In this article, the author attempts to enter the charter school dialogue by looking at the new charter school movement through an anti-essentialist social movement and new social movement lens. In the anti-Western new social movement conception there are no set patterns to how movements manifest themselves, or how they were intended to manifest themselves, and local context and activism defined as the agency to act through contentious daily practice is paramount (Holland & Lave, 2001). This article then, theoretically places the intended macro-charter school vision as an essentialist, Western social reform movement in education, but one that has not followed a uniform, easily understood, projected, and coherent model. Its manifestation then, has been that of a new social movement without definite and set patterns of generalizability, focusing on local contexts of activism as daily practice, and exhibiting an abundance of contradictions and paradoxes. Principal amongst the contradictions is that reform is intended to level the playing field, to allow for access, and to ultimately equalize. Although superficially, charter schools have done that, deeper contextual analysis and case studies of charter schools, especially of predominantly White charter schools, reveal differing results. This article focuses on the case of Heritage Charter School (HCS), a predominantly White, rural community charter school. Using the "community school" and "school of choice" rhetoric, members of the Heritage community have managed to keep a predominantly White elementary school open for over one hundred years, even when the Local Education Agency (LEA) closed down their redbrick school building in an effort to consolidate. In effect through the postmodern lens, HCS is and is not a converter charter school. A converter charter school is usually allowed to continue using the old school building by the new charter school. In that sense HCS is not a converter charter school because the LEA refused to let the new school use the old buildings; community members, however, use the rhetoric of heritage to say it is still the same school. Local community activism through contentious daily practices created a new site for the school using the new charter school reform and the claim to "community" school identity. (Contains 7 notes.)