Latinos in the Midwest

Litigating Bilingual Education: A History of the Gomez Decision in Illinois

n 207 DAVID A. BADILLO Litigating Bilingual Education: A History of the Gomez Decision in Illinois During the 20th century, educational issues of segregation and language became increasingly interrelated legally. Beginning in 1930 several landmark federal cases in Texas and California addressed unequal treatment in the form of separate “Mexican Schools” with special classes for the Spanish speaking that separated them from Anglo students. During the 1940s, according to education historian Guadalupe San Miguel (1987, 121), most Texas school districts with growing numbers of Mexican students also segregated them “in classrooms, in the teachers’ roll books, and especially in extracurricular activities.” In 1947 a California appeals court ruled in Mendez v. Westminster that segregation of Mexican schoolchildren was illegal and thus unconstitutional, which encouraged Mexican American civil rights advocates to shift their focus back to Texas. There, with the aid of the League of United Latin American Citizens (lulac), Mexican American parents in 1948 brought a lawsuit against state education officials in Bastrop County. In Delgado v. Bastrop a federal district court ruled that school districts could establish segregated facilities for pupils within the same buildings, “in the first grade only and solely for instructional purposes” for those pupils who, according to suitable testing, did not “possess a sufficient familiarity with the English language” (San Miguel 1987, 125; San 208 n David A. Badillo Miguel 2001; San Miguel 2004; Olivas 2006; Lopez and Olivas 2008). Following the landmark 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, under what came to be known as “Texas-style integration,” Anglo communities in the Southwest devised strategies to keep their children in neighborhood schools while “integrating” African Americans with Mexican Americans. Civil rights activism within the Latino community ranges from locally based, grassroots organizing to national organizations that rely on highly trained legal professionals and appeals up to the United States Supreme Court. Before 1970 lulac and the American GI Forum took the lead in using the courts to fulfill Latino civil rights goals. Since its founding in 1968, however, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (maldef) has stood at the forefront of Latino legal activity, linked through its local offices with San Antonio, Los Angeles, and other southwestern barrios. In 1980, it planted itself in Chicago in order to cover the Midwest and more recently in Atlanta for the Southeast. maldef has emerged as the primary force for litigation of a wide variety of what might be called “national origin” discrimination cases, including those involving enforcement of the federal 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act and the 1974 Equal Educational Opportunity Act. It has also taken the lead in educational litigation cases that have emerged throughout the United States. This chapter merges history, sociology, and legal studies to explore the workings of maldef with respect to language policy in the Midwest. The first section highlights some of the legal issues in federal education cases of the 1970s, particularly those involving aspects of both desegregation and bilingual education, key areas of civil rights litigation. Next the focus shifts to maldef’s specific response to challenges and circumstances presented in the case of Gomez v. Illinois State Board of Education, which culminated in a favorable ruling and settlement in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 1987. A concluding section discusses the enhanced effectiveness of bilingual education programs resulting from this litigation, and their increased reach among diverse state and local educational agencies. My sources include contemporary news accounts, court documents, internal memos and reports gleaned from archives, as well as the writings of scholars and other commentators. I have also incorporated an interview with the former Chicago maldef staff attorney whose diligence found a willing plaintiff and helped launch the class action lawsuit. Desegregation as the Legal Route to Bilingual Education Educational scholar Richard Valencia (2008, 309), who has examined the historic impact of desegregation cases on Mexican Americans, notes that during the late 1960s Litigating Bilingual Education n 209 “the U.S. Department of Justice began a campaign to force state educational agencies into compliance with new federal desegregation rulings.” Eliminating segregated school facilities remained the dominant strategy for obtaining educational equality for Latinos until the mid-1970s, when maldef and other organizations began to promote bilingual/bicultural education in desegregated settings as the solution to the special needs of Mexican American schoolchildren. maldef’s full-time staff of trained lawyers established legal precedents through “impact litigation” in the...