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Introduction

Time magazine has called the continuing racial segregation of U.S. public schools one of the most underreported news stories of our time (Fitzpatrick 2009). While it is historically viewed as an African American/White issue, Latinos¹ are now in fact more segregated than African Americans in southern and western regions of the country. In the Western states,² the number of Latinos in intensely segregated minority schools— that is, schools with a 90–100 percent racial minority population—increased from 19 percent in 1980 to over 40 percent in 2005 (Orfield and Lee 2007). California is now the national leader for the isolation of Latino youth, with approximately 90 percent attending majority minority schools and nearly half (47 percent) attending intensely segregated minority schools (Orfield and Lee 2006).

A distinguishing feature of this increasing White/Latino segregation is that it is no longer limited to metropolitan areas. Rapid increases in the ethnoracial and socioeconomic diversity of U.S. suburbs has led to thousands of communities experiencing significant shifts in their public school enrollments, many for the first time (Frankenberg and Orfield 2012; Frankenberg and Lee 2002). As Latino immigrant and nonimmigrant populations move beyond “suburban ring” satellite areas of metropolitan centers to further removed, more affluent, and traditionally White suburban areas as well as small to mid-sized towns across the United States (Orfield and Luce 2012), they often find themselves in communities that have relatively little experience in bringing youth and adults together across lines of racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic difference (Frankenberg and Orfield 2012), and that lack adequate services to facilitate the adaptation of immigrant students (Waters and Jiménez 2005).

Unfortunately, in a number of U.S. suburbs facing increased immigration and ethnic and racial diversification, public school resegregation has become an active process led by concerned citizens and elected school board collaborators whose proclaimed interests are to reorganize school districts in ways that best meet the alleged “needs” of all children. School district reorganization campaigns in which resegregation has become a significant factor have proliferated across the country—most notably in California, but also in Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Washington (Murray 2009). In California alone since the 1990s, public school district reorganization campaigns in which White/Latino racial resegregation has become a politicized issue include those in Alta Dena (Pasadena), Aptos (Santa Cruz County), Fremont (San Francisco Bay Area), Grand Terrace (near Riverside), Lakewood (Long Beach), Lomita (Los Angeles County), Marina (Monterey County), Pleasanton Valley (Ventura), Rio Linda (North Sacramento), San Rafael (Marin County), and Santa Clarita Valley (Los Angeles County), to name a few. The proliferation of these campaigns has gone hand in hand with a string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that suggest a growing legal and political interest in abandoning the goal of integrating children and moving (back) toward the idea of the “neighborhood school” and arrangements favoring “parental choice.”³ While this tendency of federal courts to support residential level control of schooling can be potentially liberating for both majority and minority populations in some areas of the country, it has provided, in others, tacit support for the efforts of affluent White populations to resegregate on the basis of class-based interests.

Many of these suburban school resegregation movements—including the one that will be highlighted in this study—take the form of grassroots district reorganization campaigns led predominantly by White, middle-class residential communities whose residents justify their actions as anything other than racially, culturally, or socioeconomically motivated. These citizen movements, and the policy decisions their activism inspires, are typically couched in language such as promoting quality education, meeting the linguistic and academic needs of diverse students, holding all students accountable to basic educational standards, bridging the achievement gap, exercising local control, or assuring the integrity and benefits derived from “neighborhood schools.” Despite the avowed good intentions and clear democratic appeals, the outcomes of these efforts are often the increased isolation of Latino students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources, less-experienced teachers, and fewer social networks that cross lines of racial, class, and ethnic differences (Orfield and Lee 2005, 2006, 2007).⁴

Central Questions and Arguments of the Book

The purpose of this book is to examine the political and educational processes that are contributing to active White/Latino school resegregation in suburban areas of the United States. Rather than focusing primarily on shifts in legal discourse and educational policy at the state and federal levels, the book investigates school resegregation processes through a grounded ethnographic study of a suburban school district on California’s central coast where a predominantly White residential community has undertaken an active, decade-long campaign to “secede” from what has become an increasingly Latino school district. Based on five years of extensive school and community-based ethnographic research, the analysis pays close attention to the local, regional, and national politics that have shaped the direction of debates, decisions, and patterns of action and response regarding school resegregation, as well as to the justifications to “reorganize” the school district in ways that accomplish resegregation. The book’s analytical focus on “cultural politics” is meant to situate local interactions within and around schools in relation to larger macro-level discourses regarding race and class entitlement, as well as current conceptions of what constitutes “quality education” and equality of educational opportunity.

