Review by Choice Review
Mexican Americans living in the US Southwest have long complained that their community, its traditions, and its language have been under continuing assault, notably in the schools. For years, they have attended segregated public schools, and (in the author's words) ``they have been the victims of humiliating and depressing incidents of racial discrimination and social ostracism.'' But San Miguel (University of California, Santa Barbara) incorrectly affirms that ``the ambitions of these students, their perceptions of that schooling experience, and the impact of the public schools on their lives have been neglected by historians.'' On the contrary, there is a huge literature-empirical, descriptive, and biographical-that attests this doleful experience. Indeed, it was out of the Mexican American community in the 1960s that bilingual education reforms derived, themselves an affirmation of vast protest and study, the fruits of which are best documented in the massive 1970 hearings by the US Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity. The author's overstatement, however, does not lessen the monograph's importance. It is a truly valuable study, tracing over a 50-year period the Mexican Americans' quest for educational equality-the context of its origins, the forms it took, its ideals-and assessing the impact of this quest on public education policies. This study is a major achievement. Essential for institutions with graduate programs in education and the social sciences.-F. Cordasco, Montclair State College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
