This policy brief is based on the edited book "The Magic Key: The Educational Journey of Mexican Americans from K-12 to College and Beyond" (Zambrana & Hurtado, 2015a), which focuses on the experiences of Mexican Americans in education. Drawing from an interdisciplinary corpus of work, the authors move beyond the rhetoric of progress and engage intersectional analytic frameworks. They explore how historical events and consequent practices and policies depleted the accumulation of human capital and contributed to disinvestments in Mexican American communities. New findings are introduced that create more dynamic views of--and new thinking about--Mexican American educational trajectories. The authors also proffer strategies of resistance that Mexican Americans employ to overcome pernicious stereotypes and prejudicial barriers to educational achievement. Overall this brief seeks to improve the understanding of structural inequality in educational pathways for Mexican Americans; challenge the deficit model approach as an explanatory research paradigm; and call for ways to institutionalize effective educational policies and practices. [For Issue No. 4, see ED571018.]