The Chicana O X Dream Hope Resistance And Educational Success

Based on interview data, life testimonios, and Chicana feminist theories, The Chicana/o/x Dream profiles first-generation, Mexican-descent college students who have overcome adversity by utilizing various forms of cultural capital to power their academic success. While college enrollment rates for Chicana/o/x students have steadily increased over the last decade, this cohort still faces significant barriers to academic achievement, including minimal information about college and limited access to the kind of preparation and advising that will help them get there. As a result, Chicana/o/x students maintain stubbornly low four-year completion rates. Against this backdrop, Gilberto Q. Conchas and Nancy Acevedo address the mechanisms that shape the achievement, aspirations, and expectations of Chicana/o/x students who grew up in marginalized communities and unequal school contexts and share success stories about this growing population of students. Conchas and Acevedo elevate the voices of students at a research university and in the community college sector to reveal important issues and factors impacting and shaping the students' academic journeys. The college-age men and women in the narratives evince hope, resistance, and empowerment in the face of marginalization, anti-immigration sentiment, poverty, and an education system that too often reinforces deficit-minded stereotypes. The authors critique the educational policies and practices that systematically fail to champion Chicana/o/x success and examine the use of community cultural wealth that supports US-born and US immigrant students of Mexican descent to make their achievement possible. In so doing, the authors look toward the future by highlighting the actions that Chicana/o/x students take in creating bridges between K-12 to college and between their communities and higher education. The Chicana/o/x Dream helps define the heart and soul of tomorrow's America and elucidates how Chicana/o/x college students maintain hope, enact resistance, and succeed against injustice. The book offers a call to action to K-20 educators and administrators to develop better supports to foster the success of Mexican-descent students.

This book chronicles a 10-year journey to develop and sustain Adelante, a university-school-community partnership designed specifically to address public education’s failure to meet the needs of students of color, particularly Chicana/o students. The authors examine the persistent barriers, mistakes, challenges, and successes that emerged in their community-based partnership with elementary school students, college students, teachers, parents, and educational leaders. Intertwining critical race theories with Chicana feminist theories, they propose a “critical race feminista praxis” and provide real-world examples of what this praxis can look like in the context of a racialized, gendered, and colonial landscape. The book offers practical advice and theoretical insight to those interested in disrupting pervasive inequities that shape the (mis)education of marginalized students. Book Features: Fills a void about how to engage in activist scholarship by describing concrete strategies and practices employed by the authors. Offers theoretical contributions through the braiding together of critical race and Chicana feminist theories. Proposes a partnership model for working with communities of color that promotes pathways to higher education. “Theoretically cutting-edge and with practical on-the-ground application, Transforming Educational Pathways is a brilliant example of how university–school–community collaborations can be reshaped into transformative praxis in the education of Chicanx, Latinx students. The balanced combination of community-engaged work and scholar-activist research in this groundbreaking book powerfully move us further in the spiritual journey of reimagining and transforming the inequities of educational institutions for Chicanx, Latinx students and their families and communities.” —Luis Urrieta, professor, The University of Texas at Austin “Delgado Bernal and Aleman start and end with the transformative idea that all students should be expected to attend college from their earliest experiences in public education—kindergarten. By challenging the deficit notions surrounding Chicana/o students and their communities, the authors provide the most compelling asset-based and theoretically grounded university–community partnership program I’ve seen in the K–8 sector.” —Daniel G. Solorzano, professor, University of California, Los Angeles “Transforming Educational Pathways for Chicana/o Students is a compelling and intimate account of the development of Adelante, an innovative university–school partnership. It is also an inspiring story of the impact of culturally affirming and anticolonial education on Latina/o children and their teachers, university student mentors, and parents. The process of changing deficit-based school culture is a difficult one, as the book shows. Yet, drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s feminist theorizing, Delgado Bernal and Alemán offer a theory of school change where collisions, difficult solidarities, and transformative moments constitute a praxis of hope, imagination, and social justice.” —Sofia Villenas, professor, Cornell University

Fueled largely by significant increases in the Latino population, the racial, ethnic, and linguistic texture of the United States is changing rapidly. Nowhere is this 'Latinisation' of America more evident than in schools. The dramatic population growth among Latinos in the United States has not been accompanied by gains in academic achievement. Estimates suggest that approximately half of Latino students fail to complete high school, and few enroll in and complete college. The Latinization of U.S. Schools centres on the voices of Latino youth. It examines how the students themselves make meaning of the policies and practices within schools. The student voices expose an inequitable opportunity structure that results in depressed academic performance for many Latino youth. Each chapter concludes with empirically based recommendations for educators seeking to improve their practice with Latino youth, stemming from a multiyear participatory action research project conducted by Irizarry and the student contributors to the text.

Winner of the 2000 Outstanding Book Award presented by the American Educational Research Association Winner of the 2001 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award Honorable Mention, 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Subtractive Schooling provides a framework for understanding the patterns of immigrant achievement and U.S.-born underachievement frequently noted in the literature and observed by the author in her ethnographic account of regular-track youth attending a comprehensive, virtually all-Mexican, inner-city high school in Houston. Valenzuela argues that schools subtract resources from youth in two major ways: firstly by dismissing their definition of education and secondly, through assimilationist policies and practices that minimize their culture and language. A key consequence is the erosion of students' social capital evident in the absence of academically oriented networks among acculturated, U.S.-born youth.

"This book comprehensively but succinctly tells the story of LatCrit's emergence and sustainable presence as a scholarly and activist community within and beyond the US legal academy, finding its place alongside such other schools of critical legal knowledge as Feminist Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory that aim to combust social and legal transformative change"--

"This memoir's beauty is in its fierce intimacy." --Roy Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother’s decline, and also tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora. Native Country of the Heart: AMemoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California’s Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation. As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. As Moraga charts her mother’s journey—from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer’s—she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother’s memory fails, Moraga is driven to unearth forgotten remnants of a U.S. Mexican diaspora, its indigenous origins, and an American story of cultural loss. Poetically wrought and filled with insight into intergenerational trauma, Native Country of the Heart is a reckoning with white American history and a piercing love letter from a fearless daughter to the mother she will never lose.

Examines, from various perspectives, the school failure and success of Chicano students. The contributors include specialists in cultural and educational anthropology, bilingual and special education, educational history, developmental psychology.

A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying. Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education—the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the “dropout”) and value (the “graduate”)—emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making. Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an “alter-university” movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.