Background/Context: School segregation scholarship underlines that litigation challenging the segregation of Mexican American students in Texas schools stressed their legal racial identity as white. "The other white race strategy," as scholars call it, granted Mexican Americans the right to access resources designated for the country's…

Mexican Americans have a long history in the struggle to end school segregation and achieve educational equality. Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson trace that history through a series of court cases that show how their fight for desegregation both intersects with and differs from the more well-known struggle of Black Americans. In some cases, Mexican…

Sixty-five years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the federal and judicial role in school desegregation has declined. In a more difficult political and legal environment, it has fallen on school districts to develop and implement voluntary integration plans through diversity-minded student assignment…

In this study, I employ geospatial techniques to assess the impact of school attendance zone "gerrymandering" on the racial/ethnic segregation of schools, using a large national sample of 15,290 attendance zones in 663 districts. I estimate the effect of gerrymandering on school diversity and school district segregation by comparing the…

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…

"Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) was a landmark decision that was the result of decades of efforts by grassroots activists and civil rights organizations to end legalized segregation. A less well-known effort challenged the extralegal segregation of Mexican American students in the Southwest. I combine original research and research…

This article analyzes the legal classification of Mexican Americans as "other white" as argued in a number of critical court cases that beginning in the 1930s up to the 1970s attempted to desegregate public schools in Texas. Since the Texas constitution declared school segregation as being only for "colored children," Mexican…

Social prejudice by Texas-Anglo society as reflected by politicians and administrators resulted in a segregated school system. However, the Mexican community never passively accepted discrimination in the schools. The American G.I. Forum's records and the action of the World War II generation indicate that Mexicans have long struggled to acquire…

Contains extracts from a school segregation case involving whether Mexican-Americans constitute an identifiable ethnic group in desegregation proceedings, which question was decided in the affirmative. (DM)

This report is about the changing patterns of segregation in American public schools through the 2003-2004 school year. It begins by examining the transformation of racial composition in the nation's schools, the dynamic patterns of segregation and desegregation of all racial groups in regions, states, and districts by using data from 1968 until…

Contests the State of Texas argument in the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) case that historical discrimination against African Americans and Mexican Americans is unrelated to their TAAS outcomes. Examines contemporary de facto school segregation, distribution of substandard teachers, and the relationship of these factors to student…

Actually, the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision of the U.S. Supreme Court descended upon this nation as a way of checking the pervasive injustice rendered by public educational institutions on people of color, particularly African Americans. The injustices resulted from laws, regulations and other public policies promulgated or…

The history of San Felipe School District (Texas), 1894-1971, depicts a situation in which Mexican Americans had control of local schools. Established in the Mexican "barrio" of the racially divided border town of Del Rio, San Felipe resisted annexation to the Anglo school district and became an independent school district in 1929.…

Historical studies have tended to take a simplistic view of minority groups as passive victims of an oppressive and racist public school system. This book looks at Mexican Americans as active agents in history and documents their quest for educational equality in Texas--a state notorious for its record of inferior and separate schooling for…