforts to address new concerns such as school funding, testing, English-only curricula, the exclusion of undocumented immigrants, and school closings. They also advocated cultural pride and memory, inclusion of the Mexican American community in school governance, and opportunities to seek educational excellence in private religious, nationalist, and secular schools. The profusion of strategies has not erased patterns of de facto segregation and unequal academic achievement, San Miguel concludes, but it has played a key role in expanding educational opportunities. The actions he describes have expanded, extended, and diversified the historic struggle for Mexican American education.
Mexican Americans are rapidly becoming the largest minority in the United States, playing a vital role in the culture of the American Southwest and beyond. This A-to-Z guide offers comprehensive coverage of the Mexican American experience. Entries range from figures such as Corky Gonzales, Joan Baez, and Nancy Lopez to general entries on bilingual education, assimilation, border culture, and southwestern agriculture. Court cases, politics, and events such as the Delano Grape Strike all receive full coverage, while the definitions and significance of terms such as coyote and Tejano are provided in shorter entries. Taking a historical approach, this book's topics date back to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a radical turning point for Mexican Americans, as they lost their lands and found themselves thrust into an alien social and legal system. The entries trace Mexican Americans' experience as a small, conquered minority, their growing influence in the 20th century, and the essential roles their culture plays in the borderlands, or the American Southwest, in the 21st century.
A conservative, bipartisan consensus dominates the discussion about what's wrong with our schools and how to fix them. It offers "solutions" that scapegoat teachers, vilify unions, and impose a market mentality. But in each case, students lose. This book, written by teacher-activists, speaks back to that elite consensus and offers an alternative vision of learning for liberation.
This book deals with a broad range of social issues facing Mexican-origin people in the United States. The studies presented in this volume are brought together by two main themes: (1) social inequalities-cultural, educational, and economic-endured by the Chicano/Mexicano community in the United States and (2) the community's efforts to eradicate the source of those inequalities. The second edition of Chicanas and Chicanos in Contemporary Society takes into consideration the most recent demographic changes affecting the Chicano/Mexicano people. With one-third of persons of Mexican descent under the age of fifteen, many of the challenges center on the current well-being of children and their future prospects. Unlike any other book in the market, several chapters closely examine issues related to children and youth, with particular attention given to children's ethnic identity, schooling practices, and educational policies. Two additional features set this book apart from other books. First, it includes new chapters focused on Chicana/Mexicana mothers, including adolescent mothers, interactions with their children and their efforts to reform schools. Second, it has contributions that analyze relations between Mexican immigrants and their coethnics born in the United States. The studies offered in this volume employ multiple theoretical perspectives and research methods. The studies invoke theories from social science disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Contributors use a variety of analytical strategies, including ethnographic methods and quantitative analysis.
First published in 2000. This study compares two urban schools based on their ability to provide an effective education for Hispanic students. Broderick High School began as an elite, Anglo-dominated institution and evolved into a school whose student body was 82% Hispanic. It is large, public and with a history of sporadic racial tension, walkouts, and a high dropout rate for Hispanic students. Escuela Tlatelolco is small, private, and Chicanocentric. Founded in 1970 by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, a leader of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, it was designed to provide Chicano students the opportunity to reinforce pride in their language, culture, and identity. Through interviews of administrators, teachers, graduates, and students at both schools as well as personal observations, a significant difference was discovered between the experiences and attitudes of those who attended the public school in the 1960s through 1980s and those who graduated in the 1990s. As the public school increased Hispanic administration, teaching and operating staff, and changed its curriculum to include Hispanic history, Hispanic students expressed a greater degree of satisfaction and fulfillment.
Bilingual education is usually framed as a tool of antiracism. This book challenges that framing by pointing to the ways that the foundations of modern approaches to bilingual education have their roots deficit perspectives of Latinx communities. It connects these deficit perspectives with a broader shift in discussions of race that framed racial inequities as a product of cultural and linguistic deficiencies of racialized communities as opposed to structural barriers produced by centuries of racist policies. It then examines the ways that Latinx professionals who entered the field of bilingual education were expected to adopt this deficit perspective in ways that served to maintain racial oppression.