A growing body of academic literature is focusing on public school resegregation processes in the United States, including the expansive research associated with the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA.⁵ This work has focused primarily on quantitative analyses of shifting societal attitudes, aggregate demographic data, and changing court orders, decisions, deliberations, and legal proceedings. While these approaches are valuable in assessing what kinds of resegregation are happening, and to some extent how they are happening, but they provide less insight into why resegregation is occurring and how it is being justified, particularly given the paradoxical reality that U.S. citizens appear to value integrated schooling as much now as (if not more than) ever.⁶ This book intends to help fill the existing gap in qualitative research by providing a micro/macro account of White/Latino suburban school resegregation processes that moves beyond quantitative data analysis to delve more deeply into the explanations, justifications, and community-level processes through which increasing school segregation is being accomplished, in what appears in the case at hand to be a very active fashion.

The theoretical and ethnographic analysis in the book is informed by three related interests. The first is a desire to analyze and understand the core issues at the root of campaigns to reorganize suburban school districts in ways that accomplish Latino/White resegregation. Why are these efforts being pursued despite the existence of state laws that prohibit reorganization on such terms, and how is such activity being justified? To what extent are racism and/or classism a significant factor? A second area of interest relates to the different visions of entitlement to “quality education” that characterize battles between students, school officials, and citizen groups who occupy various sides of the school district secession debate. What differential visions of “quality education” exist, and how do they inform the perspectives of policymakers, community activists, parents, and school officials, as well as the academic and social engagement of students in racially diverse school settings? Third, this study seeks to examine some of the diverse ways Mexican-descent⁷ populations—from migrant residents to later generation Mexican American youth and their families—are experiencing and responding to the school district secession campaign and efforts to exclude them from low-poverty, middle-class schools and the potential benefits derived from them. Of particular interest are forms and expressions of resistance that are being mobilized against school resegregation campaigns. From what angles have these potent citizen initiatives been resisted, particularly from those within the working-class Latino community, and to what effect? Correspondingly, what alternative visions for developing successful, integrated, and equitable suburban schools are being imagined and articulated, and to what extent might such visions inform broader, equitybased school reform efforts aimed at establishing high-quality, integrated education as a fundamental right for all U.S. citizens? A deeper conceptual engagement with this set of questions is undertaken in the first chapter of this book.

Beyond these foundational concerns, this study seeks to address a practical set of questions regarding the challenges and prospects for developing successful models of high-quality, integrated education, particularly in bimodal (White/Mexican-descent), socioeconomically diverse school settings. For example, what obstacles do administrators, teachers, and students in such settings face in their efforts to facilitate educational transformation toward equity and broad inclusiveness, particularly in areas historically opposed to changes in schooling status quo? How and why do teachers and school administrators who are committed to improving learning environments and facilitating access to resources for Latino children and their families—even in well-resourced schools—face such difficult challenges achieving these goals? For what complex reasons do some people oppose types of educational reform and policies that 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 over integration, or any other form of equity-based school reform, as struggles between distinct races of people, or bearers of specific “cultures” or national heritages (e.g., as struggles between White/Mexican “races” or “cultures”). Instead, conflicts must be examined as negotiations over the meanings and relative value ascribed to racial and cultural categories, in specific historical terms and institutional contexts, with attention to the processes and practices of inclusion and exclusion through which categorical boundaries are maintained, and for what reasons and at whose benefit or disadvantage. Second, with respect to the current study, a racialization perspective calls for attention to the historically specific manner in which Mexican Americans in the U.S. Southwest have themselves participated in the racialization process, not simply as victims of class and racial oppression but as contributors to the making and unmaking of racial and class categories in ways that have been consequential to the relative distribution of political, economic, and educational opportunities and resources in the region. Moreover, attention to processes of racialization permits space to consider how racism can operate in a more complex fashion among minority populations, taking such forms as selfaggrandizement at the expense of more vulnerable representatives of racially subordinate groups (Omi and Winant 1994: 73).¹³ This perspective helps explain why actions and attitudes in racially politicized educational encounters do not always fall neatly along racial or cultural lines.

It is at this level of boundary construction and maintenance that I concentrate much of my ethnographic attention in the following study. In doing so, I attend not only to individual and group-ascribed actions and attitudes but also to the ways institutional routines and interactions between social groups, as they occur within and around schools, have shaped schooling structures, policies, and modes of community-building. This strategy requires ethnographic attention to multiple levels of the schooling process, including (1) district-level politics and policies, (2) the activism of community-based groups around schooling related issues, (3) the attitudes and practices of staff at the school level, (4) the social organization of students within the school, and (5) students’ particular responses to school structures and programs.

