Notes

Introduction

1. The concept of testimonio, elaborated by the Latina Feminist Group (2001), will be explained more fully in chapter 5. See Nuñez-Janes and Robledo (2009) for a similar use of testimonio.

2. For a review of these stories, sometimes called “deficit theories,” about Latino families in the educational research literature, see Flores (2005) and Valencia and Solorzano (2004). For further critique of deficit stories about Latino parents, see Villenas and Deyhle (1999), Lopez (2001), and Hurtig and Dyrness (forthcoming).

3. See Kozol (2005), Chapa (2002), and Orfield and Lee (2005b). Latino students are the most segregated minority group in U.S. schools, and they face the highest dropout rates (Chapa 2002; Orfield and Lee 2006). Their segregation is clearly related to their low participation in higher education (Chapa 2002).

4. According to Richard Wood (2002), faith-based organizing is the second-largest social-justice movement in the United States today, after the labor movement. In a national study of faith-based community organizing, Warren (2001) found 133 local and metropolitan-area federations operating in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. The Pacific Institute for Community Organizations (PICO) is one of four major national networks linking these federations.

5. Data from 2000. The Academic Performance Index is a statewide ranking assigned to schools based on their performance on statewide standardized tests.

6. These figures represent an early snapshot of teachers who expressed interest in starting new schools, and are not necessarily representative of all teachers who ultimately opened new small schools.

7. Amanda Lashaw (2006) explores the phenomenon of dreaming and the role that it played in the small schools movement.

8. The mothers later named the group Madres Unidas (Mothers United), placing themselves in a long history of mothers organizing in Latin America and the United States.

9. Participatory research as a method and form of activist research will be explained in greater detail in the concluding chapter.

10. In this book I use the term “Latina” rather than “Chicana,” as used by Delgado-Bernal (2006), because the women I worked with, who included immigrants from Central America, did not identify as Chicana.

1. Separate Journeys

1. My translation from the Spanish.

2. We later discussed the book in Madres Unidas, and, at Ofelia’s request, I photocopied passages from my book for all of them to read.

3. The first small school organizing effort in Oakland, which failed.

4. Both teachers and parents participated on a later OCCA trip to visit the small schools in Chicago, but the teacher from UCS who had been on this trip did not mention it in the focus group.

2. Baudelia’s Leadership

1. The Request for Proposals for new small schools was described in the Introduction.

2. All quotes in English are my translation from the Spanish, unless otherwise indicated.

3. She later gave me a copy of this. Out of respect for her words I have included both the original Spanish and my English translation of her statement.

4. Baudelia’s response to the RFP, question 5.2; my translation from the Spanish.

3. Contested Community

1. For more information, see Wood (2002).

2. Ibid., 31.

3. “Why Immigrants Select Oakland,” Oakland Tribune, March 25, 2002.

4. Gregory uses these terms to describe the managing of citizen participation in an urban development project by the Port Authority of New York. See Apple (1996) for a discussion of similar processes in education.

5. In addition to Valenzuela (1999), see Delgado-Gaitán 2001; Valdés 1996. Bruce Fuller (2007) provides a review of the literature on Latino parent socialization practices, highlighting several studies that found this meaning of educación in Latino communities.

6. There is some research supporting this; see Lareau (1989) and Lewis and Forman (2002).

4. The Good Parent, the Angry Parent, and Other Controlling Images

1. Findings from this interview are discussed in chapter 1.

2. Although the Madres invited parents they knew who had been involved since the beginning, they also invited parents who were suggested to them by teachers. Getting parents to participate in focus groups proved to be an unexpected challenge, and the groups were ultimately composed of those parents who were willing and able to attend.

3. Pseudonym for a new small middle school that did not have a site for the following year.

4. The district’s required reading program, phonics-based and highly scripted.

5. See Wood (2002) for an explanation of this organizing model.

5. Ofelia’s Kitchen

1. La Virgen de Guadalupe is the patron saint of the Americas. Latinos from around the world make pilgrimages to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, where, according to Catholic teaching, the Virgin first appeared to an indigenous man. La Virgen de Guadalupe has become highly significant in Latino Catholic identity.

2. See Solorzano and Yosso 2001 and Yosso 2006 for a discussion of counter-spaces in the context of Chicana students in the university setting.

3. Michelle Fine, “Contesting Injustice/Insisting on Human Rights: Participatory Action Research by and for Youth,” keynote address given at Crossroads II: Community-based Collaborative Research for Social Justice, Hartford, Connecticut, June 8, 2007.

6. En Confianza

1. See also Chela Sandoval’s (2000) analysis of Frantz Fanon’s work, describing the methodology of the oppressed as “the bursting of the self and its re-formation” (129).

2. See Wood (2002) and Warren and Wood (2001) for a lengthy description of the organizing model.

3. BACEE job description for school change facilitators, from the BACEE Web site.

4. The UCS student population at this time was 76 percent Latino, 10 percent African American, 10 percent Asian, and less than 2 percent white.

5. I have reproduced the poem, with Carmen’s permission, at the end of this chapter.

6. My translation from her Spanish, as are all excerpts from here on.

7. Samuel, whose daughter was then in fifth grade and would soon graduate, was no longer a candidate.

8. “Latino Majority Arrives—among State’s Babies,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2003.

9. See Anyon 1997 and 2005 for a description of how political and economic forces shaping the city impact urban schooling.

Conclusion

1. Checker, Vine, and Wali (2010). See Hale (2006, 2008) and Speed (2006) for a succinct review of the roots of activist research in anthropology.

2. For some examples, see Lipman 2005; Foley and Valenzuela 2005; Emihovich 2005; González 2005; Weis and Fine 2000; Nygreen 2006.

3. Revised mission statement, bylaws, Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE), May 2007. Available at http://www.aaanet.org/sections/cae/aboutcae.html. CAE is a subsection of the American Anthropological Association.

4. See the introduction to Hale’s edited volume for further elaboration of the ways in which activist scholarship is “a privileged source of theoretical innovation” (Hale 2008, 19).

5. In addition to Hale (2006), see Nygreen 2006; Lipman 2005; González 2005.

6. Bell hooks (1989, 1990) wrote especially eloquently about this, critiquing blacks who sought to reverse the poles of domination but not its logic.