Mia, a female junior from Allenstown, and one of three African American students at the school, expressed her perspective on the segregated campus environment in the following way:
It [Allenstown High] is really separated. Like in the “I” building, there’s the Hispanic people. Over there is a bunch of “Skaters” . . . then over here is the weird [White] people who wear scary clothes and pierce everything. And then over—they aren’t “Mexicans”—there’s a few Hispanic people, but they would be considered “sell-outs” because they don’t speak Spanish and they are just Hispanic ethnicity. It’s all separated like that. Like all my friends who hang out over there by the tree, they’re all White. There’s not really a lot of interracial mixing because there’s only two types of races, that’s White and Hispanic.
These student narratives highlight the complex, disturbingly essentialized, and highly oppositional nature of racial and ethnic relations on the AHS campus. High levels of separation and distrust fuel the development of damaging racial co-constructions and stereotypes, to the point that even students who refuse to align themselves with one category or the other risk being criticized or ostracized by peers from either “side.” For example, an assistant principal admitted, “even those Mexican students who have been able to cross over and join some of the White-dominated clubs and friendship groups on the campus have to be okay with being White.” By this, she referred to their willingness to assimilate to styles, norms, and behaviors thought to be characteristic of White students (English language, dress, similar preferences for music, leisure activities, etc.) and to minimize expression or behaviors that might be associated with “Mexican-ness,” including regular associations with other groups of Mexican-descent students on campus.
One such a “border crosser” was Veronica, a 1.5 generation (one parent foreign-born and the other U.S.- born) Mexican immigrant female from Farmingville who, during my second year of research, was elected vice president of her sophomore class. Asked how she ended up participating in student government despite the fact that so few Latino students were involved in the school’s mainstream activities, she spoke of the difficult transformation she had to make after arriving at the high school from Farmingville:
Well, last year, at the beginning of my freshman year, me and my best friend from Rolling Meadows [a “feeder” middle school located in Farmingville] didn’t know anybody. So we got to know new people and we like, left, we kind of like stayed away from our old friends. We moved on and we met new people. [emphasis added]
CH: Why did you feel you had to leave your middle school friends to get involved in activities here?
V: Well, when we came, we did actually hang out with them. But I would want to go to meetings and stuff and they’d be like, “We don’t want to go.” And I’d be, like, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ So we just like slowly kept on getting away, because they never wanted to do anything.
CH: How come they didn’t like to do that stuff?
V: They were just—well, they were Mexican so, it’s like, I don’t know. Like those girls that I used to hang around with are still with the same crowd. And it’s like, we moved on. And they see how much I’ve improved and stuff, and I still say Hi and everything. But they’re still with the same friends from Rolling Meadows.
For Veronica, the route to engagement and belonging at Allenstown High meant “staying away” from her former Farmingville friends. Her explanation for why they failed to get involved in school activities—because “they were just, they were Mexican”—suggests a skewed social orientation as well as the internalization of a damaging stereotype about her ethnic peers, leaving her to feel that she had to “get away” by “leaving” them in order to “improve” herself. Asked if she felt comfortable and enjoyed being at Allenstown High, Veronica immediately nodded in excitement and smiled: “Yes. It’s cool. I love it! I ran for vice president and I won. I know a lot of people [now]. So every day is like—I want to come to school every day in the morning!”
Veronica’s story of disassociation above, along with the wider sampling of student narratives collected through the Peers Project research, suggest the way that being “White” or “Mexican” in the school is marked by particular statuses, where being “White” or “American” tends to be associated with enfranchisement (inhabiting central spaces and predominating in high-status school contexts and activities) and entitlement (defining and directing these activities), while being “Mexican” seems to signal disenfranchisement (less involvement or active participation in high-status contexts and activities) and marginality (a sense of not-belonging and a feeling of unequal status in curricular and co-curricular schooling activities). In other words, local beliefs about what it means to be “Mexican” or “White” are linked not simply to skin color or national origin, but to assimilationist expectations and students’ willingness—or in some cases, ability—to demonstrate behavioral norms that signal their affiliation with either “Americanness” (defined by norms signaling “White” status) or “Mexican-ness.” While school officials acknowledge these dynamics and find them troublesome, many seem as mystified by the situation as anything. Ultimately, their lack of intentionality and initiative to transform the dynamics on the campus has ensured that they have remained somewhat normal and natural among students.
The “nature” of student social relations at AHS plays a significant role in structuring the systematic separation of White and Mexican-descent students in nearly all contexts of the school. Mexican-descent students are highly underrepresented in the school’s many curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities, including clubs and sports (with a few exceptions), the frequent student-organized “spirit” activities, and various honors and advanced placement classes. Each of these contexts tends to be dominated, numerically and organizationally, by White students. This underrepresentation has generated negative social and academic consequences for Mexican-descent students, particularly given that active participation in such schooling contexts is known to anchor students to school and connect them to informational and human resources and networks of social capital that aid in social adjustment and facilitate academic success (Gibson and Bejínez 2002; Stanton-Salazar, Vásquez, and Mehan 2000). Given the academic and linguistic needs of many of Hillside High’s Mexican-descent students—with nearly 60 percent classified as Migrant students at the time of the study2—it is precisely the kind of access and participation they need most but, unfortunately, experience the least.
The essentialized and oppositional nature of racial and ethnic differences at Allenstown High—while viewed as relatively immutable by students and nearly impossible to overcome by school staff—are of course neither natural nor inevitable. Nor are the differential levels of school engagement to which they tend, as will be explored more deeply in Chapters 3 and 6. The racial sensibilities that permeate AHS cannot be explained away as the ordinary product of students’ associational preferences, nor as the to-be-expected result of everyday forms of identity construction in secondary schools that function to reproduce broader ethnic and racial distinctions. While the racial and cultural separations that characterize White and Mexican-descent student peer groupings at AHS are given shape in everyday encounters on the campus, they are also deeply historical and rooted in relationships that go far beyond the school context. The very nature of the local racial imaginary is embedded in broader processes of racialization and place-making in the Pleasanton Valley region that, over time, have conditioned social relationships and encounters in such ways as to make possible the kinds of unequal racial and cultural relationships experienced by students at Allenstown High.
The remainder of this chapter engages a broader ethnoracial history of Pleasanton Valley, with primary attention to the patterns of interaction between White and Latino residents. Such a regional politico-historical approach is necessary, I argue, to make sense of the dominant and educationally damaging constructions of racial categories that inform residents’ “racial sensibilities” and serve as frames for interpretation and behavior within and around area schools. Centering attention on the political exercise of community in the region