Mexican Americans Across Generations: Immigrant Families, Racial Realities

6. Fit to Be Good Cooks and Good Mechanics: Racialization in Schools

| 163 6 Fit to Be Good Cooks and Good Mechanics Racialization in Schools Through policies which are explicitly or implicitly racial, state institutions organize and enforce the racial politics of everyday life. —Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States School systems are simultaneously racialized and racializing. Educational institutions possess tremendous capacity to reproduce the power structure and racial hierarchy of society. Family, as another social institution , mediates the racializing effects of the educational system. The family is a critical site of racial identity development as it is a locale where intergenerational biography-based teaching occurs and strategies of action and resistance are formed. Within both schools and families, students respond to racializing messages and renegotiate their racial self-understanding. School experiences are conditioned by historical context, gender, and parental influences as parents use their own schooling experience as fodder for the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and ideologies to their children. This chapter asks, What influence do educational systems have on immigrants ’ and citizens’ racial identity formation? What role do families play in amplifying or mitigating the process of racialization? From a long-term perspective , what are the cumulative effects of racialization across family generations ? This chapter examines how second- and third-generation Mexican Americans experience their social identity within the educational system and how parents’ experiences with their own schooling shape their parenting styles. 164 | Fit to Be Good Cooks and Good Mechanics First-Realization-of-Race Stories Crosscut Generations Schools are a chief locale of socialization outside of the family and, as such, are places where much teaching and learning about social life and national culture takes place. The two generations educated in the United States apprehend the importance of race for the first time at school. Children first realize race in school and then come to identify with it, along a number of major axes of difference such as phenotype, formal name, language, and food. Recognizing skin-color variations often consolidates a conception of race, as with second -generation Rafael Treviño: “Somebody pointed out to me [in elementary school in the 1950s] that I was a little darker than they were. . . . I went home and I was washing my hands and I was trying to wash the darkness out. It was just a split moment, just realizing, ‘Hey, this isn’t gonna come off.’” Realizing the disadvantage that skin color carries (Pager and Quillian 2005) led some respondents to try to “cleanse” themselves of this liability by earnestly washing or using skin-bleaching agents. Third-generation Daniel Zagada speaks simply of being in a racially heterogeneous setting and of how “seeing” different skin colors and physical features is tantamount to seeing race: “I went to a school that was very diverse so we had lots of blacks and Filipino, white, Asians. So pretty early on, you can’t miss that. I mean, you see it.” A person’s first and last name is also an axis of difference that distinguishes groups according to Spanish and non-Spanish origin. Timothy, whose given name is “Timoteo,” tells me how his grade school teacher anglicized his name to make it easier to pronounce and linguistically increased his Americanness (Murguia and Forman 2003). In this case, Timothy’s teacher muted his foreignness as she used her school-sanctioned authority to acculturate him: Timothy: My name is “Timoteo.” When I was in fourth grade my teacher, Miss Green—she was from England—she changed my name to “Timothy .” And I’ve always had it since. Except for my family, to my family I’m “Timoteo.” JMV: How is it your fourth grade teacher renamed you? Timothy: You know, people thought teachers were pretty smart, they knew what they were doing. [Laughs.] Timothy noted that “everybody got their names changed” in the forties and fifties. To have one’s name anglicized by a school authority whom you are taught to respect inculcates the sense that one’s new name is better, imputing deficiency to one’s original name. Moreover, a teacher changing—or cor- Fit to Be Good Cooks and Good Mechanics | 165 recting—students’ names serves to transport them figuratively from their family’s country of origin and into the United States via the road of cultural acceptability. Language marks cultural crossings, so for teachers to rename students is for them to erase a native culture and superimpose a U.S.-centered national culture.1 Part...