Raza Schools: The Fight for Latino Educational Autonomy in a West Texas Borderlands TownIn 1929, a Latino community in the borderlands city of Del Rio, Texas, established the first and perhaps only autonomous Mexican American school district in Texas history. How it did so—against a background of institutional racism, poverty, and segregation—is the story Jesús Jesse Esparza tells in Raza Schools, a history of the rise and fall of the San Felipe Independent School District from the end of World War I through the post–civil rights era. The residents of San Felipe, whose roots Esparza traces back to the nineteenth century, faced a Jim Crow society in which deep-seated discrimination extended to education, making biased curriculum, inferior facilities, and prejudiced teachers the norm. Raza Schools highlights how the people of San Felipe harnessed the mechanisms and structures of this discriminatory system to create their own educational institutions, using the courts whenever necessary to protect their autonomy. For forty-two years, the Latino community funded, maintained, and managed its own school system—until 1971, when in an attempt to address school segregation, the federal government forced the San Felipe Independent School District to consolidate with a larger neighboring, mostly white school district. Esparza describes the ensuing clashes—over curriculum, school governance, teachers’ positions, and funding—that challenged Latino autonomy. While focusing on the relationships between Latinos and whites who shared a segregated city, his work also explores the experience of African Americans who lived in Del Rio and attended schools in both districts as a segregated population. Telling the complex story of how territorial pride, race and racism, politics, economic pressures, local control, and the federal government collided in Del Rio, Raza Schools recovers a lost chapter in the history of educational civil rights—and in doing so, offers a more nuanced understanding of race relations, educational politics, and school activism in the US-Mexico borderlands. |
Contents
Schools of Their | |
More than Just Schools | |
Betraying the Cause | |
When the Chicano Movement Came Our Schools Went Away | |
Other editions - View all
Raza Schools: The Fight for Latino Educational Autonomy in a West Texas ... Jesús Jesse Esparza No preview available - 2023 |
Raza Schools: The Fight for Latino Educational Autonomy in a West Texas ... Jesús Jesse Esparza No preview available - 2023 |
Common terms and phrases
A. E. Gutiérrez activists Additionally African American Anglo annexation April Barrio bilingual education Black & Brown Blandina Cárdenas Carlos Castańeda Carlos Castańeda Papers Chicano Movement Civil Rights classroom Comprehensive Educational Plan Conquistador consolidation cultural curriculum Del Rio desegregation district officials DRISD Eloy Padilla enrolled escuelitas ethnic Mexicans federal Felipe Del Rio Felipe Independent School funds González graduates Handbook of Texas Homero Sígala Independent School District integration interview by author Julio Ramos LAFB Langston Elementary Latino LULAC March Mexican American Mustangs oral history interview Orozco parents Peńa Public School Directory racial racial segregation Rights in Black Rio News Herald San Felipe Exes San Felipe Independent San Felipe schools San Miguel School board minutes School Number school system schools in San segregation sense of autonomy September September 28 SFCSD SFDRCISD Administrative Offices SFISD superintendent TEA Files teachers Texas Online Texas Public School University of Texas Val Verde County