Latino Americans

Americanization The dominant

ideology in public schools imposed on immigrant and minority group children in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although assimilation is no longer an official government policy, many Native Americans remain alienated from the educational system. Compared to the national population, a greater percentage of Native Americans are under age 20, but their participation in schooling is far lower than the national average. An extremely high dropout rate places Native American high school completion far below that of the US population at large.

5-6d latino americans

Latino Americans comprise the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States. Latino, a collective term, identifies Spanish-speaking people whose ethnic groups originated in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, or other Central and South American countries. Although Latino Americans may speak Spanish as a common language and share many Spanish traditions, each group has its own distinctive culture.62

Mexican Americans are the largest Latino group in the United States.63 The 1848 Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, forced Mexico to cede to the United States the vast territories that now comprise Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. This territory, along with Texas, was home to a large Mexican population.64 In these states, public schools followed the Americanization assimilationist policy then used throughout the United States. Mexican American children were taught in English, rather than their vernacular Spanish, and their Chicano cultural heritage was ignored. Consequently, schooling imposed a negative self-image, often portraying Mexican Americans as conquered people of an inferior culture.65 Bilingual and multicultural education, replacing “Americanization,” contributes to maintaining a Mexican American historical consciousness. (For more on bilingual and multicultural education, see Chapter 12, Providing Equal Educational Opportunity.)

The Mexican American population increased as migrant workers crossed the USMexican border to work in the United States. Because Mexicans provided cheap labor as ranch workers, railroad crews, and especially farm workers, employers encouraged their entry. Wages were low, housing was frequently squalid, and working conditions were harsh. Children of the migrant workers, even if not working in the fields with their parents, had few or no educational opportunities. Although many migrant workers returned to Mexico, others remained in the United States, either legally or illegally. Since World War II, many Mexican Americans have relocated from the Southwest to other states, often to the large Northeastern and Midwestern cities. Today, approximately 90 percent of Mexican Americans live in urban areas.

In the late 1960s, the Chicano movimiento, or movement, similar to the African American civil rights movement, pursued two goals: (1) organizing Mexican Americans to work for improved social, economic, and educational conditions; (2) preserving the Mexican American cultural heritage as a source of group identity.66 Organized in 1929 to promote Latino civil rights, The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) attracted middle-class professionals. Cesar Chavez organized the United Farm Workers

62Joseph A. Rodriguez and Vicki L. Ruiz, “At Loose Ends: Twentieth-Century Latinos in Current United States History Textbooks,” Journal of American History 86 (March 2000), pp. 1689–1699. 63Victoria-Marie MacDonald, “Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, or ‘Other’? Deconstructing the Relationship between Historians and Hispanic-American Educational History,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (Fall 2001), pp. 368–369. 64Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Also, see Victor Zuniga and Ruben Hernandez-Leon, eds., New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). 65For the educational experience of Mexican American children, see Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Chicanalo Struggles for Education: Activism in the Community (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013); and Patricia Gandora and Frances Contreras, The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 66Richard Valencia, Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

to secure improved working conditions and higher wages for agricultural workers.67 The Chicano movement encouraged Mexican American political activity, economic development, and educational participation. Despite increased Mexican American attendance in elementary and secondary education, higher-education enrollments fall below the national average.68

The history of Puerto Rican Americans, another large Latino group, begins with the Spanish-American War of 1898, when defeated Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States. Puerto Rico, a US possession, attained Commonwealth status in 1952.69

Believing that Puerto Rico needed American-style social and economic development, US officials overhauled the old Spanish school system. They made school attendance compulsory, established American-style public schools, and employed English-speaking teachers trained in US teaching methods. Although some classes continued to be taught in Spanish, English was made compulsory to promote “Americanization.” Some teachers skillfully negotiated their teaching to include the concept of Puerto Rican identity within the larger context of an emerging American cultural presence. 70 Puerto Rican immigration to the US mainland has been continuous since the early twentieth century. Today more than two million Puerto Rican Americans live in large urban centers such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Historically, their high school dropout rates have been high and college attendance rates low. In recent years, however, Puerto Rican Americans have become more politically active, especially in New York and Chicago, and have improved their economic and educational position.

The Cuban American experience in the United States represents a different pattern from other Latino groups in that it originated as a community in political exile from its native land.71 Several waves of emigration from Cuba combined to form the Cuban American community. The first exiles, from 1959 to 1973, fled Fidel Castro’s repressive Communist regime. Many were upper- and middle-class Cubans who brought with them the political, economic, and educational background and organizations needed to create a distinctive Cuban American cultural community. The Mariel immigrants of the 1980s came from Cuba’s disadvantaged underclass. The Cuban American community, mirroring some aspects of the Cuba they left, has created a unique but also a permeable culture.72 In 2015, the Obama administration initiated the process of normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Cuban Americans have high rates of participation in higher education, with over 90 percent of the age group from 18 to 24 enrolled in colleges and universities. In the twenty-first century, Latino Americans are playing a larger role in American social, political, and economic life, as evidenced by the growing and influential Latino professional and business middle classes. The concept of “permeable cultures” is useful in interpreting Latino American cultures. The term permeable refers to the tendency to move back and forth from Latino to Anglo cultures. Latinos selectively create their own Hispanic American cultural patterns.73

67Frederick J. Dalton, The Moral Vision of Cesar Chavez (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003). 68Vicki L. Ruiz and John R. Chavez, eds., Memories and Migrations: Mapping Boricua and Chicana Histories (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 69For the history of Puerto Rico as a US possession, see Jose Trias Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 70Gervasio Luis Garcia, “I Am the Other: Puerto Rico in the Eyes of North Americans, 1898,” Journal of American History 38 (June 2000), p. 41; and Solsiree del Moral, Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), pp. 5–12. 71Alex Anton and Roger E. Hernandez, Cubans in America: A Vibrant History of a People in Exile (New York: Kensington Books, 2003). 72Maria Cristina Garcia, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 111–118. Also, see Alex Stepick, This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For higher education participation, see Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, The Triple Package: What Really Determines Success (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), p. 39. 73Rodriguez and Ruiz, “At Loose Ends,” p. 1696.