The Ethnographic Field Site

The following study takes place in the Pleasanton Valley of California, a rich agricultural basin situated between the mountain foothills and the jagged cliffs of the state’s central coast. The focus of analysis is on the Pleasanton Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), consolidated in 1967, which currently serves two physically separate, residential communities characterized by sharp contrasts in culture, “race,” and socioeconomic status. At the center of Pleasanton Valley is Farmingville, a largely Mexican and Mexican American working-class town of about 50,000 residents (with a median house hold income of $46,500 and per capita income $16,200)¹⁴ whose livelihoods have long been tied to the Valley’s rich and productive commercial farmland. Ten miles north on the state highway is Allenstown, a predominantly White, middle-to upper-class professional town of just under 20,000 residents (with a median house hold income of $80,000 and per capita income $41,500) that has been populated largely since the 1950s and serves as a bedroom community for a nearby corporate center and wealthy coastal tourist town.

Historically speaking, Farmingville’s regional reputation as a “Mexican town” is quite recent. It was not until the 1942 passage of California’s Public Law 78, popularly known as the Bracero Program, that thousands of Mexican nationals (mostly single men) were brought to the Valley to work on temporary, low-wage work contracts with agricultural companies. The termination of the Bracero Program in 1965, along with the relatively generous amnesty terms associated with the federal Immigration Act of 1965, supported a large and relatively unregulated in-migration from Mexico. Between 1960 and 1995, Farmingville’s population grew over 130 percent, with Latinos—the vast majority of them Mexican immigrants—representing 97 percent of the new arrivals. As a percentage of the town’s population, Latinos increased from less than 15 percent in 1960 to nearly 75 percent by 2000. Over the same time period, the enrollment of Latino students in PVUSD schools grew from under 8 percent to over 70 percent.

The sociocultural transformations that reshaped Farmingville in the post-World War II period were not equally manifest in Allenstown, due in large degree to Allenstown’s higher real estate values, its relative distance from the center of agricultural production and employment, and its history of active political resistance to low-income residential development that might have attracted working-class Mexican-descent populations. As an unincorporated area without a city council or planning commission, Allenstown politics have long been dominated by homeowner associations (HOAs) representing the coastal subdivisions, and leaders have traditionally included those heavily invested in local real estate and interested in preserving desirable rural characteristics that would keep land values high. This long-established de facto private residential government has continued to yield a political leadership in Allenstown that is conservative and isolationist, despite what would appear to be growing political heterogeneity among its residents.

Since the PVUSD was consolidated in the late 1960s, community leaders in Allenstown have successfully repelled a series of state and federal mandates, continuing through the mid-1990s, that have sought to integrate working-class, Mexican-descent children from Farmingville with the predominantly White, middle-class children from the Allenstown area. In spite of this active resistance, some level of school desegregation has been achieved. This resulted not from capitulation to legal mandates, but as a consequence of dire overcrowding at Farmingville’s only comprehensive high school in the late 1980s. This lack of classroom space in Farmingville, combined with the district’s inability to secure public bond support for the construction of a new high school, compelled the district to begin a busing arrangement that would send an increasing number of Mexican-descent students from Farmingville to Allenstown High School. By the mid-1990s, Allenstown High held the status as the district’s only truly racially mixed school, with Mexican-descent youth from Farmingville constituting nearly half the school’s 2,000 students. Chapters 2, 3, and 6 of this book provide a deeper look at the highly politicized experience of integration at Allenstown High from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s.

In its current form, the PVUSD is a predominantly bi-modal school system (72 percent Mexican American/25 percent White),¹⁵ with nearly 18,000 students enrolled, making it one of the largest K-12 districts in northern California. Nearly 50 percent of the district’s students are identified as having limited English proficiency, and approximately 30 percent are the children of migrant farm worker families.

Research Engagements and Methods

My research experience in the PVUSD began in the late 1990s as a graduate student researcher in a larger, longitudinal study of peer relationships among Mexican-descent and European American students at Allenstown High School.¹⁶ Aptly named the “Peers Project,” the research was designed to investigate the ways in which peer groups and networks at the high school mediated Mexican American and Euro-American students’ academic orientations, engagement, and relative participation in schooling activities. In three years as a lead researcher at the high school site, I worked with a team of ethnographic researchers that included, over time, ten undergraduate students, four Master’s-level graduate students, and two postdoctoral fellows. Nearly all the researchers were bilingual, including myself, and a smaller number were first- or second-generation Mexican immigrants themselves.

