Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas by Philis Barragán Goetz (review)

Since the late 1970s, historians have documented the complex relationship between Mexican-origin individuals and public schools. Few of these studies, however, have explored the variety of learning opportunities provided by informal institutions such as the family or by formal ones like the Catholic Church, Protestant denominations, and private individuals, especially Mexican Americans themselves. Philis M. Barragán Goetz addresses one of the major gaps in this field by focusing on the widespread existence of Mexican-sponsored private schools in Texas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and on the important roles they played in the community.

Barragán Goetz provides a fascinating history of these escuelitas, or little schools, by focusing on the various binational political, economic, and cultural factors that influenced their rise and decline in South Texas from the late 1800s to the 1940s. She notes that the history of escuelitas was not only one of resistance but also of negotiation, female leadership in patriarchal communities, and responses by Mexican-origin communities as they transformed their identities from Mexican to Mexican American.

Reading, Writing, and Revolution is divided into five largely chronological chapters. The first focuses on the impact that both modernization and progressivism had on the history of escuelitas and on public education from the mid-1800s to the early twentieth century, on community debates over their existence in a modern Texas, and on the formation of one of the best-known escuelitas in Texas, the Colegio Altamirano. Chapter 2 discusses two issues, the Mexican consulate's investigation of Mexican-origin children's exclusion from school in the Laredo area and the campaign by Texas Mexicans to pressure the consulate to investigate more counties in South an Central Texas and additional forms of mistreatment. Chapter 3 examines the lives of four exceptional teachers who used children and escuelitas to "negotiate and contest the dislocating phenomena taking place on both sides of the border" (16). Chapter 4 discusses the Mexican government's role in supporting the creation of additional escuelitas in the United States in the mid-1920s and their eventual decline several years later. The final chapter examines the influence that escuelitas had on the activism of the Mexican American Generation activists who fought for civil and educational rights between 1930 and 1960.

Barragán Goetz does an excellent job of documenting the existence of escuelitas in the context of public school development, Mexican nation-building pressures, and Mexican-origin community developments. A few basic concepts, however, such as childhood literacy and imaginary citizenship, remain inadequately clarified or substantiated. Similarly, the author's description of these schools as in constant decline—after the rise of public schooling in the late 1880s, after the Mexican consulate quit supporting them in the late 1920s, and after Mexican American Generation activists emerged in the 1930s—is baffling. The evidence indicates that escuelitas were not in constant decline but rather thrived continuously throughong the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Despite these concerns, this book is a major contribution to the historiography of Mexican American education in the United States and lays the groundwork for additional work on the origins and development of community-based schooling in Chicanx history. This book will appeal to anyone interested in educational and social history, Chicana history, ethnic/Latino studies, border studies, and foundational studies in schools of education.