Critical Race Educational History Pedagogical Tools: Designing Chicana/o Education Past and Present in Pasadena, California

• In Event: Critical Race Educational History: Methodological Commitments and Praxis With and for Chicana/o Students and Communities

Abstract

Although there is little scholarship on the racial history of Pasadena, California, key works have identified the legacy of unequal education in the city’s public K-12 schools (James, 2004; Wollenberg, 1978). The watershed moment in this history is most often identified as the 1963 case Jackson v. Pasadena City Schools, which found that the district’s implementation of attendance zones was tantamount to de jure segregation (Wollenberg, 1978). In fact, students of Mexican descent have experienced separate and unequal education far in advance of the Jackson litigation (James, 2004; Martínez, 2009; Torres-Rouff, 2012). This paper shares the historical counterstory (Mares-Tamayo, 2014) of Chicana/o segregation in the city in the early 20th century, and demonstrates how this documenting of community memory (Delgado Bernal, 1998) can also influence the design of education for present and future students.

Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) first identified the use of “parables, chronicles, stories, counterstories...and revisionist histories” (p. 57) as an approach in critical race theory that had utility in education research. This paper employs Critical Race Educational History (CREH) methodology (Santos, Mares-Tamayo, & Alonso, 2017) to tell the story of Chicana/o educational segregation in Pasadena from 1914 through 1932. CREH upholds the tenets of CRT in education that identify (a) the centrality of race and racism in education; (b) a challenge to the dominant ideology; (c) a commitment to social justice; (d) the importance of experiential knowledge; and (e) the need for interdisciplinary perspectives (Solórzano, 1998). CREH furthermore applies those tenets to historical inquiry through the methodological commitments of intentionality of their application; embodying a collaborative process; and creating spaces for multiple voices to be heard (Santos, Mares-Tamayo, & Alonso, 2017). The author thus uses local print media, school district, local and federal archives, and personal collections to outline the gradual, intentional design of segregated Mexican schools in Pasadena during the early 20th century. The evolution of two Mexican schools along with a settlement house in the city institutionalized vocational education for Chicana/o students that intertwined with majoritarian narratives of race, gender identity, and citizenship.

While the Mexican schools closed in the 1930s, the legacy of educational inequity continued to persist in Pasadena. The paper pivots after sharing this narrative to a discussion of how photographs culled from personal collections and local archives have been used as CREH pedagogical tools to teach this history to those with the power to design Chicana/o/x education in the present. In particular, the author details how the historical counterstory and images of Chicana/o education in Pasadena has informed the professional learning for faculty, staff, and administrators at the 51% Latina/o/x community college in the city. This paper thus makes scholarly contributions on both the writing of educational history from a critical race perspective as well as the pedagogical tools that emerge from that history. The story and learnings that have emerged for Chicana/o/x students and communities in Pasadena have empowering significance for applying historical inquiry and knowledge in expanded pursuits of equity.

Author

• Michaela J. López Mares-Tamayo, Polytechnic School