The collaborative, cohort-based nature of the Peers Project allowed me the unique opportunity to participate in ongoing critical discussions with a diverse group of colleagues regarding our separate (but often overlapping) field experiences at the school, including constant dialogue about our evolving relationships with students, teachers, and parents. This sense of collegiality and deep collaboration was instrumental in helping me compile the diverse, poignant, and profoundly revealing stories of students, teachers, parents, and community activists that appear in this book. The Peers Project yielded a massive archive of ethnographic material that included hundreds of transcribed, semistructured individual and focus group interviews with both White and Mexican-descent students (including a representative sampling of first-, second-, and third-generation Mexican-descent students), teachers and support staff, and parents (the latter interviewed in visits to students’ homes). Beyond my own field notes and individual/focus group interviews, I had access to all my colleagues’ ethnographic materials as well. These included thousands of pages of field notes chronicling each researcher’s interactions, conversations, and observations with students and focal peer groups across the campus.

I maintained an everyday presence at Allenstown High for the entirety of three academic years, working closely with the office of the Migrant Education Program (MEP), the Advancement via Individual Determination (AVID) program, and the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classrooms. I first served as a class assistant and student mentor in the ESL classrooms, after which I began shadowing a smaller group of ESL students who elected to enroll in the AVID classes. Since students in both the AVID and ESL programs tended to utilize the social and academic support services offered by the Office of Migrant Education at Allenstown High, I began to involve myself daily in tutoring sessions and social gatherings taking place there. Outside these formal institutional contexts, I interacted daily with smaller groups of students in the social spaces where they gathered between classes, before and after school, and during lunch periods.

To the extent that I was able to establish deeper, trusting relationships with some of the Mexican-descent students with whom I interacted, it was over time and through opportunities I had to serve as a longer-term conversation partner, mentor, and homework helper—and sometimes just a sympathetic sounding board, particularly for those students from Farmingville who experienced a sense of marginalization or mistreatment in the larger school or community context of Allenstown. I was fortunate to be able to make multiyear commitments to my relationships with students, their families, and school staff. Some of these relationships became very strong, such as those with MEP staff and AVID students whose narratives are highlighted most notably in Chapter 6. Other relationships were more episodic in nature, like those I developed with a much wider range of White and Mexican-descent student peer groups and teachers across the campus, whose narratives appear as interview excerpts throughout the book.

Beyond my ongoing, school-based participation observation, I interacted with Mexican-descent students and their families through visits to homes and workplaces, attendance at sporting and cultural events, and by serving as a chaperone on student trips to movie theaters, college visits, youth leadership conferences, and local recreational centers. I also spent a year living in a migrant farmworker housing complex adjacent to the agricultural fields in Farmingville, and several weeks during two consecutive winters traveling as a guest with migrant students and their families to their small hometown ranchos in Michoacán, Mexico. These towns constitute the other end of a significant transnational network that connects families in Pleasanton Valley to the central Mexican province, a network that has been sustained by decades of migration, travel, and resource sharing across national borders. This cross-border experience helped me to deepen some of my relationships of trust with parents and students and also increased my visibility and recognition among Latino leaders in the community of Farmingville, many of whom also traveled to visit extended family in the Mexican province.

Segregation and Nonbelonging at Allenstown High

Early in my research experience at Allenstown High, it became clear to me that the decade-and-a-half of racial togetherness at the school had not led, as one might hope, to the progressive academic and social integration of students. Instead, it had produced what was essentially two high schools—one “White” and one “Mexican”—mirroring the two separate communities in the region. This segregation was apparent in both the formal and informal spatial separation of students on campus and their differential participation in co-and extracurricular activities. School tracking practices and student classifications further reinforced segregation. Where segregation was perhaps most clearly and powerfully exhibited was in the aggregate patterns of academic performance, where White students outperformed Mexican-descent students by nearly every method of academic assessment.

The high degree of social and academic marginalization Mexican-descent students experienced at Allenstown High, despite how well resourced the school was financially, was troubling and seemed to defy any simple explanation. My curiosity was raised in the second year of my research when a social studies teacher mentioned, in passing, that just a few years earlier, two first-generation Mexican immigrant students—running on a platform to “end racism” and improve the status of Latino students at Allenstown High—were elected president and vice president of the school’s Associated Student Body (ASB). He explained how the student leaders, supported by a handful of Euro- American student allies and the mentorship of a Latino social studies teacher of Cuban descent, undertook a bold campaign to promote racial integration on the campus through strategies that included a series of social mixing and intercultural awareness activities, the design of a multicultural mural for the school gymnasium, and a controversial demand to institute an elective course on Chicano studies (this full campaign is explored in detail in Chapter 3).

