it was over time and through opportunities I had to serve as a longer-term conversation partner, mentor, and homework helper—and sometimes just a sympathetic sounding board, particularly for those students from Farmingville who experienced a sense of marginalization or mistreatment in the larger school or community context of Allenstown. I was fortunate to be able to make multiyear commitments to my relationships with students, their families, and school staff. Some of these relationships became very strong, such as those with MEP staff and AVID students whose narratives are highlighted most notably in Chapter 6. Other relationships were more episodic in nature, like those I developed with a much wider range of White and Mexican-descent student peer groups and teachers across the campus, whose narratives appear as interview excerpts throughout the book.
Beyond my ongoing, school-based participation observation, I interacted with Mexican-descent students and their families through visits to homes and workplaces, attendance at sporting and cultural events, and by serving as a chaperone on student trips to movie theaters, college visits, youth leadership conferences, and local recreational centers. I also spent a year living in a migrant farmworker housing complex adjacent to the agricultural fields in Farmingville, and several weeks during two consecutive winters traveling as a guest with migrant students and their families to their small hometown ranchos in Michoacán, Mexico. These towns constitute the other end of a significant transnational network that connects families in Pleasanton Valley to the central Mexican province, a network that has been sustained by decades of migration, travel, and resource sharing across national borders. This cross-border experience helped me to deepen some of my relationships of trust with parents and students and also increased my visibility and recognition among Latino leaders in the community of Farmingville, many of whom also traveled to visit extended family in the Mexican province.
Segregation and Nonbelonging at Allenstown High
Early in my research experience at Allenstown High, it became clear to me that the decade-and-a-half of racial togetherness at the school had not led, as one might hope, to the progressive academic and social integration of students. Instead, it had produced what was essentially two high schools—one “White” and one “Mexican”—mirroring the two separate communities in the region. This segregation was apparent in both the formal and informal spatial separation of students on campus and their differential participation in co-and extracurricular activities. School tracking practices and student classifications further reinforced segregation. Where segregation was perhaps most clearly and powerfully exhibited was in the aggregate patterns of academic performance, where White students outperformed Mexican-descent students by nearly every method of academic assessment.
The high degree of social and academic marginalization Mexican-descent students experienced at Allenstown High, despite how well resourced the school was financially, was troubling and seemed to defy any simple explanation. My curiosity was raised in the second year of my research when a social studies teacher mentioned, in passing, that just a few years earlier, two first-generation Mexican immigrant students—running on a platform to “end racism” and improve the status of Latino students at Allenstown High—were elected president and vice president of the school’s Associated Student Body (ASB). He explained how the student leaders, supported by a handful of Euro- American student allies and the mentorship of a Latino social studies teacher of Cuban descent, undertook a bold campaign to promote racial integration on the campus through strategies that included a series of social mixing and intercultural awareness activities, the design of a multicultural mural for the school gymnasium, and a controversial demand to institute an elective course on Chicano studies (this full campaign is explored in detail in Chapter 3).
The teacher’s passing reference left me to wonder: How could such Latino student empowerment have happened, given the current and seemingly systematic nature of their marginalization on the campus? And why, after only a few years, did the high school students seem to know so little about it? Why had it not come up in my conversations with long-time teachers and administrators with whom I had been communicating for nearly two years about questions of equity and diversity at the school? Was it a form of institutional amnesia? If so, what was being forgotten, and why? I wondered how something as significant as broad-based Latino student empowerment could end up, just a few years later, so difficult to talk about, so seemingly forgotten, and so clearly absent at the school. As I inquired more extensively into what had happened during that time, I was led to realize that it was the Latino student leaders’ demands for institutional change at Allenstown High that triggered the decade-long attempt by a group of parents and business leaders to “secede” from the increasingly Latino school district.
Moving the Analytical Lens from School to Community
As I continued my school-based research with the Peers Project through the early 2000s, I began to inquire more deeply into the history of the high school, the school district, and the community politics of schooling in the region. It was through this juxtaposition of site- based ethnographic data collection and historical-archival research that I began to see how the practices and politics of (re-) segregation that I saw clearly at play in the high school were a microcosm of the larger, regional struggles that had taken place in the school district over the place of culture, language, and class/racial entitlement in the schooling process. It occurred to me that if I wanted to develop a more profound understanding of the set of perplexing forces of inequality and alienation that seemed to act on Mexican-descent students in their everyday experiences in the high school, I would need to look beyond the school site and investigate the historically situated nature and “roots” of the marginalization I was witnessing. So it was, then, that in 2002 I elected to leave my research position in the Peers Project to pursue independent research that would lead me to the subject material of this book and the analytical focus on the cultural politics of school resegregation.
Over the next three years (2002–2005) of research, I leveraged my connections with Mexican-descent students, parents, and teachers from Allenstown High to visit and build relationships with civic leaders in Farmingville, including city council members, grassroots community activists, and members of the parent, youth, and citizen organizations (these interactions are described in Chapters 4, 5, and 7). Over time, I was included in ad hoc resident meetings, e-mail exchanges, and telephone calls about political developments in the community, particularly those surrounding the issue of the proposed school district split. The data I collected during this time included over 350 hours of transcribed field notes from ongoing participant-observation in community-level events and activities, including public meetings (e.g., school board meetings, district-sponsored community fora, and civic organization membership meetings) and semiprivate, ad hoc gatherings with Latino activists. In addition, I completed and transcribed semistructured individual and group interviews (about an hour each) with a purposive sample of Mexican-descent parent and parent group representatives (15), Farmingville city council, PVUSD school board, and county board of education members (9), current and former district teachers and administrators (15), Allenstown parents who supported the district reorganization plan (6), current Allenstown High and community college students (15), and former students at Allenstown High (6). I limited the interview sample to those with some level of involvement (and often a strong investment) in the activities surrounding the school district secession campaign. Additional data sources included personal notes, memos, and email communications shared by research subjects, as well as information from local and regional media sources including newsletters and newspapers, U.S. Census reports, local library collections, and school district rec ords and archival documents. All data collected for this book were imported into a single NVivo qualitative software database and analyzed for relevant and emergent themes.
Positionality and Politics in the Field
As a White, male, middle-class individual whose field research included significant interactions with working-class (and often socially and legally vulnerable) Mexican immigrant youth and their families, I have to acknowledge my own positionality in the very complex web of racialized class inequalities that made it possible for me to conduct research in the ways, and through the means, that I did.17 During my three years at the school, I held the status of a young adult, English/Spanish bilingual “nonteacher” who enjoyed the privilege of moving relatively freely across campus. This meant that