Anything But Mexican by Rodolfo F. Acuña

Author:Rodolfo F. Acuña
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

In 2014 the UCLA Civil Rights Project found “California the Most Segregated State for Latino Students.” The report found that the poverty of California’s children has increased in the last generation. Thus, Latino and African-American students on average attended schools that were 54 percent white in 1970, while in 2014 they attended schools that were 84 percent nonwhite. They suffered a “triple segregation”: by race, income, and language. The only relief was at the community college and state university levels, where student diversity allowed a certain amount of interaction.

There is an aspect of a university education that is not often discussed. In the documentary Unrest, about the founding of the Chicanx Studies Department, Dr. Warren Furumoto made an off-the-cuff observation about Chicana/o students in general.69 Warren commented that when most Chicana/o students came to San Fernando Valley State in 1969, they were by and large first-generation college students. Many of their parents did not have a high school education; some did not have a primary education. The students understood injustice and the necessity for action, but to most of the activists the terminology was foreign to them. In contrast, white activists often came from college-educated households and could be described, for want of a better term, as more sophisticated. Among the Black youngsters, there was also a core of second- and third-generation university students. The history of Black universities cannot be dismissed. Nor can the role of the Black Churches where the pastor might have a doctorate in divinity. The overwhelming majority of Mexican Americans were first-generation college students. Some their parents came from rural areas where patriarchal attitudes prevailed. It would take a generation or two to shed them.

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