Background/Context: Since 2005, critical race theory (CRT) scholars have crafted educational pipelines that compare educational attainment across racial groups in the United States. These visual models offer concise pictorial narratives about the discrepancies that fall along racial lines, particularly the underperformance of Chicana/o/x students…

This essay recounts the efforts by various groups throughout Texas with a special emphasis on the Rio Grande Valley to implement Mexican American Studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. We offer a historical timeline of events that demonstrates how the Mexican American Studies course came into existence. We also detail the way in which…

This essay contributes to the growing literature on Mexican American Studies in K-12 within the broader field of Ethnic Studies. While most of the literature on the movement for Ethnic Studies within Texas and across the nation mainly focuses on the impact of Ethnic Studies courses on students' academic success, this essay highlights a…

English learners are best supported when they receive culturally relevant content-area instruction in their first language. Numerous studies (e.g., Lindholm-Leary 2001) support this approach, and bilingual and dual language teachers in the community of Austin, Texas, have called for curricular resources. In response, a group of researchers,…

This case study examined the trials and tribulations a predominantly Mexican-American community in South Texas went through to obtain higher education opportunities for its residents. This study focuses on the "LULAC v. Richards" lawsuit and the South Texas Border Initiative. In 1987, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational…

Before Heman Sweatt, an African-American from Houston, won his lawsuit to attend the University of Texas (UT) School of Law, Carlos Cadena, a Mexican-American from San Antonio, was among its brightest students. Cadena graduated summa cum laude from the law school in 1940, a decade before Sweatt's lawsuit forced UT to open its graduate and…

This biographical study of Dr. George I. Sanchez, a leading Mexican American educator, intellectual, and activist from the 1930s through the 1960s, opens up the idea of compensatory education--the prevalent notion of the 1960s that schools use specialized instructional programs to combat the alleged cultural deprivation of some children,…

This single-case study utilized the data from a successful career and technical education (CTE) program at a public high school in southwest Texas. The CTE program selected addresses the needs of an at-risk student population in a public school district in southwest Texas whose student population was primarily Mexican American. The opportunity to…

The author questions the continued usefulness of inside/outside as a liberatory metaphor, particularly for Latino/a students, who experience that classroom quite differently from the privileged way that the author, their Anglo teacher, does. The author argues that the assumptions of the inside/outside metaphor accentuate the challenges that these…

This article presents a testimony to the late Dr. Thomas P. Carter. Well known for his classic (1970) book, Mexican Americans in School: A History of Educational Neglect, Carter was an activist scholar and pioneer in Mexican American education. His considerable interactions with South Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans served as a…

As a student in the Chicana/o studies program at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), Jesse S. Arrieta decided that her classroom instruction about the culture and history of people of Mexican origin wasn't enough. Arrieta, 27, who graduated from UTEP in 2002 before earning a master's in American history from the University of California,…

In this book Professor Davis illustrates the often unexpected reach of historical research intended originally to fill a knowledge gap. He found a forgotten figure from the past who as a scholar and teacher had contributed significantly to education. Manuel's story warranted attention, but in reconstructing it Professor Davis discovered leads to a…