August 25, 2005
Donato, Rubén. The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans During the Civil Rights Era. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.
In this book Donato explains that while many scholars have focused on the African American struggle for equal education during the Civil Rights movement, few have focused on the Mexican American community during this period. Donato summarizes this “silent” history, using as his primary example Brownfield School District in northern California. Donato writes that in Brownfield, “The concern for respecting and preserving the cultural identity of Mexican Americans found itself at odds with the traditional values of the Brownfield school system and the larger white community…Despite the claim that Mexican children were being processed by a neutral school system, public schools across the Southwest were rife with ethnic, linguistic and class biases. If one of the prime values of the Brownfield schools was uniformity, then there was an inherent conflict between the organization of schools and the desires of the Mexican American community” (10).
In Ch.1 Donato sketches a background of Mexican American educational experience in the pre-Civil Rights era. He agrees with Gilbert Gonzalez that “the schooling of Mexican Americans during the first half of the twentieth century in the Southwest functioned as a means of social control, an attempt to socialize them into loyal and disciplined workers, and the instrument by which social relations between Mexican and white communities were reproduced” (12). Donato discusses the history of segregation, assimilation politics, intelligence testing and migrant workers during the Progressive Era.
Ch.2 provides a history of the formation of the Brownfield Unified School district and discusses the pros and cons of school district unification for the Mexican American community.
Ch.3 deals with the emergence of grassroots activism within the national Mexican American community and, more specifically within Brownfield, California. Inspired by the atmosphere of political activism of the 1960’s, many Mexican Americans began to question the high dropout rate and low achievement of its youth. Donato describes the formation of a parent organization called Communidad Organizada Para Educación (COPE) in Brownfield which sought curricular, pedagogical and policy reforms (72). Despite the strong opposition of the white community and school administration, COPE received a grant to create a pilot bicultural-bilingual elementary school. Donato writes that, “Contrary to deterministic notions that viewed Mexican Americans as passive victims of dominant institutional and ideological structures, they [COPE and other Mexican American organizations] demonstrated the capacity of a powerless minority group to organize and mount a serious campaign for educational justice” (85).
In Ch.4, Donato discusses the debates that occurred in Brownfield over year-round schooling. In these debates, he argues, the concerns of Mexican migrant workers (whose children had to be free to work during summer months) were not taken into consideration.
In Ch.5 Donato relates the history of the debate over bilingual education. He explains that Lau v. Nichols (1974), a landmark case stating that failure to provide non-English-speaking Chinese students a comprehensible education denied them equal educational opportunities, sparked a renewed national interest in ESL and bilingual education programs. In Brownfield, Donato notes that though Mexican American organizations met with stiff opposition, they were able to team up with liberal white teachers and parents to pass a Bilingual Education Plan.
Ch. 6 deals with school desegregation. Donato discusses several key court cases following Brown vs. The Board of Education (1954). He then relates efforts in Brownfield to bus Mexican American students to Atherton schools (which were predominately white and middle class). For the most part, however, these efforts failed and, “Decades after the Brown decision, desegregation continued to be controversial in the late 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s” (143).
Donato concludes with an historical overview of the Mexican American struggle for equal education: “In contrast with the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Mexican American community relied on confrontational tactics in their struggle for equal education, in the late 1970s they learned that legislative and judicial support was crucial to achieve their goals” (151). Rather than any innate “laziness” or lack of organizational ability, Donato blames Mexican Americans’ exclusion from the political infrastructure for the failure of Mexican Americans in Brownfield and elsewhere to make necessary changes to the educational system.
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