By Rubén Donato.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 152 pp. $19.95.
Over the past few years, communities in the Southwest have been besieged by various statewide referendums, court decisions, and school practices that have rolled back the gains achieved by civil rights movements. When one looks to the literature on educational history or the civil rights movements, one is hard pressed to find a substantive amount of writings on Mexican American/Chicano communities. As I read through this literature, I am often left with several questions unanswered: How did public education and civil rights movements develop in the Southwest? What were Chicano communities doing during this period? What role did these communities play in the expansion of public education and educational reform? How did Chicanos initiate or respond to what was going on around them?
In The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era, Rubén Donato provides a fascinating, insightful, and informative look at how Chicano communities in general, and one Chicano community in particular, asserted their individual and collective rights in their goals for a just and equitable education for their children during the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. Using primary sources including interviews, school board minutes, state and local reports, community organization files, and newspapers, Donato critically examines how a Chicano/ Mexicano community in Brownsfield, California (Brownsfield is a pseudonym), organized in its struggle for an equitable educational system. In telling the story of the Brownsfield community, Donato is careful to inform the reader of what was going on during the same period at the national level in terms of education and civil rights movements. By doing so, Donato provides readers at all levels of knowledge of U.S. educational history a firm understanding of the period, as well as an understanding of where Mexican American communities were in relation to that history, both in regards to education and civil rights movements.
The book comprises seven chapters, each of which outlines local developments within broader regional and national contexts. The first three chapters serve to locate Brownsfield within broader societal issues of public schooling, community development, and civil rights. In chapter one, "Schooling in the Pre-Brown Era," Donato briefly reviews issues of segregation, Americanization, vocational education, and psychometrics in relation to Chicano education. Chapter two, "Evolution of a Community and the Making of a School District," provides a concise historical overview of California and the Brownsfield community after the military conquest of northern Mexico in 1848. Donato specifically focuses on the educational history of the Brownsfield Unified School District and the politics of district consolidation. In chapter three, "Emergence of Grassroots Activism," Donato outlines the development of Chicano civil rights movements within the context of the broader civil rights movements of the 1960s. Donato also describes how the Mexican American people in Brownsfield began to organize as a community in their quest for educational equity for their children.
Chapters four through six outline how the Mexican American and Anglo communities of Brownsfield responded to year-round schooling, bilingual education, and the legal dismantling of school segregation. In chapter four, "The Irony of Year-Round Education," Donato describes how Mexican migrant parents were excluded from the decisionmaking processes of year-round education, and how they mobilized as a community in response to this exclusion. Chapter five, "Mandated Bilingual Education Comes to Town," is a detailed account of how both the school system and communities of Brownsfield responded to mandated bilingual education. In particular, Donato describes the school district's aggressive implementation of bilingual education and the resistance the district encountered from parts of the White community, which led to strategic political mobilization by the Mexican American community. In chapter six, "Self-Interest and Compliance in the Desegregation Process," Donato looks at desegregation in the Mexican American context of the Southwest in the 1960s and 1970s, and the experience of the Brownsfield school system and community in the politics of desegregation. Chapter seven, "Summary and Conclusions," provides a succinct review of the book's chapters.
Overall, Donato has done a skillful job of describing and analyzing how local communities responded to larger national movements, as well as to regional and localized issues of equal and just schooling for all children. The Other Struggle for Equal Schools makes a significant contribution to our collective understanding of both the educational history and civil rights struggles of a people long ignored in mainstream educational history, and should be included within any course or curriculum related to education, history, and/or civil rights.
J.F.M.