Farmingville city council, PVUSD school board, and county board of education members (9), current and former district teachers and administrators (15), Allenstown parents who supported the district reorganization plan (6), current Allenstown High and community college students (15), and former students at Allenstown High (6). I limited the interview sample to those with some level of involvement (and often a strong investment) in the activities surrounding the school district secession campaign. Additional data sources included personal notes, memos, and email communications shared by research subjects, as well as information from local and regional media sources including newsletters and newspapers, U.S. Census reports, local library collections, and school district rec ords and archival documents. All data collected for this book were imported into a single NVivo qualitative software database and analyzed for relevant and emergent themes.
Positionality and Politics in the Field
As a White, male, middle-class individual whose field research included significant interactions with working-class (and often socially and legally vulnerable) Mexican immigrant youth and their families, I have to acknowledge my own positionality in the very complex web of racialized class inequalities that made it possible for me to conduct research in the ways, and through the means, that I did.17 During my three years at the school, I held the status of a young adult, English/Spanish bilingual “nonteacher” who enjoyed the privilege of moving relatively freely across campus. This meant that I occupied a somewhat unconventional role that allowed me to develop some unique friendship and mentor relationships with students as well as some astonishingly candid relationships with teachers. This did not mean that I was provided with anything like “insider” status among students. In fact, my ability to gain trust in the areas through which I moved, both on and off campus, was far from automatic. Many of the students with whom I interacted—both Latino and Anglo—were initially, and sometimes permanently, ambivalent or distrustful of my activities on campus. Moving through socioeconomically segregated and racialized spaces in the school, I found my positionality made me a trusted ally in some contexts and a distrusted outsider in others. This was not always in a manner one might expect, however. For example, working closely with Mexican immigrant students in a school environment characterized by acute racial/ethnic and class polarization meant that I had somewhat limited access to the more enfranchised Anglo students, particularly those who (or whose parents) may have felt anger or ambivalence about the “bussed-in” presence of Mexican-descent students. Also, because I worked primarily with recent immigrants and those in the AVID and MEP programs that tended to be more overtly school-oriented and/or college-minded, I was regarded with more distrust by some of the later generation and less enfranchised Mexican-descent students.
Unavoidably, my background as a graduate student of cultural anthropology in a university known to be politically progressive (and “Leftist” in the minds of many more conservative Allenstown residents) limited my ability to directly interview some White parents, including a pair of the more highly visible leaders of the school district secession movement. I felt an ethical and professional obligation to be as truthful as I could about my research interests, and in doing so, I was aware that I was by default “taking sides” in some people’s minds, even as I echoed my desire to understand the issues from multiple perspectives. However, I also enjoyed some privileged access to teachers at Allenstown High as well as community leaders in both Allenstown and Farmingville. That my mother was employed as a special education resource teacher at Allenstown High allowed me some legitimacy as a “well-intentioned” researcher among teachers and administrators. My father also served as a visible leader of a local community college with a strong reputation among residents, business leaders, and educators in both Allenstown and Farmingville. These familial connections provided me with some “room to move” in the bureaucratic institutions at the high school, school district, city, and county levels. For example, in some cases I was provided with privileged access to people in positions of power who might have otherwise ignored or sought to deny my solicitations for their time and requests for information.
My relationships with Latino leaders in Farmingville, including city council members, community activists, and members of the Migrant Parent Advisory Committee (MPAC), developed more slowly over time. I did not even schedule formal interviews with community leaders until the third year of my research. By that time, many of them had some knowledge of my work with students at the school, my interactions with parents, and my participation in community events and gatherings, including visits to Mexico. I found that initial interviews with Farmingville community leaders, rather than serving as an ends in themselves, often allowed me access to greater networking opportunities. Over time, I was included in email messages and telephone calls about ad hoc resident meetings on political developments in the community, particularly around the issue of school district secession.
It is important to note that I was not viewed benevolently by all residents in the larger Pleasanton Valley context. For example, soon after completing my initial research, I requested a 15-minute time slot in a regularly scheduled PVUSD school board meeting to provide a brief overview of my general findings. As a matter of public record, I left a full copy of the larger working paper in the district office. While it appeared as if my brief presentation was generally well received, I received a phone call from a school board member a few weeks later informing me that my manuscript had disappeared from the district office. As it turned out, a school board trustee who was a strong supporter of the Allenstown secession movement had taken the document into her possession. Following a demand from a fellow trustee to return the document, she did so, but not without first crafting her own three-page response, which she added as a preface to my report and copied and circulated to all board members, articulating her assessment of the “merits” of the findings. She attacked a number of specific statements in the document and claimed that “the underlying analysis appears to be focused on generalizations made about an entire community (Allenstown) based on interviews with a limited number of people, and with the author minimizing or twisting the meaning of comments that did not specifically agree with his belief system.” In defense of her claims, she intimated:
I have lived much of the story of Allenstown High . . . and in the story I lived, there were a few bad apples mixed in with a bunch of good people with good intentions who had differing opinions. The good and bad came from both Allenstown and Farmingville, and from several races, [with] a few ready to undermine processes every step of the way, and to portray the “other side” as the enemy. There were mistakes made, and lessons learned. Again, most people involved, from all opinions, were good, decent people with differing opinions.
With regard to the decentness of the people involved, I would be hard pressed to disagree. But I believe that it is also the case that people’s opinions are laden with a number of personal and shared interests and desires (including, in the context of this study, desires for self, cultural, and community/residential preservation as well as the generational reproduction of wealth and opportunity) that inform people’s attitudes and actions, and contribute to histories of privilege-in-action that have served to reproduce political and educational conditions in ways that have benefited and privileged some residents in Pleasanton Valley while marginalizing and disempowering others. It is these historicocultural and interactional processes— rather than a moral judgment of the “decentness” of the people—on which my analysis rests.18
At the same time, I must acknowledge that I agree with anthropologists Aihwa Ong, Marvin Harris, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995), who claim that anthropology cannot be divorced from ethics, and that our models of inquiry should speak to “how we have used or failed to use anthropology as a critical tool at crucial historical moments (Scheper-Hughes 1995: 419). In this book, it should be clear that my own moral and ethical frameworks have, to some degree, shaped the content, structure, and development of my analysis. It cannot, in fact, be otherwise. Ultimately, however, I hope this book will serve as an example for a kind of politically engaged anthropology that accepts, as Marvin Harris has noted, that “what we choose to study or not study in the name of anthropology is a politico-moral decision” (423).
In the narrative of events and social relations that I construct, I do not
