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t h r e e LESSONS FROM LOS ANGELES STUDENTS FOR SCHOOL SUCCESS In our conversations the Chicana/o students at Harding, the community college, and the university focused on describing their experiences, explaining how their identities had emerged and how that process was related to school performance. Although we did not have much time during the interviews to strategize how to address the needs of Chicana /o students, the revelations of some of the students contained ideas for strategies. This chapter focuses on one student, Ernesto, who told a compelling story through which a theme of both survival and empowerment emerged. This chapter and Chapter 6 in Part 2 are not intended to cover the whole of students’ experiences. Instead, this chapter looks for innovative possibilities by focusing intently on one insightful young man, and Chapter 6 focuses on five students, with the heart of the potential strategies coming from three young women. There are other stories and other strategies, but Ernesto’s was the most compelling. As mentioned earlier, it is critical that the conversations discussed in this book are set in the proper context. These interviews were conducted shortly after the Proposition 187 attack on Latinas/os in California. During this time, immigrants and Latinas/os in general were targeted as social leeches by the major political players in the state. This targeting was translating into a similar attack on multiculturalism, affirmative action, and other programs that were seen by conservatives as antiAmerican and antimeritocratic. The attack continues to the present day. The backlash against liberal politics and policies like affirmative action transformed the sociopolitical discourse by re-visioning the melting pot, appropriating “color-blind” imagery, and criticizing ethnic groups that avoid the meltdown. Thus the reality of the Chicana/o experience, as revealed in this study, was that the lives of these students, from an early 101 03-T3261 3/22/05 1:22 PM Page 101 i n s i g h t s f r o m l o s a n g e l e s c h i c a n a /o y o u t h age, were defined and categorized for them as a function of the color of their skin. The experiences of these students and the impact of those experiences on their identity formation is a powerful description of Omi and Winant’s racial formation model (1994), which describes the process by which race and the racialization of people of color define life in the United States. The severity of this situation becomes more dramatic as we look back at the history of the Chicana/o experience. Almaguer (1994) provides an in-depth analysis of the experiences of the first Chicanas/os (and of other racial groups) in California after its annexation by the United States. In his work, Almaguer exposes the significance of race and the racialization of the Chicana/o population as the key organizing principle around which the hierarchical relations of inequality in California were structured . Almaguer critiques other theoretical approaches to understanding the stratification of early Californian society as incomplete and inaccurate in that they ignored the complexity of the ideological forces at work during this period and overlooked the way in which race became a central issue in determining power and social location, regardless of class. He demonstrates that “racialization fundamentally shaped the classand gender-specific experiences of both the white and non-white populations ” (209). The same means of hierarchical stratification that Almaguer described are being invoked in the subjugation of Chicanas/os as we move into yet another century. The Chicana/o students of modernday Los Angeles suggest that the primary changes that have occurred are reflected only in the advancement of the ideological weaponry employed to maintain the hierarchy. Rather than blatantly racist ideological positions as to the inherent or imbedded inferiority of certain races, today the hierarchy is reinforced through a racialization process that intersects with class and gender injustices to deny Chicanas/os the opportunity to demonstrate their equality. This process is achieved by limiting Chicana/o access to the resources needed to succeed in contemporary society and by boldly embedding in the popular discourse the belief that past reforms have led us to a point where effort by Chicanas/os is all that they need to succeed (as evidenced in the anti–affirmative action, colorblind ideology currently in vogue). Omi and Winant (1994) and Apple (1993...

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