Valley Interfaith and School Reform: Organizing for Power in South Texas

Introduction: COMMUNITY ORGANIZING IN THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY

 COMMUNITY ORGANIZING IN THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY The frontier between the United States and Mexico—which until the Second World War was the site of relatively modest population migration —has in the postwar era turned into one of the most dynamic and heavily traversed national boundaries in the world. The explosive growth of Mexican-origin populations in the major U.S. metropolitan regions has wrought dramatic changes upon North America’s demographic , cultural, political, and economic landscapes. Concurrent with these broad changes, the educational system in the United States has sought to respond to Mexican immigration with a broad range of initiatives , of which bilingual education is perhaps the most salient, but in actuality represents merely one component of a broader movement for greater multicultural awareness and linguistic sensitivity in our nation’s schools.1 The changes wrought by Mexican immigration have had an impact on the economy, politics, and culture of the United States in countless ways. Yet while much ink has been spilled concerning the challenges confronting the United States, U.S. citizens of Mexican origin, and Mexican immigrants in the current context, we are only just beginning to articulate a broader vision of educational theory and practice that can integrate these demographic transformations into a democratic synthesis that will enhance a rich civic life for immigrants and citizens alike. This topic is of increasing urgency because of both the growth of the Mexican and Mexican American populations in the United States and the imperative that future citizens have at least the foundations of an education that will enable them to participate in the nation’s civic and economic life. Such analytic work is crucial if we are to sustain and extend our nation’s democratic and republican legacy, both for Ameri- cans who have resided here for many generations and for the immigrants who seek opportunities in the U.S. economy and polity that they have been denied in their homelands.2 The current study is an effort to address this lacuna in scholarship by describing the efforts of a community-based organization in the South Texas borderlands to improve the living conditions of low-income citizens and immigrants and the public schools their children attend. This work is significant because the worlds of community organizing and school reform have been distinct from one another until relatively recently.Community organizers addressed glaring injustices facing poor and working-class communities that pertained to health care, job opportunities , and crime, but refrained from tackling issues relevant to school reform. Educational reformers, on the other hand, focused on pedagogical, curricular, and assessment issues in schools without addressing the problems of unemployment, crime, and inadequate health care that have a disproportionate impact on low-income communities. The self-imposed boundaries thus established by community organizers and educators made sense to a degree, given the inability of any single group to address the staggering number of problems that confront poor and working-class communities. However, they impeded the exploration of common ground and the kind of intellectual exchange that can occur when individuals from different cultural and class backgrounds commit themselves to sustained learning from one another. Only recently have systematic efforts begun, predominantly in metropolitan areas of the Southwest, to cross boundaries and to examine both how community organizing can catalyze the work of school reform and how transformations in a school can give a politically disconnected community a locus for civic engagement. The initial results of these efforts have been intriguing and call for further study in other settings that reflect the diversity of the American civic and cultural landscape.3 A second indication of the significance of this work has to do with larger issues confronting public education in the United States in the current political and economic conjuncture. For a variety of reasons, Americans’ faith in their public schools is at a historic low, and surveys indicate that a majority of Americans would now prefer to send their children to private schools if expense were not an issue. At the same time, recent economic trends have exerted a downward pressure on the wages of poor and working-class Americans and have caused the United States—once the proud bastion of a strong middle class—to become the world’s most economically stratified developed country.When xii      combined with other data tracking a decline of civic engagement and...