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CHAPTER 2

Historicizing Educational Politics in Pleasanton Valley

The Politics of Place and Belonging at Allenstown High School

The first buses appear at the gated entrance of Allenstown High School just before 7 a.m., beginning their winding quarter-mile journey up to the center of the campus. The hilly ascent provides views of well-groomed athletic fields and an expansive, naturally terraced forest of redwood and juniper that rises around the campus on three sides. Passing through a series of staff and visitor parking lots, the bus dips briefly into a canopy of eucalyptus before stopping at the flagpole that decorates the roundabout just short of central campus quadrangle. As the doors swing open, it is mostly brown faces that descend, some having awoken as early as 5:30 a.m. to take the crowded, ten-mile ride from their homes in Farmingville to the Allenstown area high school.

By 7:45 a.m., hundreds more students have arrived on campus, streaming in from the student parking lots rising up along the north side of campus, moving instinctively down toward the central “Quad” area. The Quad is a fishbowl- style courtyard, lined with concrete and dotted with newt trees, that offers an assortment of painted metal picnic tables and wood benches around which students socialize between classes and before and after school. With the exception of the primary entrance from the bus roundabout, the Quad is largely an enclosed area, buffeted on the right side by an elevated cafeteria and on the left by the recessed gymnasium. In the very back of the courtyard is a narrow staircase that leads to a secondary terrace of classroom buildings. Even at this early hour, the Quad is thick with activity as students mingle on benches, gather around tables, sit cross-legged on the concrete ground, or occupy one of the multiple staircases that surround the enclosure on each side.

Student peer groups and networks spread across the Quad in a discernible social matrix that students can map in astounding detail.¹ The broad staircase that descends from the cafeteria is reserved as the exclusive domain of the junior and senior male “Jocks.” Below them, in the interior of the courtyard, one finds the “Preps,” a fairly equal mix of fashionably dressed girls and boys who sit in small groups on the ground or congregate around picnic tables to talk, eat, or finish homework assignments. Lounging against a wire fence that stretches around to the back of the gymnasium are the so-called “Dirts,” who, despite their disparaging namesake, are a colorful coalition of coed peers that manages to incorporate a diverse and outwardly eclectic mix of nonconformist, punk, Goth, trench coat, and neo-hippie styles and attitudes. Near the front entrance to the gymnasium, flanking the soda machines, are the male “Surfer” and “Skater” groups, who can often be identified by their Quicksilver sweatshirts, spiked or shaved hair, and occasional skateboard in tow. On the front side of the courtyard and spilling across the driveway into the interior of the bus roundabout are the self-proclaimed “normal girls” who take pride in their tasteful yet understated fashion style and their well-groomed but generally low-maintenance appearance. Students’ social locations in the Quad tend to be remarkably permanent, as most students return to the same spaces before and after school and at nearly every break, some for their entire high school careers.

At first glance, the central Quad area at AHS would seem to provide space for a remarkably diverse cross-section of student identity and status groups at the high school. Yet, among the several hundred students who settle in and mill through the area, one would be hard pressed to ever find more than a very small handful of Mexican-descent students. Even then, they are likely to be individuals or pairs scattered in the larger social groups. Despite making up nearly half the Allenstown High population, Mexican-descent students are almost entirely absent from the Quad area and the central campus region generally. Instead, they can be found dispersed across the more peripheral areas of campus. For example, groupings of primarily English-speaking Latino students congregate on the far sides of the “G” and “H” classroom buildings, two temporary modular units on the front side of the campus. Groups of more recently arrived Mexican immigrants meet outside the ESL classrooms in the high terrace building beyond the Quad; migrant student peer groups congregate near the “I” building, 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, where being “White” or “American” tends to be associated with enfranchisement (inhabiting central spaces and predominating in high-status school contexts and activities) and entitlement (defining and directing these activities), while being “Mexican” seems to signal disenfranchisement (less involvement or active participation in high-status contexts and activities) and marginality (a sense of not-belonging 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.