Description
The struggle for legal recognition not only reflected an upsurge in organizing within the community but also generated a shift in consciousness and identity. In Brown, Not White Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., astutely traces the evolution of the community’s political activism in education right through the Chicano Movement era of the early 1970s.
San Miguel also identifies the vital implications of this struggle for Mexican Americans and for public education. First, he demonstrates, the political mobilization in Houston underscored the emergence of a new form of grassroots ethnic leadership committed to community empowerment and to inclusiveness of diverse ideological interests within the minority community. Second, it signaled a shift in the activist community’s identity from the assimilationist “Mexican American Generation” to the rising Chicano Movement with its “nationalist” ideology. In spite of everything, it introduced Mexican American interests into educational policy making normally and into the national desegregation struggles in particular.
This vital study will engage those interested in public school policy, in addition to scholars of Mexican American history and the history of desegregation in The us.