The teacher’s passing reference left me to wonder: How could such Latino student empowerment have happened, given the current and seemingly systematic nature of their marginalization on the campus? And why, after only a few years, did the high school students seem to know so little about it? Why had it not come up in my conversations with long-time teachers and administrators with whom I had been communicating for nearly two years about questions of equity and diversity at the school? Was it a form of institutional amnesia? If so, what was being forgotten, and why? I wondered how something as significant as broad-based Latino student empowerment could end up, just a few years later, so difficult to talk about, so seemingly forgotten, and so clearly absent at the school. As I inquired more extensively into what had happened during that time, I was led to realize that it was the Latino student leaders’ demands for institutional change at Allenstown High that triggered the decade-long attempt by a group of parents and business leaders to “secede” from the increasingly Latino school district.

Moving the Analytical Lens from School to Community

As I continued my school-based research with the Peers Project through the early 2000s, I began to inquire more deeply into the history of the high school, the school district, and the community politics of schooling in the region. It was through this juxtaposition of site- based ethnographic data collection and historical-archival research that I began to see how the practices and politics of (re-) segregation that I saw clearly at play in the high school were a microcosm of the larger, regional struggles that had taken place in the school district over the place of culture, language, and class/racial entitlement in the schooling process. It occurred to me that if I wanted to develop a more profound understanding of the set of perplexing forces of inequality and alienation that seemed to act on Mexican-descent students in their everyday experiences in the high school, I would need to look beyond the school site and investigate the historically situated nature and “roots” of the marginalization I was witnessing. So it was, then, that in 2002 I elected to leave my research position in the Peers Project to pursue independent research that would lead me to the subject material of this book and the analytical focus on the cultural politics of school resegregation.

Over the next three years (2002–2005) of research, I leveraged my connections with Mexican-descent students, parents, and teachers from Allenstown High to visit and build relationships with civic leaders in Farmingville, including city council members, grassroots community activists, and members of the parent, youth, and citizen organizations (these interactions are described in Chapters 4, 5, and 7). Over time, I was included in ad hoc resident meetings, e-mail exchanges, and telephone calls about political developments in the community, particularly those surrounding the issue of the proposed school district split. The data I collected during this time included over 350 hours of transcribed field notes from ongoing participant-observation in community-level events and activities, including public meetings (e.g., school board meetings, district-sponsored community fora, and civic organization membership meetings) and semiprivate, ad hoc gatherings with Latino activists. In addition, I completed and transcribed semistructured individual and group interviews (about an hour each) with a purposive sample of Mexican-descent parent and parent group representatives (15), Farmingville city council, PVUSD school board, and county board of education members (9), current and former district teachers and administrators (15), Allenstown parents who supported the district reorganization plan (6), current Allenstown High and community college students (15), and former students at Allenstown High (6). I limited the interview sample to those with some level of involvement (and often a strong investment) in the activities surrounding the school district secession campaign. Additional data sources included personal notes, memos, and email communications shared by research subjects, as well as information from local and regional media sources including newsletters and newspapers, U.S. Census reports, local library collections, and school district rec ords and archival documents. All data collected for this book were imported into a single NVivo qualitative software database and analyzed for relevant and emergent themes.

Positionality and Politics in the Field

As a White, male, middle-class individual whose field research included significant interactions with working-class (and often socially and legally vulnerable) Mexican immigrant youth and their families, I have to acknowledge my own positionality in the very complex web of racialized class inequalities that made it possible for me to conduct research in the ways, and through the means, that I did.¹⁷ During my three years at the school, I held the status of a young adult, English/Spanish bilingual “nonteacher” who enjoyed the privilege of moving relatively freely across campus. This meant that I occupied a somewhat unconventional role that allowed me to develop some unique friendship and mentor relationships with students as well as some astonishingly candid relationships with teachers. This did not mean that I was provided with anything like “insider” status among students. In fact, my ability to gain trust in the areas through which I moved, both on and off campus, was far from automatic. Many of the students with whom I interacted—both Latino and Anglo—were initially, and sometimes permanently, ambivalent or distrustful of my activities on campus. Moving through socioeconomically segregated and racialized spaces in the school, I found my positionality made me a trusted ally in some contexts and a distrusted outsider in others. This was not always in a manner one might expect, however. For example, working closely with Mexican immigrant students in a school environment characterized by acute racial/ethnic and class polarization meant that I had somewhat limited access to the more enfranchised Anglo students, particularly those who (or whose parents) may have felt anger or ambivalence about the “bussed-in” presence of Mexican-descent students. Also, because I worked primarily with recent immigrants and those in the AVID and MEP programs that tended to be more overtly school-oriented and/or college-minded, I was regarded with more distrust by some of the later generation and less enfranchised Mexican-descent students.

