First published in 1999. This study looks at the relationship between the quest for Chicano community empowerment in the Winter Garden region, the development and implementation of the bilingual/cultural education program in Crystal City, Texas, and bilingual education policy change.

First published in 1999. This study looks at the relationship between the quest for Chicano community empowerment in the Winter Garden region, the development and implementation of the bilingual/cultural education program in Crystal City, Texas, and bilingual education policy change.

Much of the history of Mexican American educational reform efforts has focused on campaigns to eliminate discrimination in public schools. However, as historian Guadalupe San Miguel demonstrates in Chicana/o Struggles for Education: Activisim in the Community, the story is much broader and more varied than that. While activists certainly challenged discrimination, they also worked for specific public school reforms and sought private schooling opportunities, utilizing new patterns of contestation and advocacy. In documenting and reviewing these additional strategies, San Miguel’s nuanced overview and analysis offers enhanced insight into the quest for equal educational opportunity to new generations of students. San Miguel addresses questions such as what factors led to change in the 1960s and in later years; who the individuals and organizations were that led the movements in this period and what motivated them to get involved; and what strategies were pursued, how they were chosen, and how successful they were. He argues that while Chicana/o activists continued to challenge school segregation in the 1960s as earlier generations had, they broadened their efforts to address new concerns such as school funding, testing, English-only curricula, the exclusion of undocumented immigrants, and school closings. They also advocated cultural pride and memory, inclusion of the Mexican American community in school governance, and opportunities to seek educational excellence in private religious, nationalist, and secular schools. The profusion of strategies has not erased patterns of de facto segregation and unequal academic achievement, San Miguel concludes, but it has played a key role in expanding educational opportunities. The actions he describes have expanded, extended, and diversified the historic struggle for Mexican American education.

This collection of articles conveys information to teachers and teacher trainers about Chicano Spanish and English in bilingual education and ESL. The first section enables the reader to acquire an understanding of the social and educational issues involved in establishing a role for any given variety of Chicano speech. The second section provides research about Chicano Spanish and English, their distribution, characteristics, and pertinent potential for educational applications. The reader can then proceed to section three and analyze instructional issues, suggested applications, and options for Chicano speech in the bilingual classroom. A select bibliography completes this volume.

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A), University of Potsdam (Anglistics/ American Studies), course: Seminar: How Race is Lived in America, language: English, abstract: This paper on the Mexican Americans in the south-western states in the United States aims at examining whether bilingual education of this ethnic group could be a means to help the Mexican Americans escape the vicious circle they live in. The introduction will give a short historical overview over the Mexican Americans′ schooling. In the main part, the description of what is referred to as vicious circle will be followed by the depiction of the Mexican Americans′ situation in school in the south-western states of the United States. As this situation cannot be considered as good, the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 which marked a first step towards an improvement will be introduced. Apart from that, two models of bilingual education will mainly find reconsideration and will be compared with each other regarding their usefulness to give the Mexican Americans an equal educational opportunity as the Anglo Americans have. Towards the end of the main part, the attempt will be made to answer the topic question of this paper. Several obstacles on the way to ′good′ bilingual schooling and possible alternatives will be mentioned then. The concluding remarks will sum up the result of this paper and will shortly focus on the contemporary situation of the Mexican Americans in the American school system. [...]