In "The Other American Dilemma," Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson examine the experiences of Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Hispanos/as in their schools and communities between 1912 and 1953. Drawing from the Mexican Archives located in Mexico City and by venturing outside of the Southwest, their examinations of specific…

Typically, when a community's historical materials encounter a large academic library's archives, the engagement is transactional: they sign forms, they hand over their archives, and we assure them that their materials will be valued by researchers. These procedures make assumptions about comfort with gift agreements (what if communities seek…

Claiming that free speech is dying on American campuses, a conservative think tank has led an effort to push states to adopt a model bill that, in the name of defending campus free speech, risks undermining it. This report seeks to understand the context and content of the "campus free-speech" movement, to track its influence within…

This research argues that the transatlantic environment of Louisiana and the creolization process that was a part of that environment in the early nineteenth century were instrumental in fostering a public democratic culture which developed outside of formal education and which was not contingent upon legal realities and political rights. It…

Although considerable work has been done around the supposed successes and failures of education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, concerns about the public/private qualities of new policies are often not discussed explicitly. In kind, this article serves to investigate theoretical conceptions of the public as they relate to education while…

Racial equality and racial equity in U.S. education has been elusive although decades of education reform have them as goals. Current discourse advocate colorblind and post-racial solutions to racial inequality and racial inequity in education; these solutions implicate presentism, a view that exclusively circumscribes the existence of present-day…

Long before Katrina, the South functioned in the social imaginary to contain racism and poverty, and the Mason-Dixon acts then in the national imagination as a buffer to safeguard the nation from the taint of such undemocratic realities. More and more, in many countries of America, a system known as "neoliberalism" prevails; based on a…

In cities across the United States, working-class communities of color find themselves struggling against inequities deepened by state disinvestment. Students at the Center--a writing initiative based in several public high schools in New Orleans over the last decade--has been a part of this struggle and embraces a pedagogy rooted in the voices,…