It is at this level of boundary construction and maintenance that I concentrate much of my ethnographic attention in the following study. In doing so, I attend not only to individual and group-ascribed actions and attitudes but also to the ways institutional routines and interactions between social groups, as they occur within and around schools, have shaped schooling structures, policies, and modes of community-building. This strategy requires ethnographic attention to multiple levels of the schooling process, including (1) district-level politics and policies, (2) the activism of community-based groups around schooling related issues, (3) the attitudes and practices of staff at the school level, (4) the social organization of students within the school, and (5) students’ particular responses to school structures and programs.
The Ethnographic Field Site
The following study takes place in the Pleasanton Valley of California, a rich agricultural basin situated between the mountain foothills and the jagged cliffs of the state’s central coast. The focus of analysis is on the Pleasanton Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), consolidated in 1967, which currently serves two physically separate, residential communities characterized by sharp contrasts in culture, “race,” and socioeconomic status. At the center of Pleasanton Valley is Farmingville, a largely Mexican and Mexican American working-class town of about 50,000 residents (with a median house hold income of $46,500 and per capita income $16,200)14 whose livelihoods have long been tied to the Valley’s rich and productive commercial farmland. Ten miles north on the state highway is Allenstown, a predominantly White, middle-to upper-class professional town of just under 20,000 residents (with a median house hold income of $80,000 and per capita income $41,500) that has been populated largely since the 1950s and serves as a bedroom community for a nearby corporate center and wealthy coastal tourist town.
Historically speaking, Farmingville’s regional reputation as a “Mexican town” is quite recent. It was not until the 1942 passage of California’s Public Law 78, popularly known as the Bracero Program, that thousands of Mexican nationals (mostly single men) were brought to the Valley to work on temporary, low-wage work contracts with agricultural companies. The termination of the Bracero Program in 1965, along with the relatively generous amnesty terms associated with the federal Immigration Act of 1965, supported a large and relatively unregulated in-migration from Mexico. Between 1960 and 1995, Farmingville’s population grew over 130 percent, with Latinos—the vast majority of them Mexican immigrants—representing 97 percent of the new arrivals. As a percentage of the town’s population, Latinos increased from less than 15 percent in 1960 to nearly 75 percent by 2000. Over the same time period, the enrollment of Latino students in PVUSD schools grew from under 8 percent to over 70 percent.
The sociocultural transformations that reshaped Farmingville in the post-World War II period were not equally manifest in Allenstown, due in large degree to Allenstown’s higher real estate values, its relative distance from the center of agricultural production and employment, and its history of active political resistance to low-income residential development that might have attracted working-class Mexican-descent populations. As an unincorporated area without a city council or planning commission, Allenstown politics have long been dominated by homeowner associations (HOAs) representing the coastal subdivisions, and leaders have traditionally included those heavily invested in local real estate and interested in preserving desirable rural characteristics that would keep land values high. This long-established de facto private residential government has continued to yield a political leadership in Allenstown that is conservative and isolationist, despite what would appear to be growing political heterogeneity among its residents.
Since the PVUSD was consolidated in the late 1960s, community leaders in Allenstown have successfully repelled a series of state and federal mandates, continuing through the mid-1990s, that have sought to integrate working-class, Mexican-descent children from Farmingville with the predominantly White, middle-class children from the Allenstown area. In spite of this active resistance, some level of school desegregation has been achieved. This resulted not from capitulation to legal mandates, but as a consequence of dire overcrowding at Farmingville’s only comprehensive high school in the late 1980s. This lack of classroom space in Farmingville, combined with the district’s inability to secure public bond support for the construction of a new high school, compelled the district to begin a busing arrangement that would send an increasing number of Mexican-descent students from Farmingville to Allenstown High School. By the mid-1990s, Allenstown High held the status as the district’s only truly racially mixed school, with Mexican-descent youth from Farmingville constituting nearly half the school’s 2,000 students. Chapters 2, 3, and 6 of this book provide a deeper look at the highly politicized experience of integration at Allenstown High from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s.
In its current form, the PVUSD is a predominantly bi-modal school system (72 percent Mexican American/25 percent White),15 with nearly 18,000 students enrolled, making it one of the largest K-12 districts in northern California. Nearly 50 percent of the district’s students are identified as having limited English proficiency, and approximately 30 percent are the children of migrant farm worker families.
Research Engagements and Methods
My research experience in the PVUSD began in the late 1990s as a graduate student researcher in a larger, longitudinal study of peer relationships among Mexican-descent and European American students at Allenstown High School.16 Aptly named the “Peers Project,” the research was designed to investigate the ways in which peer groups and networks at the high school mediated Mexican American and Euro-American students’ academic orientations, engagement, and relative participation in schooling activities. In three years as a lead researcher at the high school site, I worked with a team of ethnographic researchers that included, over time, ten undergraduate students, four Master’s-level graduate students, and two postdoctoral fellows. Nearly all the researchers were bilingual, including myself, and a smaller number were first- or second-generation Mexican immigrants themselves.
The collaborative, cohort-based nature of the Peers Project allowed me the unique opportunity to participate in ongoing critical discussions with a diverse group of colleagues regarding our separate (but often overlapping) field experiences at the school, including constant dialogue about our evolving relationships with students, teachers, and parents. This sense of collegiality and deep collaboration was instrumental in helping me compile the diverse, poignant, and profoundly revealing stories of students, teachers, parents, and community activists that appear in this book. The Peers Project yielded a massive archive of ethnographic material that included hundreds of transcribed, semistructured individual and focus group interviews with both White and Mexican-descent students (including a representative sampling of first-, second-, and third-generation Mexican-descent students), teachers and support staff, and parents (the latter interviewed in visits to students’ homes). Beyond my own field notes and individual/focus group interviews, I had access to all my colleagues’ ethnographic materials as well. These included thousands of pages of field notes chronicling each researcher’s interactions, conversations, and observations with students and focal peer groups across the campus.
I maintained an everyday presence at Allenstown High for the entirety of three academic years, working closely with the office of the Migrant Education Program (MEP), the Advancement via Individual Determination (AVID) program, and the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classrooms. I first served as a class assistant and student mentor in the ESL classrooms, after which I began shadowing a smaller group of ESL students who elected to enroll in the AVID classes. Since students in both the AVID and ESL programs tended to utilize the social and academic support services offered by the Office of Migrant Education at Allenstown High, I began to involve myself daily in tutoring sessions and social gatherings taking place there. Outside these formal institutional contexts, I interacted daily with smaller groups of students in the social spaces where they gathered between classes, before and after school, and during lunch periods.
To the extent that I was able to establish deeper, trusting relationships with some of