The Educational Welcome Of Latinos In The New South

This is the tale of the origin, emergence, and transformation of an unorthodox binational partnership, the Georgia Project, that brought a Mexican university to aid a Georgia school district that suddenly found itself hosting thousands of Latino newcomers. It is also the tale of educational leaders evolving understandings of what they needed to do. This book tells the particular story of the Georgia Project, a partnership initiated between leading citizens, a school district, and a Mexican university to help Dalton, Georgia, the Carpet Capital of the World as it suddenly found itself host to the first majority Latino school district in Georgia. The book focuses on the evolving understandings of six early leders of this initiative and their resultant actions. It tries to carefully situate these particular actors within the larger swirl of conflicting scripts and public sphere messages regarding who Latino newcomers are, what they want and merited, and how the community should respond.

This book highlights an underexplored dimension of Latino education: how sincerely intentioned educational leaders, four Americans and two Mexicans, understood and thus acted and reacted to the challenge of a school district's rapid Latinization.

This is the tale of the origin, emergence, and transformation of an unorthodox binational partnership, the Georgia Project, that brought a Mexican university to aid a Georgia school district that suddenly found itself hosting thousands of Latino newcomers. It is also the tale of educational leaders evolving understandings of what they needed to do. This book tells the particular story of the Georgia Project, a partnership initiated between leading citizens, a school district, and a Mexican university to help Dalton, Georgia, the Carpet Capital of the World as it suddenly found itself host to the first majority Latino school district in Georgia. The book focuses on the evolving understandings of six early leders of this initiative and their resultant actions. It tries to carefully situate these particular actors within the larger swirl of conflicting scripts and public sphere messages regarding who Latino newcomers are, what they want and merited, and how the community should respond.

The Latino population in the South has more than doubled over the past decade. The mass migration of Latin Americans to the U.S. South has led to profound changes in the social, economic, and cultural life of the region and inaugurated a new era in southern history. This multidisciplinary collection of essays, written by U.S. and Mexican scholars, explores these transformations in rural, urban, and suburban areas of the South. Using a range of different methodologies and approaches, the contributors present in-depth analyses of how immigration from Mexico and Central and South America is changing the South and how immigrants are adapting to the southern context. Among the book’s central themes are the social and economic impact of immigration, the resulting shifts in regional culture, new racial dynamics, immigrant incorporation and place-making, and diverse southern responses to Latino newcomers. Various chapters explore ethnic and racial tensions among poultry workers in rural Mississippi and forestry workers in Alabama; the “Mexicanization” of the urban landscape in Dalton, Georgia; the costs and benefits of Latino labor in North Carolina; the challenges of living in transnational families; immigrant religious practice and community building in metropolitan Atlanta; and the creation of Latino spaces in rural and urban South Carolina and Georgia.

