Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation

Chapter 2: The Americanization of the Mexican Family

Chapter 2 The Americanization of the Mexican Family The target of Americanization extended beyond the Mexican child in the classroom to include the adults in the colonia or barrio. For example, in many communities of the Southwest, classes for women included English, nutrition, child rearing, hygiene, homemaking, and sewing. While the men also took courses in English, Americanization training for them also included various vocational subjects. Often public schools financed programs that provided teachers who taught English in factories and in agricultural labor camps, especially in the citrus-growing areas of California. In southern California, some teachers lived in the camps (performing a role not unlike today’s Peace Corps volunteers). Others, called “Home Teachers,” traveled into the urban barrios to offer classes. The broad sweep of Americanization touched every member of many communities. The Los Angeles city schools’ Americanization classes aimed no less than to offer Americanization “to the individual from birth to old age or death.”1 The Los Angeles program reached into nurseries , elementary, junior and senior high schools, adult evening schools, 46 Chicano Education & Segregation industrial work sites, day classes for mothers, and naturalization classes. Indeed, this was a comprehensive program designed to completely eliminate Mexican culture in the United States. Although a significant chapter in the educational history of the Chicano community,2 historians, hitherto, have overlooked the Americanization of the family. The insightful and important study by historian Richard Griswold del Castillo, for example, does not delve into the role of the public educational system in the evolution of the Mexican family,3 and while Ricardo Romo’s excellent history of eastern Los Angeles briefly discusses Americanization in the segregated schools, it does not recognize its impact on women.4 Maxine Seller’s essay on the education of immigrant women recognizes the Americanization emphasis of schooling and includes a discussion of Mexican women,5 but, like Romo’s account, does not link the two. The Americanization of Mexican children went beyond, however, the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic or allegiance to the country and its institutions. It involved separating children from home and family in such a way that they would come to desire a home and family of a different kind. Educators perceived the Mexican home as a source of Mexican culture and consequently as a reinforcer of the “Mexican educational problem.” In its course of study for Mexican children, the Arizona Department of Education urged that the home be a “continuous topic through the school days,” since “home life is the basis of custom and culture.”6 This body informed teachers that the measure of an effective educational program was whether or not it had “a lasting effect on home life.” The superintendent of the Chaffey School District in southern California concluded that the learning “disability” of Mexican children (in his research, Mexican children were found to learn at 58 percent of the rate of normal American children) could be resolved only through an Americanization program that would “supply in some way what the home conditions lack.”7 The focus upon the home had several aspects: the relations of boys and girls with the home; the young girl as a future wife, mother, and The Americanization of the Mexican Family 47 homemaker; and the woman as wife, mother, and homemaker. The Americanization program within the school addressed the first two aspects. Various contexts in the wider community provided forums for addressing the third aspect; for example, classes might be held in community centers, settlement houses, evening schools, cottages in the neighborhood , and the like. The Americanization and homemaking instructor in the Covina California , elementary schools and author of a teacher’s manual entitled Americanization through Homemaking, wrote that the “surest solution of the Americanization problem lies in the proper training of the parents of a future citizenry.”8 Homemaking focused on the future effect that the Mexican girl would have as a mother in creating an American-like home. The instructor cautioned teachers to be cognizant of the relationship between the home and political behavior. She wrote: The man with a home and family is more dependable and less revolutionary in his tendencies. . . . the influence of the home extends to labor problems and to many other problems in the social regime. The homemaker creates the atmosphere, whether it be one of harmony and cooperation or of dissatisfaction and revolt.9 The Mexican Girl During an era when few questioned...