Unavoidably, my background as a graduate student of cultural anthropology in a university known to be politically progressive (and “Leftist” in the minds of many more conservative Allenstown residents) limited my ability to directly interview some White parents, including a pair of the more highly visible leaders of the school district secession movement. I felt an ethical and professional obligation to be as truthful as I could about my research interests, and in doing so, I was aware that I was by default “taking sides” in some people’s minds, even as I echoed my desire to understand the issues from multiple perspectives. However, I also enjoyed some privileged access to teachers at Allenstown High as well as community leaders in both Allenstown and Farmingville. That my mother was employed as a special education resource teacher at Allenstown High allowed me some legitimacy as a “well-intentioned” researcher among teachers and administrators. My father also served as a visible leader of a local community college with a strong reputation among residents, business leaders, and educators in both Allenstown and Farmingville. These familial connections provided me with some “room to move” in the bureaucratic institutions at the high school, school district, city, and county levels. For example, in some cases I was provided with privileged access to people in positions of power who might have otherwise ignored or sought to deny my solicitations for their time and requests for information.

My relationships with Latino leaders in Farmingville, including city council members, community activists, and members of the Migrant Parent Advisory Committee (MPAC), developed more slowly over time. I did not even schedule formal interviews with community leaders until the third year of my research. By that time, many of them had some knowledge of my work with students at the school, my interactions with parents, and my participation in community events and gatherings, including visits to Mexico. I found that initial interviews with Farmingville community leaders, rather than serving as an ends in themselves, often allowed me access to greater networking opportunities. Over time, I was included in email messages and telephone calls about ad hoc resident meetings on political developments in the community, particularly around the issue of school district secession.

It is important to note that I was not viewed benevolently by all residents in the larger Pleasanton Valley context. For example, soon after completing my initial research, I requested a 15-minute time slot in a regularly scheduled PVUSD school board meeting to provide a brief overview of my general findings. As a matter of public record, I left a full copy of the larger working paper in the district office. While it appeared as if my brief presentation was generally well received, I received a phone call from a school board member a few weeks later informing me that my manuscript had disappeared from the district office. As it turned out, a school board trustee who was a strong supporter of the Allenstown secession movement had taken the document into her possession. Following a demand from a fellow trustee to return the document, she did so, but not without first crafting her own three-page response, which she added as a preface to my report and copied and circulated to all board members, articulating her assessment of the “merits” of the findings. She attacked a number of specific statements in the document and claimed that “the underlying analysis appears to be focused on generalizations made about an entire community (Allenstown) based on interviews with a limited number of people, and with the author minimizing or twisting the meaning of comments that did not specifically agree with his belief system.” In defense of her claims, she intimated:

I have lived much of the story of Allenstown High . . . and in the story I lived, there were a few bad apples mixed in with a bunch of good people with good intentions who had differing opinions. The good and bad came from both Allenstown and Farmingville, and from several races, [with] a few ready to undermine processes every step of the way, and to portray the “other side” as the enemy. There were mistakes made, and lessons learned. Again, most people involved, from all opinions, were good, decent people with differing opinions.

With regard to the decentness of the people involved, I would be hard pressed to disagree. But I believe that it is also the case that people’s opinions are laden with a number of personal and shared interests and desires (including, in the context of this study, desires for self, cultural, and community/residential preservation as well as the generational reproduction of wealth and opportunity) that inform people’s attitudes and actions, and contribute to histories of privilege-in-action that have served to reproduce political and educational conditions in ways that have benefited and privileged some residents in Pleasanton Valley while marginalizing and disempowering others. It is these historicocultural and interactional processes— rather than a moral judgment of the “decentness” of the people—on which my analysis rests.¹⁸

At the same time, I must acknowledge that I agree with anthropologists Aihwa Ong, Marvin Harris, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995), who claim that anthropology cannot be divorced from ethics, and that our models of inquiry should speak to “how we have used or failed to use anthropology as a critical tool at crucial historical moments (Scheper-Hughes 1995: 419). In this book, it should be clear that my own moral and ethical frameworks have, to some degree, shaped the content, structure, and development of my analysis. It cannot, in fact, be otherwise. Ultimately, however, I hope this book will serve as an example for a kind of politically engaged anthropology that accepts, as Marvin Harris has noted, that “what we choose to study or not study in the name of anthropology is a politico-moral decision” (423).

