Mexican Americans vs. The White Architects A Battle for Educational Equality

By Lesley Gonzalez

For decades, the Mexican-American community has been engaged in a prolonged battle for educational equity. The mistreatment of MexicanAmericans in the public school system requires a critical analysis of the dominant class’s irrational prejudice towards this marginalized group. In short, the gradual increase of the Mexican-American population placed immense pressure on White society’s attempts at barricading minorities’ path to success. Throughout the 1900s, several school districts across the nation focused on alienating Chicanx students–in which a UCLA professor, David G. Garcia’s historical research, Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality, will be used to provide an overall perspective of the Mexican-American schooling experience.

Garcia’s research hones in on a neighborhood called La Colonia in Oxnard, California, and its history surrounding segregation. From 1903 to the 1930s, Oxnard’s formative years were spent perfecting their practice of mundane racism. In sum, Garcia claims “White Architects” (influential white community members) tested the lengths of their political power and exercised four strategies of segregation: “1) establishing a racial hierarchy, 2) building an interconnection between residential and school segregation, 3) constructing a schoolwithin-a-school model of racial separation, and 4) omitting a rationale for segregation”1.

The elite White class managed to establish a racial hierarchy by placing themselves as the superior race. Essentially, they engaged in deficit modes of thinking through a genetic and cultural determinist lens. From a eugenics point of view, the genetic determinist model blames the students’ deficiencies on their genetic and biological structure, whereas the cultural determinist model blames the students’ cultural upbringing as the cause for their perceived inferiority. In either ideology, the oppressive and inequitable schooling conditions were never at fault. For example, Oxnard Unified School District superintendent and first mayor, Richard Haydock, was the first to assume that Mexicans were an inferior class and found it justifiable to segregate them from “the superior class.” This racist and xenophobic assumption endorsed by Haydock was one of the many ideologies used when implementing school policies. This drew Haydock to integrate White and East Asian children into classes that were separated from the rest of the student population as they were perceived to be of higher intellect. Additionally, he claimed that the Mexican-American way of living was atrocious and would lead to contagion. Supposedly their “lack” of proper hygiene was an acceptable reason to alienate them even when “he approved plans for substandard housing and neglected to extend basic municipal services such as sewage, electricity, and paved roads to [their segregated residential area]” 2. Haydock believed that the Mexican-American community chose to live in filth and linked their terrible living conditions as a practice of their culture.

Thus, La Colonia became the underdeveloped and underfunded part of the city that was separated from the White community by a set of railroad tracks. These railroad tracks were representative of a color line that demonstrated which side of town was treated with indifference. Moreover, Garcia argues that the misguided belief of Mexican Americans being filthy residents

“enabled school officials to feverishly work toward complete segregation” 3. Mexican-American students could intuit a sense of White supremacy and unwelcomeness within these restrictive covenants when crossing over to the exclusive White neighborhood. Additionally, well-resourced schools were placed within the wealthier side of Oxnard, purposely limiting educational access for La Colonia residents. The few Mexican-American families who were financially able to purchase a home on the affluent side were legally refrained from doing so as property deeds explicitly stated: “a person whose blood is not entirely that of the Caucasian Race” cannot purchase property 4. Hence, Mexican-Americans were not only segregated academically, but socially as well.

In terms of segregation within the school, officials masterfully fabricated a school-withina-school model to ostracize Mexican-American students subtly. In essence, schools implemented “segregated classes, distinct recesses, and staggered release times for Mexican students” within elementary schools, and similar trends followed these students into junior high. The classes in which Mexican students were enrolled in were taught by disengaged and racist teachers, leading them to face significant academic barriers in their future schooling experiences. Moreover, predominant Spanish-speaking students were further alienated through the establishment of an elementary school within La Colonia. The school board of trustees believed that building a school on the poverty side of Oxnard would “benefit” the Mexican students – when in reality, it was just a method for complete school segregation.

Amidst all the decisions made in favor of segregation, the school board of trustees records did not disclose any expressions of dissent nor rationale for segregation. More importantly, none of the decisions were communicated to the Mexican parents – they were completely shut out of all school board meetings, and their concerns were immediately disregarded. The precise tactic to avoid noting any explicit discussion of segregation was the school board’s way of avoiding accusations of unfair treatment. They wanted to give off the notion that the unequal schooling and residential structures occurred without their recollection.

The years between the 1900s and 1930s may have been filled with constant degradation of MexicanAmerican identity, but the emergence of resilience and agency took over in the 1940s to the 1970s. Mexican parents took it upon themselves to petition the school board to move their children out of Mexican classes and into the White classes. These parents demonstrated a concern for their children’s future and advocated on their behalf. Additionally, Garcia obtained oral histories of past students who experienced first-hand segregation. One particular interviewee, Atonia Arguelles DiLiello (one of the few Colonia students to graduate high school), recollects her time in these segregated schools and mentions how she became aware of the “substandard schooling she and her peers had received” 5 .

She states, “I used to think [white kids] were better than me [and] Mexicans were not the same,” and as she matured, she abandoned this internalized self-hatred. Thus, Antonia produces a counterstory that exposes the racism that explicitly singled out Mexican-Americans in the school system. Counterstorytelling became a form of resistance that the community of La Colonia utilized in order to challenge majoritarian stories told by the white elites that omit and distort the histories and realities of oppressed communities.

Among these acts of resistance, several advocacy organizations began to surface with the intent to hold Oxnard’s board of trustees accountable for their blatant discrimination. Organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Community Service Organization (CSO – a platform focused on educational reform) collectively tackled Oxnard’s systemic racism by fighting for school desegregation. However, it wasn’t until 1970 that community organizer Juan L. Soria developed a legal complaint against the Oxnard Board of Trustees to challenge de facto and de jure segregation. The case Soria v. Oxnard Board of Trustees 1970 was merely one of several classaction lawsuits pivoted towards improving the educational lot for marginalized students. The Soria case “was [also] among the first desegregation cases in the nation to be filed jointly by Mexican American and Black Plaintiffs” 6. The solidarity established between these two groups induced a harsh reality check on the education system’s discriminatory state and determined Oxnard’s Board of Trustees guilty of “intentional, deliberate, purposeful segregation” 7 .

As seen, the history behind the Mexican American schooling experience has been dominated by an ever-lasting struggle for quality education. For decades, the community has endured the country’s bigotry, but has championed racial stigma through litigation, advocacy organizations, political demonstrations, legislation, and the acknowledgment of cultural wealth. Though integration may have been achieved, discrimination persists within the educational system, and undocumented students/students of color continue the battle for equity, exhibiting the utmost resilience.