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

In 2016, educators, community members, and school-aged children gathered at the Texas capitol to call for the rejection of a racist textbook on Mexican Americans slated to be adopted by the State Board of Education (SBOE). They also called for the integration of Mexican American Studies as a stand-alone course in the public-school curriculum. The SBOE eventually rejected the textbook and subsequently heeded the recommendation for a course. That fight, however, has its roots in the nineteenth century as argued by historian Philis Barragán Goetz. Jovita Idar, Leonor Villegas de Magnón and other women and men helped to found and sustain escuelitas, small community and individually funded schools. Escuelitas helped to preserve the Spanish language, asserted Mexican culture, and operated as vehicles with which to instill pride among the young and old in Mexican-origin communities. During the late nineteenth century, escuelitas represented community members’ efforts to address their children’s education, regardless of how remote or distant they were from public schools. These educational centers often lacked books and other materials but implemented creative methods of learning, such as oral recitations of poems, integrating newspaper stories into history lessons, and writing exercises. These were concrete examples of the importance of education among Mexican American families since the post-1846 war period.

By the eve of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, pressures from outside of the community to expand the public-school system, as well as the outbreak of war itself, wrought changes in community-based schooling that had prioritized a community’s choice of language in their children’s instruction. While the Revolution created disruption and ended an important investigation (led by the Mexican consulate) on ethnic discrimination at the request of community members, modernization also affected the very future of the escuelita model. New technologies, social integration due to expanding rail service, public school expansion and nativist ideas about English as the preferred language deeply affected communities along the border. While some escuelitas survived such societal changes, the majority of these small schools entered a period of decline and eventually closed.

Among the major contributions of Reading, Writing, and Revolution are those the book makes in the area of gender, race and ethnicity, class, nationalism, and identity formation. Barragán Goetz’s discussion of the role of female educators in the pre-revolution escuelitas expands our understanding of the broader implications of education. Community leaders and founders of one of the earliest feminist Mexican American leagues, Jovita Idar and María Villarreal operated as liaisons between a predominantly working-class Mexican-origin population and the small, but growing, middle-class Mexican American community. This is particularly important as such alliances formed part of everyday life along the U.S.–Mexican border and Barragán Goetz’s analysis of their writings in the form of correspondence and editorials, among other source material, reveals how divisions of class were not as clear cut on the ground as one may think. Moreover, such interaction, and the dynamics in the classroom itself, help to illuminate what Barragán Goetz identifies as a constant negotiation of a cultural nationalism that, by the 1920s, becomes somewhat subsumed to questions of citizenship as the latter became ever so important. Such escuelita education privileged the Spanish language and Mexican literary tradition and informed children’s view of their own identity as one that figuratively, and culturally, straddled both countries. Theirs was a citizenship that was imagined and fluid, as instruction helped Mexican-origin children gain a sense of cultural pride with a strong connection to Mexico, but simultaneously claimed a space in U.S. society. Equally significant is Barragán Goetz’s ability to show, quite clearly through analysis of school board records, newspapers, memoirs, and private papers, just how central female educators were to the formative period of a...