:Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality.(Critical America.)

Abstract

In this book Richard R. Valencia effectively weaves together a wide variety of large and small, famous and forgotten, Chicano legal challenges to educational discrimination and ties the entire corpus of activism around the concept of critical race theory. This book is successful as a reference work and as a synthesis of critical race scholarship on the varied, confusing tangle of Mexican American educational litigation. Valencia devotes specific chapters to the somewhat overlapping areas of segregation, funding, special education, bilingual education, school closures, undocumented students, higher education, and high-stakes testing. Unsurprisingly, the largest topic is school segregation. Valencia begins with the recent discovery of the Romo v. Laird (1925) case in Arizona, the first Mexican American anti-segregation lawsuit. He also insightfully examines the similarities between the Mexican American and African American civil rights movements, noting that educator Marie Hughes's pedagogical and psychological testimony in the landmark Mendez v. Westminster (1946) case of California “paralleled the arguments that were to be made later by Dr. Kenneth Clark in the Brown case” (p. 27). Valencia demonstrates that the racializing power of the law and the judiciary kept both civil rights movements from more neatly converging in this period. For example, a federal appeals court explicitly refused the efforts of both civil rights movements to apply the Mendez case to Plessy v. Ferguson in a way that would perhaps have ushered a Brown-like decision a decade earlier.