and a feeling of unequal status in curricular and co-curricular schooling activities). In other words, local beliefs about what it means to be “Mexican” or “White” are linked not simply to skin color or national origin, but to assimilationist expectations and students’ willingness—or in some cases, ability—to demonstrate behavioral norms that signal their affiliation with either “Americanness” (defined by norms signaling “White” status) or “Mexican-ness.” While school officials acknowledge these dynamics and find them troublesome, many seem as mystified by the situation as anything. Ultimately, their lack of intentionality and initiative to transform the dynamics on the campus has ensured that they have remained somewhat normal and natural among students.
The “nature” of student social relations at AHS plays a significant role in structuring the systematic separation of White and Mexican-descent students in nearly all contexts of the school. Mexican-descent students are highly underrepresented in the school’s many curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities, including clubs and sports (with a few exceptions), the frequent student-organized “spirit” activities, and various honors and advanced placement classes. Each of these contexts tends to be dominated, numerically and organizationally, by White students. This underrepresentation has generated negative social and academic consequences for Mexican-descent students, particularly given that active participation in such schooling contexts is known to anchor students to school and connect them to informational and human resources and networks of social capital that aid in social adjustment and facilitate academic success (Gibson and Bejínez 2002; Stanton-Salazar, Vásquez, and Mehan 2000). Given the academic and linguistic needs of many of Hillside High’s Mexican-descent students—with nearly 60 percent classified as Migrant students at the time of the study2—it is precisely the kind of access and participation they need most but, unfortunately, experience the least.
The essentialized and oppositional nature of racial and ethnic differences at Allenstown High—while viewed as relatively immutable by students and nearly impossible to overcome by school staff—are of course neither natural nor inevitable. Nor are the differential levels of school engagement to which they tend, as will be explored more deeply in Chapters 3 and 6. The racial sensibilities that permeate AHS cannot be explained away as the ordinary product of students’ associational preferences, nor as the to-be-expected result of everyday forms of identity construction in secondary schools that function to reproduce broader ethnic and racial distinctions. While the racial and cultural separations that characterize White and Mexican-descent student peer groupings at AHS are given shape in everyday encounters on the campus, they are also deeply historical and rooted in relationships that go far beyond the school context. The very nature of the local racial imaginary is embedded in broader processes of racialization and place-making in the Pleasanton Valley region that, over time, have conditioned social relationships and encounters in such ways as to make possible the kinds of unequal racial and cultural relationships experienced by students at Allenstown High.
The remainder of this chapter engages a broader ethnoracial history of Pleasanton Valley, with primary attention to the patterns of interaction between White and Latino residents. Such a regional politico-historical approach is necessary, I argue, to make sense of the dominant and educationally damaging constructions of racial categories that inform residents’ “racial sensibilities” and serve as frames for interpretation and behavior within and around area schools. Centering attention on the political exercise of community in the region will help to better contextualize the relationships and discourses that have helped generate the disproportionate distribution of educational rights and entitlements between citizens in the Valley’s two major residential communities and that have produced a longterm failure to establish equal schooling opportunities between local White and Mexican-descent students.
Historicizing Racial Difference and Inequality in Pleasanton Valley
An oft-heard contention among those wishing to make a strong case for the “disfunctionality” of Pleasanton Valley School District as a means of justifying the attempt to split it, is that the communities of Allenstown and Farmingville are two physically separate residential communities with distinct histories and identities that were indiscriminately “thrown together” into a consolidated school district in the late 1960s under the false pretense of financial and organizational efficiency.3 Yet to describe the two communities as geographically distinct does little to account for how, despite their close proximity, they developed into such distinct social, cultural, and socioeconomic “places” in the region, with such dissimilar social and cultural identities.
As Doreen Massey has argued, the nature and identity of any specific community is always constituted by a wider set of social relations, such that what is perceived as “local” often draws as much from relationships outside the area than from those within (see Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Massey 1994b; Stewart 1996). In this sense, appreciating the particular nature and identity of any “place” requires attention to the specific social relations that have historically intersected at that location along with “what people make of those relations in their interpretations and in their lived practice” (Massey 1994a: 117). This is to say that places are fundamentally political rather than simply geographic, and by seeing communities as particular historical intersections of social relations renders struggles of the present—including the antagonisms that constitute them and the political cultures from which they are waged—intelligible. In the case of Pleasanton Valley, paying attention to residential “place-making”—including historical processes of racialization, economic development, and immigrant incorporation—is essential to understanding more contemporary ethnoracial realities as well as existing distinctions related to socioeconomic status, political power, and—particularly relevant in this case—the felt-entitlement of residents in Allenstown to “locally controlled” schools.
Early Racialization Process in Pleasanton Valley—Diversity Structured in Inequality
Farmingville has long been described as a quintessential immigrant town. That its current residential population is nearly 80 percent Latino—the vast majority Mexican Americans who arrived since the mid-1950s—is enough to confirm that status. Farmingville’s historic willingness to incorporate and welcome immigrants—which have included, over the last century and a half, waves from Eu rope and Asia as well as Latin America—is often invoked as a matter of civic pride, particularly by organizations such as the local chamber of commerce and regional historical society. Less acknowledged in recitations of this fabled history, however, is the manner in which the town’s diversity has long been structured in inequality and why, until the early 1990s, the town remained controlled politically by a White elite.
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