Reconceptualizing the Teaching of Mexican American Contributions in U.S. History: A Case Study on Mendez v. Westminster.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This research considers how Mexican American history becomes part of the curricular canon, and what their inclusion tells us about popular conceptions of Mexican Americans. At a time of increasing presence of Latina/o students in K-12 classrooms, it is important to consider how we depict their experiences in U.S. history. To address this concern, this research is comprised of two interrelated studies regarding Mendez v. Westminster, a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation. The first study considers how high school curricular materials frame the Mendez narrative and the role they play in how students construct the historical significance of the Mendez case. I argue that Mexican American inclusion into the U.S. history curriculum is contingent on their story being analogous to the Black experience. Mendez is taught as if it were Brown v. Board of Education but with protagonists of a different skin color. Consequently, students learn a linear story of racial progress, shorn of nuance and erasing the variegated experiences of Mexican Americans and other people of color. The second study is based on a Mendez curricular intervention. Through a combination of primary and secondary sources, students learned about Mexican Americans' claim to legal Whiteness to gain access to better schools. The curriculum also highlighted how the Mendez decision upheld existing racial school segregation and language-based segregation. The findings suggest that there is value in using historical inquiry to help students evaluate evidence that focuses on anti-essentialist content that aims to avoid reductive notions of race/ethnicity that assumes that all people of color are the same. The findings also revealed that students' understanding of how racial categories, racial constructs, and White privilege function in the present allowed them to empathize with Mexican Americans in the 1940s who identified as legally White to gain access to better schools. Yet, when it came to language segregation, students' present understanding of language education interfered in them understanding that language segregation was a proxy for racial/ethnic segregation. Thus, Mexican Americans, and other Latinas/os may see history through multiple lenses: One as a racialized group that identifies with other historically disenfranchised people of color; and another, an English dominant group that does not align itself with language minorities or racialized linguistic discrimination. Collectively, these manuscripts are part of a broader research agenda that aims to challenge the education field to rethink diversity in a way that is more inclusive of Latinas/os and goes beyond thinking about race relations as a Black-White binary.