also on the front side of campus, which houses the MEP office and language arts classes such as “Spanish for Spanish Speakers.” The largest grouping of Mexican-descent students—a rather diverse mix of first- and second-generation Mexican immigrant youth—hang out along the more remote, multipurpose athletic courts that extend beyond the backside of the gymnasium. The only Mexican-descent students who maintain a close proximity to the central Quad area are those found inside the school cafeteria, a situation most attributable to the fact that they—along with a wider representation of the working-class Latino on the campus—tend to rely on the free or reduced price meals made possible by the National School Lunch Program.
“This Big Ole’ Wall That Nobody Can Ever Cross”
The sociospatial marginalization of Mexican-descent students on the Allenstown High campus is not a simple consequence of student preferences. Sonia, a sophomore and Mexican migrant student from Farmingville, describes the anxiety and discomfort she experiences—and that many of her peers would claim to share—when moving through central spaces like the Quad:
You feel like you don’t fit in, just by walking [or] passing through the Quad. When you pass through there . . . they don’t even notice you. And it’s like you don’t belong there. It’s weird, and I don’t know how to explain it but it’s just the feeling you have.
Beatrice, a sophomore and third-generation Mexican American, explains why she chooses to avoid the Quad area:
You see all the White people there? Some of them are really cool to be with. But then there’s the little things they say, like when you pass by, they are like “Oh look, there goes another Mexican.” So now we started hanging out by the library. We just stick in our little corner.
Ana, a junior female and second-generation Mexican immigrant, asked if she believed the feeling of discomfort and displacement she experienced might be the result of active forces of discrimination at play on the campus, responds:
I don’t know, but it seems that Mexicans are always denied from certain things. Like they hang out in places where they’re not seen. The whole Quad is full of different races except for Mexicans, and it does not feel so cool like that. I think it’s because, I’m not sure, but there’s too many Whites and it seems like they dominate the whole school, and the Mexicans can’t do anything.
Jennie, an Anglo-American junior from Allenstown, recognizes as well the anxiety that seems to accompany the spatial segregation of White and Mexican-descent students on the campus, and she is quick to express her sense of disappointment about the general racial and class divisions that characterize student interactions:
My good friend is Mexican, and I’ve never been raised to be prejudiced like that. And it was kind of like it was just forced upon you. In classes, you know, they [Mexican-descent students] would be incredibly friendly and very cool. A lot of times they were more down to my level than a lot of other [White] kids that go to this school because they can be kind of rich and snobby and fed with a silver spoon and never had to want for anything. And then once [class] breaks come along, there was like this big old wall that no one could ever cross [emphasis added]. Like if you went over there they would all go, “Oh, the White person!” and if one came to us it would be like “Oh, the Mexican.” But it goes both ways. I think it’s hard because a majority of the Mexicans are really poor . . . we blame a lot of our problems on them and it’s not fair. So a lot of times they have resentment toward us and I see why, but it shouldn’t be that way.
Mia, a female junior from Allenstown, and one of three African American students at the school, expressed her perspective on the segregated campus environment in the following way:
It [Allenstown High] is really separated. Like in the “I” building, there’s the Hispanic people. Over there is a bunch of “Skaters” . . . then over here is the weird [White] people who wear scary clothes and pierce everything. And then over—they aren’t “Mexicans”—there’s a few Hispanic people, but they would be considered “sell-outs” because they don’t speak Spanish and they are just Hispanic ethnicity. It’s all separated like that. Like all my friends who hang out over there by the tree, they’re all White. There’s not really a lot of interracial mixing because there’s only two types of races, that’s White and Hispanic.
These student narratives highlight the complex, disturbingly essentialized, and highly oppositional nature of racial and ethnic relations on the AHS campus. High levels of separation and distrust fuel the development of damaging racial co-constructions and stereotypes, to the point that even students who refuse to align themselves with one category or the other risk being criticized or ostracized by peers from either “side.” For example, an assistant principal admitted, “even those Mexican students who have been able to cross over and join some of the White-dominated clubs and friendship groups on the campus have to be okay with being White.” By this, she referred to their willingness to assimilate to styles, norms, and behaviors thought to be characteristic of White students (English language, dress, similar preferences for music, leisure activities, etc.) and to minimize expression or behaviors that might be associated with “Mexican-ness,” including regular associations with other groups of Mexican-descent students on campus.
One such a “border crosser” was Veronica, a 1.5 generation (one parent foreign-born and the other U.S.- born) Mexican immigrant female from Farmingville who, during my second year of research, was elected vice president of her sophomore class. Asked how she ended up participating in student government despite the fact that so few Latino students were involved in the school’s mainstream activities, she spoke of the difficult transformation she had to make after arriving at the high school from Farmingville:
Well, last year, at the beginning of my freshman year, me and my best friend from Rolling Meadows [a “feeder” middle school located in Farmingville] didn’t know anybody. So we got to know new people and we like, left, we kind of like stayed away from our old friends. We moved on and we met new people. [emphasis added]
CH: Why did you feel you had to leave your middle school friends to get involved in activities here?
V: Well, when we came, we did actually hang out with them. But I would want to go to meetings and stuff and they’d be like, “We don’t want to go.” And I’d be, like, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ So we just like slowly kept on getting away, because they never wanted to do anything.
CH: How come they didn’t like to do that stuff?
V: They were just—well, they were Mexican so, it’s like, I don’t know. Like those girls that I used to hang around with are still with the same crowd. And it’s like, we moved on. And they see how much I’ve improved and stuff, and I still say Hi and everything. But they’re still with the same friends from Rolling Meadows.
For Veronica, the route to engagement and belonging at Allenstown High meant “staying away” from her former Farmingville friends. Her explanation for why they failed to get involved in school activities—because “they were just, they were Mexican”—suggests a skewed social orientation as well as the internalization of a damaging stereotype about her ethnic peers, leaving her to feel that she had to “get away” by “leaving” them in order to “improve” herself. Asked if she felt comfortable and enjoyed being at Allenstown High, Veronica immediately nodded in excitement and smiled: “Yes. It’s cool. I love it! I ran for vice president and I won. I know a lot of people [now]. So every day is like—I want to come to school every day in the morning!”
Veronica’s story of disassociation above, along with the wider sampling of student narratives collected through the Peers Project research, suggest the way that being “White” or “Mexican” in the school is marked by particular statuses,
