are specifically designed to transform schooling conditions to include and better serve working-class Mexican-descent students?
To pursue these diverse concerns, the book offers a kind of contrapuntal narrative. In one line of inquiry, it examines a school district reorganization process, initiated by concerned citizen groups rather than local teachers or school officials, to establish separate schooling systems between two residential communities in central California that have long shared a common school district. One community, which I call Allenstown,8 is a predominantly White, middle-to upper-class professional suburb; the other, Farmingville, is a largely Mexican-descent working-class town. In a related line of analysis, the study looks closely at the struggles of a well-resourced desegregated high school in the district’s White residential community to establish an inclusive, integrated schooling environment capable of promoting the broad-based success and academic achievement of an increasingly diverse student body.
In this sense, the case study provides a unique opportunity to simultaneously investigate a political process pushing for ethnically separate “local schools” and the efforts of a well-resourced high school to create the conditions for the positive operation of a racially diverse and inclusive school. This dual ethnographic focus is intended to provide a lens from which to see how the recent campaign to split the school district along racial, ethnic, and class lines—an effort touted by its proponents as a response/reaction to an institutional failure to create effective integrated schools locally—is better understood as an outcome of the continued mobilization of normative discourses, restrictive citizenship narratives, and forces of privilege-in-action that have served to undermine a range of courageous and well-intentioned efforts to establish conditions of equal status and shared control that are the essential prerequisites for effective and equitable integrated education in racially and socioeconomically diverse settings (Allport 1954; Fine et al. 1997; Pettigrew and Tropp 2006; Slavin 1985, 1995; Tropp and Prenovost 2008). Here, an important distinction must be made between a willingness to establish desegregated schools—that is, those that allow for the coexistence of students from different racial and ethnic groups in the same institutional space—and the commitment to effectively sustain integrated schooling conditions, which requires intentional, well-informed, and often courageous efforts to establish intellectual and social engagement, as well as relationships of equal status, across lines of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic difference and in settings inside and outside the formal classroom. A major aim of this ethnography is to investigate the political and educational processes that have contributed to this failure of integration in a desegregated school setting, and to identify the dimensions of shared responsibility for the conditions of educational inequality that continue to exist between middle-class Whites and working-class Latinos.
Chapters 3 through 7 offer a set of extended case studies, covering a ten-year period from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, that focus on a series of highly politicized encounters between youth and adults in Allenstown and Farmingville as they attempt to negotiate a shared vision for equitable, high-quality schooling that reflects and validates their varied (and sometimes divergent) wants, needs, and senses of entitlement. By way of the vested and emotional narratives of local students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and community activists, the case studies critically analyze the school and community-level practices and policies that have sustained ongoing structures of segregation in ways that have resisted change and made conditions of segregation seem so sensible to those currently privileged. At the same time, each case study includes attention to the concerted efforts of local working-class Latino youth and their families to challenge schooling arrangements and practices that have long favored the affluent and that have excluded them from the benefits of equal access to, and participation in, well-resourced, low-poverty schools.
By design, this study is not concerned with the formal analysis of curricular content, pedagogical methods, or student assessment in ways that suggest specific technical remedies for classroom-based educational reform. Instead, the ethnographic approach highlights normative educational processes and forces of privilege-in-action that limit efforts to promote equitybased educational change. The study suggests that, until we address these normative issues that challenge equity-based school reform, and imagine paths and strategies for altering them, our technical reform endeavors will continue to fall flat (Oakes et al. 2005; Rogers and Oakes 2005).
Racialization and Mexican American Experiences of (De-)segregation
A substantial body of scholarly research has addressed the historical, socioeconomic, political, and legal factors and conditions that have undermined the institutionalization of racial integration since Brown v. Board of Education and justified what appears to be a return to more “separate but equal” public schooling conditions in the United States. A more detailed outline of these explanatory frameworks is offered in Chapter 1. Fewer studies, however, have focused specifically on the Mexican American experience of (de-) segregation despite a significance history of Latino struggle that includes hard-fought legal victories predating the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown.9 While African Americans and Latinos have faced common obstacles in their respective struggles for equal schooling, there are important distinctions that should prohibit any attempt to collapse the Latino experience into the dominant White/Black binary that constitutes much of the historical analysis of school (de)segregation. Shifting racial categorizations applied to Mexican Americans from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1970s generated a unique set of political statuses and inspired a distinct array of educational policy decisions that have differentially impacted how Latino communities have experienced, responded to, and resisted the intersectional forms of subordination they have faced—forms that can be at once legal, political, economic, cultural, linguistic, and [hetero]sexual (Donato and Hanson 2012; Valencia 2008; Yasso and Solórzano 2007).10
For these reasons, scholars of Latina/o education, notably those writing from a Critical Race Theory perspective (Latina/o CRT), have emphasized moving beyond the Black/White binary in the study of Mexican American experiences of (de)segregation to focus more specifically on processes of racialization—that is, on the sociohistorical processes through which particular racial categories have been maintained and shaped through social struggles over time.11 A racialization perspective encourages attention not only to the (often shifting) forces of exclusion and discrimination that have been directed at particular communities of color, but also to minority populations’ own histories of responding to such treatment, including the manners in which they come to organize themselves around racial discourse (Omi and Winant 1994; Solórzano and Delgado-Bernal 2001; Villenas and Deyhle 1999; Yasso and Solórzano 2007). Highlighting processes of racialization draws attention to the ways “race” can serve as a source of meaning for minority populations in their own struggle against intersectional forms of cultural, political, and socioeconomic oppression, and how racial solidarity and identities may serve as bases for social and political action, informing broader social mobilizations and community capacity-building activities to assert political rights and promote social and racial justice (Gilroy 1987; Gregory 1998).
The CRT framework has drawn increased scholarly attention to the agency and lived experience of Latino populations in both historical and contemporary contexts, inspiring a host of critical qualitative/ethnographic studies examining processes of community empowerment and collective struggle, including important explorations of how Latina/o communities have successfully used experiential knowledge, drawn from community-based relationships, as a source of strength in their struggles against intersectional forms of oppression, building on such “cultural wealth”12 to politically organize, assert rights in society, and excel academically in the educational realm (Dyrness 2008; González, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Villenas and Deyhle 1999; Warren et al. 2011; Yasso 2005; Yasso and Solórzano 2007).
In investigating the politics of school integration and resegregation, attention to processes of racialization prove useful for a variety of reasons. First, a racialization perspective warns against any tendency to represent the conflicts that arise in battles
