Rubén Donato

Sugar Beets, Segregation, and Schools: Mexican Americans in a Northern Colorado Community, 1920-1960

For more than three decades, scholars have been writing about the schooling experiences of Latinos in the U.S. Southwest. We have learned from these studies how Mexican American children were seen as intellectually inferior, culturally deprived, indifferent about education, and expected to drop out of school before reaching junior high. These children typically were put into separate classes or separate schools, and if they did make it beyond elementary school, they were channeled into low-track courses or vocational paths. Rife with issues of racism, classism, paternalism, and discrimination, the literature presents a detailed depiction about Latinos’ schooling experiences during the first half of the 20th century.1 Although these studies have given us a richer understanding about what it was like to be Mexican American in U.S. public schools, there are gaps in the literature. We know very little about their educational histories outside of California and Texas. In this article, I examine the experiences of Mexican Americans in a northern Colorado community (Fort Collins) between 1920 and 1960. In addition to when, why, and how Mexican Americans settled in Fort Collins, I focus on the Great Western Sugar Company’s efforts to “colonize” Mexican workers, the community’s Jim Crow-like environment, and their experiences in schools. I argue that Mexican Americans were not expected to rise beyond their station in life as sugar JOURNAL OF LATINOS AND EDUCATION, 2(2), 69–88 Copyright

The Irony of Year-Round Schools: Mexican Migrant Resistance in a California Community During the Civil Rights Era

This study examines the politics of year-round education in a California community during the early 1970s. As one of the few school districts in the nation to experiment with the concept, and one of the first to test it that served a large Mexican migrant student clientele, the findings show that Mexican Americans challenged the 45-15 year-round plan because they were excluded in the decision-making process and because it conflicted with the employment pattern of Mexican migrant agricultural workers. Whereas most studies have primarily focused on middle-class concerns in urban and suburban environments, this article gives special attention to how Mexican migrant resistance differed from conventional accounts.

“In These Towns, Mexicans Are Classified as Negroes”: The Politics of Unofficial Segregation in the Kansas Public Schools, 1915–1935

This article examines the emergence of Mexican American school segregation from 1915 to 1935 in Kansas, the state that gave rise to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Even though Mexicans were not referenced in Kansas’s school segregation laws, they were seen and treated as a racially distinct group. White parents and civic organizations pushed school officials to establish separate facilities for Mexican children. We argue that the contradictory and enigmatic responses to school segregation from high-ranking U.S. and Mexican government officials pointed to a degree of uncertainty about whether Mexican children could be segregated. That ambiguity, however, did not prevent local school officials from placing Mexican children in separate facilities. As the American Educational Research Association continues to pursue education research that promotes the public good, the segregation and resegregation of Mexican children in the United States must be framed as a critical issue moving forward into the “next 100 years.”