Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation

Chapter 6: Inter-American and Intercultural Education

Chapter 6 Inter-American and Intercultural Education The problem of inequality in educational resources and achievement has long been a source of conflict between the Mexican community and the Anglo-dominated educational system. Analysts on all sides have generally interpreted the problem as stemming from either local, regional, or national contexts. No one has, however, offered an analysis incorporating two critical conditions affecting educational policy beginning in 1940. The first condition originated as an impact of the international context, a context defined by the struggle for world power by the United States; the second emerged as the increasingly apparent potential for independent political action held by minorities,1 especially blacks and Mexicans. I argue that in the minds of domestic and foreign policy officials these two conditions interconnected and beginning in 1940, government officials formulated federal domestic policy affecting minorities in relation to wartime and, later, cold war objectives. This federal activity represented indeed a new political relationship destined to affect the political behavior of the Mexican people, and this relationship became 146 Chicano Education & Segregation clearly established in formal and informal educational policy affecting the Mexican community. In the historical accounts of Rodolfo Acuna,2 Thomas P. Carter,3 Meyer Weinberg,4 Charles Wollenberg,5 and Carey McWilliams,6 little or no discussion takes place concerning the international dimension as a critical factor in Chicano educational history. In addition, although historians have focused much attention on World War II as a historical watershed in the development of Mexican political consciousness and activity, little research has focused upon those programs applied by the federal government that affected the Mexican community during that same period. McWilliams’s modest analysis of the State Department’s Office of Inter-American Affairs in North from Mexico, probably makes the major statement on the role of the federal government in the educational and political experience of the Mexican community. Yet McWilliams downplays the significance of the international factor as well as the significance of the federal intervention into the Mexican community. Wollenberg includes some discussion of the effect of World War II upon social science thought and the practice of segregation, but does not emphasize sufficiently the international question, nor the role of the federal government in regional education. San Miguel’s recent work on educational reform in Texas devotes a chapter to the inter-American phase, but interprets it as an aspect of the Mexican-American struggle for educational equality. This study interprets inter-American education as shaped by the foreign policy interests of the United States, within which certain educational reforms became desirable, even necessary. This interpretation of the international factor places emphasis upon the role of the state in shaping the agenda of educational reformers in the Mexican community. The paucity of research upon this significant historical relationship, that is, between the federal government and the Mexican community at the World War II juncture, places it on the agenda as an important research topic. Inter-American and Intercultural Education 147 I will now demonstrate that since the Second World War the international concerns of the United States, especially its policy interests in Latin America, have proven fundamental to the altering and shaping of formal and informal educational policies affecting the Mexican community . I will explicate the relationship between the inter-American and intercultural educational programs, which significantly affected the Mexican historical experience during and after World War II. I will also explain the need to politically socialize the Mexican people, and the causes of the international struggle for power waged first between the Allies and Axis powers, and later between the United States and Soviet blocs. The Economics and Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy This interrelation manifests itself clearly in an examination of economic and political relations between the United States and Latin America. Based on this immediate relationship, educators and other authorities formulated several long-range educational objectives for the Mexican people. The general purpose of that foreign policy included maintaining and developing economic ties between the United States and Latin America and preventing the establishment of political forces that would endanger those ties. Because that foreign policy targeted the Mexican community, an educational emphasis developed that would affect the political culture of the Mexican people. One of the methods proposed by the State Department to ensure such ties involved an innovative application of the culture concept, breaking the last strongholds of the biological determinists within the social...