In the narrative of events and social relations that I construct, I do not wish to create a single, linear account out of what were (and surely remain) a multiplicity of interests, concerns, and motivations among a diverse Pleasanton Valley citizenry. Nor would I argue that earlier history in the area inevitably produced the more contemporary conditions and particular events I describe, including the highly politicized racial and class conflicts that occurred at Allenstown High and that have long surrounded the Allenstown secession campaign. History is not, in fact, so structural, orderly, and goaloriented. Although I try to represent more than one side of the issues I choose to highlight, I do not pretend to present an “objective” or exhaustive accounting. There are a number of limitations, among them that I tended to focus my analysis more on the stories of those residents who were centrally involved and who maintained strong investments in the events I highlight, and within that group, I focused more (although not exclusively) on the narratives/voices of Mexican-descent residents. By highlighting perspectives that have tended to be marginalized or actively silenced, I expected the analysis would challenge, to some extent, prevailing institutional explanations and authoritative accounts of the historical experiences in the region and within the school district. Ultimately, my narrative rendering follows how I imagine my informants would ideally like to narrate their own personal experiences, that is, by providing an interpretive frame for others that does justice to complexity of the events that occurred.

Outline of the Chapters

To orient the reader to the timing of the various happenings described in the book, I offer a chronology of significant events, along with the corresponding chapters in which they are discussed (see Timeline of Events, p. vii).

In Chapter 1, I provide an overarching discussion of the theoretical frameworks that I deploy to explain the political, material, and normative forces that have contributed to the deprioritization of racial integration as a means of promoting equity-based public school reform in the United States. Here, I focus special attention on the cultural norms of race, merit, and citizenship that have driven and, to a great extent limited, the scope of equity-based educational reform in U.S. schools. The chapter ends with a discussion about the relative promise of grassroots social activism, led primarily by working-class Latino populations, to help generate the political will to protect and sustain shared schooling environments and to establish high-quality integration as a fundamental right in the United States.

Chapter 2 begins with an ethnographic introduction to students’ social worlds at Allenstown High, with specific attention to the highly essentialized understandings of racial and cultural difference that characterize students’ narratives and help generate students’ experiences of sociospatial segregation on the campus. I explore how students’ particular understandings of social difference limit their social interactions in ways that impact the relative levels of academic and social engagement experienced by Mexican-descent and White students at the school. In order to make sense of the extreme levels of student segregation, I offer a wider analysis of the economic, political, social, and cultural realities that have shaped the political exercise of community in the larger Pleasanton Valley region, arguing that this history helps explain the racially oppositional politics of identity that has come to shape not only student interactions at the high school but also broader patterns of parent and citizen involvement in the schooling process. The chapter ends with a historical overview of the highly politicized battles over school desegregation that marked schooling politics in Pleasanton Valley from the 1970s to the early 1990s, with particular attention to how conditions of racial polarization in school and community have long served to hinder efforts to establish educational equity and opportunity between White and Mexican-descent populations in the region. This historical analysis of desegregation politics provides what I believe to be essential background for the more recent effort of a citizen group in Allenstown to “secede” from the increasingly Latino school district.

Chapters 3 and 4 chronicle a series of events that led up to the Allenstown school district secession campaign. Because the events in these chapters took place in the mid-1990s—several years before I began ethnographic fieldwork in the area—I take great care to reconstruct the events, relying heavily on narratives from individual and group interviews with parents, educators, community activists, and former students as well as archival sources that include local and student media press accounts, internal school memos and personal notes shared by former school staff and teachers, and school- and district-level meeting notes and transcripts. Chapter 3 focuses on the remarkable set of events that followed the election of two first-generation Mexican immigrant students to top leadership positions in student government at Allenstown High School. Here, I document and analyze the manner in which student leaders and their supporters challenged the status quo of local schooling practices that had historically failed to prioritize the integration of students and to assure equal access and participation for Mexican-descent students at the high school. Despite a series of thoughtful and sincere attempts by students and their adult mentors to create conditions for unity and mutual respect at the school, the efforts ultimately failed to generate any significant transformations in schooling structures and practices. A more detailed analysis demonstrates how students’ efforts were undermined by adults at many different levels of the schooling process. Because of the contentious nature of events that transpired during this time, and the painful impact they had on some of those who experienced them, it is important to note that two of the central participants who acted as my informants—Diego Omán and Luis Sandoval— requested that I not quote them directly or reveal the level of information they provided during the course of our interactions. For this reason, I provide a second-hand account of their experiences in this chapter.