For most of US history, most of America’s Latino population has lived in nine states—California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Florida, New Jersey, and New York. It follows that most education research that considered the experiences of Latino families with US schools came from these same states. But in the last 30 years Latinos have been resettling across the US, attending schools, and creating new patterns of inter-ethnic interaction in educational settings. Much of this interaction with this New Latino Diaspora has been initially tentative and improvisational, but too often it has left intact the patterns of lower educational success that have prevailed in the traditional Latino diaspora. Revisiting Education in the New Latino Diaspora is an extensive update, with all new material, of the groundbreaking volume Education in the New Latino Diaspora (Ablex Publishing) that these same editors produced in 2002. This volume consciously includes a number of junior scholars (e.g., C. Allen Lynn, Soria Colomer, Amanda Morales, Rebecca Lowenhaupt, Adam Sawyer) and more established ones (Frances Contreras, Jason Irizarry, Socorro Herrera, Linda Harklau) as it considers empirical cases from Washington State to Georgia, from the Mid-Atlantic to the Great Plains, where rural, suburban, and urban communities start their second or third decades of responding to a previously unprecedented growth in newcomer Latino populations. With excuses of surprise and improvisational strategies less persuasive as Latino newcomer populations become less new, this volume considers the persistence, the anomie, and pragmatism of Latino newcomers on the one hand, with the variously enlightened, paternalistic, dismissive, and xenophobic responses of educators and education systems on the other. With foci as personal as accounts of growing up as an adoptee in a mixed race family and the testimonio of a ‘successful’ undocumented college graduate to the macro scale of examining state-level education policies and with an age range from early childhood education to the university level, this volume insists that the worlds of education research and migration studies can both gain from considering the educational responses in the last two decades to the ‘newish’ Latino presence in the 41 U.S. states that have not long been the home to large, wellestablished Latino populations, but that now enroll 2.5 million Latino students in K-12 alone. "Timely and compelling, Revisiting Education in the NLD offers new insight into the Latino Diaspora in the US just as the discussions regarding immigration policy, bilingual education, and immigrant rights are gaining steam. Drawing from a variety of perspectives, contributing authors interrogate the very concept of the diaspora. The wide range of research in this volume thoughtfully illustrates the nuanced phenomena and provides rich descriptions of complex situations. No longer a simple question of immigration, the book considers language and legal status in schools, international adoption, teacher preparation, and the relationships between established and relatively new Latino communities in a variety of contexts. Comprised of rich, thoughtful research Revisiting Education provides a fascinating window into the context of Latino reception nationwide. ~ Rebecca M. Callahan, Associate Professor - University of Texas-Austin As the leader of a 10-years-and-counting research study in Mexico that has identified and interviewed transnationally mobile students with prior experience in U.S. schools, I can affirm that in addition to students with backgrounds in California, Arizona, Texas, and Colorado, migration links now join schools in Georgia, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Alabama, etc. to schools in Mexico. For that reason and many others I am excited to see this far-ranging, interdisciplinary, new text that considers policy implementation through lenses as different as teacher preparation, Latino adoption into culturally mixed families, the fate of Latino newcomers in 'low density' districts where there are few like them, and the misuse of Spanish teachers as interpreters. This is an relevant book for American educators and scholars, but also for readers beyond U.S. borders. Hamann, Wortham, Murillo, and their contributors should be celebrated for this fine new collection. ~ Dr. Víctor Zúñiga, Dean of Research and Extension, Universidad de Monterrey

Providing a comprehensive review of rigorous, innovative, and critical scholarship relevant to educational issues which impact Latinos, this Handbook captures the field at this point in time. Its unique purpose and function is to profile the scope and terrain of academic inquiry on Latinos and education. Presenting the most significant and potentially influential work in the field in terms of its contributions to research, to professional practice, and to the emergence of related interdisciplinary studies and theory, the volume is organized around five themes: history, theory, and methodology policies and politics language and culture teaching and learning resources and information. The Handbook of Latinos and Education is a must-have resource for educational researchers, graduate students, teacher educators, and the broad spectrum of individuals, groups, agencies, organizations and institutions sharing a common interest in and commitment to the educational issues that impact Latinos.

Now in its second edition, this Handbook offers a comprehensive review of rigorous, innovative, and critical scholarship profiling the scope and terrain of academic inquiry on Latinos and education. Presenting the most significant and potentially influential work in the field in terms of its contributions to research, to professional practice, and to the emergence of related interdisciplinary studies and theory, the volume is now organized around four tighter key themes of history, theory, and methodology; policies and politics; language and culture; teaching and learning. New chapters broaden the scope of theoretical lenses to include intersectionality, as well as coverage of dual language education, discussion around the Latinx, and other recent updates to the field. The Handbook of Latinos and Education is a must-have resource for educational researchers; graduate students; teacher educators; and the broad spectrum of individuals, groups, agencies, organizations, and institutions that share a common interest in and commitment to the educational issues that impact Latinos.

This volume brings together the latest research and scholarship on Latinos in the United States. This book is special in terms of the broad scope of topics covered and methodologies employed in pursuit of knowledge about Latino students. This collection is also unique in that it features the work of more than a dozen Latino scholars—both early-careerand established—applying their research expertise to investigate and elucidate the educational experiences of Latinos in the United States. The themes that are discussed in the chapters of The Education of the Hispanic Population: Selected Essays, reflect the wide-ranging discussions that are occurring in schools and school districts across the country and issues that are being carefully investigated by researchers who are committed to contributing thoughtful and meaningful scholarship of consequence for improving conditions for Latino youth.