Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality

1. School Segregation

This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction Understanding and Analyzing Mexican American School Litigation Beginning with the Romo v. Laird (1925) school desegregation lawsuit in Arizona, for more than eight decades Mexican Americans have been engaged in a hard-fought legal struggle for educational equality.1 Yet few scholars are aware of this long-standing struggle. Contributing, in part, to this unawareness is Mexican Americans’ exclusion from much of the scholarship on civil rights history. Law professor Juan Perea (1997) has asserted that American racial thought incorporates an implicit “Black/ White binary paradigm of race,” which excludes Mexican Americans, “distorts history, and contributes to the marginalization of non-Black peoples of color” (p. 1213).2 This binary has evolved to become a central point of discussion and critique in contemporary discourse. For example, Perea noted that even major books on constitutional case law have truncated history in such a way that the Mexican American struggle for school desegregation has been entirely excluded (see Stone, Seidman, Sunstein, & Tushnet, 1991). By contrast, in my own research on Mexican American desegregation lawsuits, I have identified thirty-five cases dating from 1925 to 1985 (see chapter 1, this volume). The problem with the Black/White paradigm of race, which Angel Oquendo (1995) refers to as “racial dualism,” is that it leads to the unfounded perception that Mexican Americans and other Latinos do not need access to the “machinery of civil rights law” (Ruiz Cameron, 1998, p. 1358). The reality is, however, that in the sphere of educational lawsuits Mexican Americans have indeed been quite active in civil rights discourse. To better understand and analyze this corpus of Mexican American–initiated school litigation, I employ a conceptual framework that draws from critical race theory, critical legal studies—especially the notion of legal indeterminacy —and postcolonialism. 2 Introduction Critical Race Theory Critical race theory (CRT) began in the 1970s when a cadre of legal scholars , lawyers, and activists across the nation realized that the momentum of civil rights litigation had stalled (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Taylor, 1998).3 A form of oppositional scholarship, CRT “challenges the experiences of whites as the normative standard and grounds its conceptual framework in the distinctive experiences of people of color” (Taylor, 1998, p. 122).4 Some of the issues that CRT addresses are campus speech codes, disproportionate sentencing of people of color in the criminal justice system , and affirmative action (Taylor, 1998). Now a growing field of scholarship with a large corpus of literature, CRT has gained widespread popularity in the field of education, especially among scholars of race and ethnicity.5 Issues studied in CRT and education are diverse and include, for example, the experiences of scholars of color in the academy, affirmative action, educational history, families of color, tracking, the Western canon, hierarchy in the schools, and testing. In recent years, spin-off movements have separated themselves from CRT, including Asian critical race theory (AsianCrit; see, e.g., Chang, 1993) and Latina/Latino critical race theory (LatCrit). Similar to CRT, “LatCrit is concerned with a progressive sense of a coalitional Latina/Latino pan-ethnicity and addresses issues often ignored by critical race theorists such as language, immigration, ethnicity, culture, identity, phenotype, and sexuality ” (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001, p. 311).6 Solórzano (1998), a prominent CRT scholar, has identified five themes, or tenets, that underlie the perspectives, research methods, and pedagogy of CRT in education. I also draw from Yosso’s (2006) discussion of these points: 1. The centrality and intersectionality of race and racism. CRT begins with the proposition that race and racism are entrenched and enduring in U.S. society. Race “is a central rather than marginal factor in defining and explaining individual experiences of the law” (Russell, 1992, pp. 762–763). CRT calls for an examination of how race has come to be socially constructed and how the systemic nature of racism serves to oppress people of color while it protects White privilege. Although CRT in education focuses on race and racism, it also seeks to investigate how racism intersects with other manifestations of oppression (e.g., gender, phenotype, class, language, and surname). Introduction 3 2. The challenge to dominant ideology. Heterodoxy is another key element in CRT in education. Here, CRT challenges the orthodoxy, particularly regarding claims of the educational system and its views toward meritocracy, objectivity, color and gender blindness, and equal opportunity . Critical race theorists assert that these conventional and...