Chapter 4 shifts the focus of analysis from the high school to the larger community, chronicling a series of district-sponsored parent fora that were convened to resolve conflicts surrounding the political empowerment of Latino students at Allenstown High. Despite courageous efforts by a group of Mexican migrant parents from Farmingville to have their voices heard, the parent meetings ultimately dissolved before significant action could be taken. As the meetings began to break down, a group of White parents from Allenstown met separately to discuss a plan to separate from the larger PVUSD and create their own Allenstown School District, a plan they made public several weeks later. In proposing their plan for district reorganization—which became widely known as the “Allenstown secession campaign”—the parent group denied that race was an issue, arguing instead that their interests were to create smaller schools, less bureaucracy, and higher-quality education. I analyze the competing notions of entitlement that shaped the convictions of those supporting and opposing the Allenstown secession movement, as well as the role of local discourses of place and community in arguments for and against secession. From either side of this debate, questions about “deservedness”—who deserves what and why, based on entitlements proper to one’s racial, class, and residential status—are central to understanding how particular claims about the nature of educational “problems” are constructed, and how these claims acquire wider acceptance by framing debates about how school reform should best be pursued.

Chapter 5 pursues a more in-depth analysis of Allenstown’s school secession movement. I consider whether the significance of race was overdetermined in the conflict, and I explore the ways its supporters use discourses proposing its “overdetermined” nature to dismiss the racial dimensions of their own rhetoric and political action. While I warn against collapsing the movement into a simple narrative of White racism, I highlight the ways in which the Allenstown secession effort has resonated with strategies historically employed by local Whites to defend their neighborhoods against racial and class Others.

Chapter 6 shifts to more contemporary conditions at Allenstown High School, where I draw from three years of site-based, participant-observation research to analyze the well-intended, institutional effort at Allenstown High to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for Mexican-descent students on the campus. I then narrow my focus to one particular effort in this regard: the promotion of “cultural celebrations,” including those commemorating Mexican holidays. I argue that the conflicts that have accompanied these events reveal the complex challenges teachers and students face in even the most modest attempts to promote multicultural educational practices that value and validate the cultural and linguistic heritage of Mexican-descent students.

Chapter 7 shifts attention back to the school district secession battle, highlighting the mid-2000s appearance of a broad-based, Latino-led coalition of engaged citizens, community leaders, and civic groups that set out to delegitimize the well-established district secession movement and provide an alternative vision for high-quality, shared schooling in the district. The chapter looks closely at the process and outcomes of civic capacity building among Mexican-descent youth and adult citizens, demonstrating how and why they were drawn powerfully into local politics for school improvement despite conditions of concentrated poverty that can often serve to stifle such mobilization. The analysis focuses specifically on two Latino-led collectivities that served as central organizing contexts for opposition to school resegregation, addressing how each group provided a unique social, cultural, and political space from which formerly marginalized youth and adults could engage in critical conversations about the role and purpose of public schooling, speak out against unjust educational conditions, and articulate counter-narratives stressing the importance of racial justice and a fundamental entitlement to shared, high-quality education. I also explore some of the specific strategies developed by local Latino activists to consolidate cross-class coalitions sympathetic to the cause of equal educational opportunity. The article ends with a discussion of the challenges inherent in translating grassroots activism into broader educational reform efforts aimed at establishing high-quality integrated education as a fundamental right.

The concluding chapter uses a recent controversy over the naming of a newly constructed high school after civil rights leader Cesar Chavez to bring together several of the central arguments developed in the book. The book concludes with a more personal discussion of the importance of integrated schooling in a twenty-first-century context, putting in perspective both the inherent challenges to such efforts, and the strategies that would be necessary to sustain public school environments in ways that might more equally serve all students across class, racial, ethnic, and cultural difference.

The story I tell about Pleasanton Valley, its school district, and Allenstown High in particular, cannot be generalized as the “normal” experience of all bimodal (predominantly White/Latino) school systems in the United States, nor is it necessarily a proper representation of the challenges other multiracial schools and school systems may face. However, what became clear to me in the course of my fieldwork is that increasing White/Latino public school segregation, while national in scope, is locally produced. This realization is significant in that it obligates school personnel at both the district and school site levels—as well as officials at the level of regional government—to acknowledge and come to an informed understanding of their own role in perpetuating and reproducing inequity in education and blocking equal access to important academic and social resources for Mexican-descent students. What has been a crux of the problem in Pleasanton Valley are agencies, administrators, and teachers who are, at worst, unwilling to challenge status quo schooling practices that generate racial segregation and unequal access to educational resources and, at best, lacking the ability, resources, and knowledge to maintain the kind of resolve necessary to transform them.