Utilizing Critical Race Educational History to Collectively Write Chicanas/os Into Phoenix Educational and Community Histories

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

Abstract

According to Valencia (2011), persistent inequalities confronting Chicanas/os leading to what he defines as school failure is one rooted deeply in history. Covering a range of 150 years of Mexican American education in the Southwest, San Miguel and Valencia (1998) examine how “the foundation of conflict, hostility, and discrimination, as symbolized by the Treaty [of Guadalupe Hidalgo], shaped the emergence, expansion, and changing character of public education for the Mexican American people.” In response to unequal educational conditions, Delgado Bernal (1999) states that Chicana/o students and their communities, influenced by the Black civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war protests, organized their own protests, walkouts, and boycotts as they struggled to call attention to and improve their quality of education across the Southwest. Much of this documented history geographically focuses on Southern California, Texas, and Colorado—although scholars such as Echeverria (2014), Luckingham (1994), Powers (2008), and Valencia (1984) have documented the diverse, complex, and extensive experiences of Chicanas/os in Phoenix and Arizona. Yet much of this history remains severely under-documented.

This paper focuses on documenting the educational inequalities between 1968 and 1970 at Phoenix Union High School (PUHS), specifically focusing on the 1970 Chicana/o Boycott. This is done by collectively documenting the experiences of six Chicana/o oral history collaborators with an aim to demonstrate a correlation between the racialization of Chicanas/os, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans in public schools and the city at large. The documentation of this educational and community history is done through a theoretical application of CRT in Education lens (DeCuir and Dixson, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solórzano, 1997) combined with Critical Race Educational History (CREH) (Santos et. al, 2017) methodological praxis intent on collectively composing a Phoenix community history that demonstrates the relationship of how racism functioned at Phoenix Union corresponding with the establishment and development of the city of Phoenix. Each Chicana/o oral history collaborator shared recollections of their unique experiences with PUHS that draws parallels with living in the city of Phoenix in turn helping to better understand how racism operated across time and space in the city.

By understanding the salience of racism as experienced by Chicanas/os, within PUHS in relation to the city’s history we can begin to construct more collective community histories that are reflective of the Phoenix Chicana/o experience. Moreover, this paper also presents the collective community history as a larger historical counterstory that as Delgado (1989) states “opens new windows into reality” allowing the opportunity to decenter white interpretations and recounting of history by centering socially and racially marginalized communities. Thus, a collective community counterstory as part of a Critical Race Educational History centers Phoenix Chicana/o experiences as a tool that according to Milner IV and Howard (2013), “reinterpret, disrupt, or interrupt pervasive discourses that may paint communities and people, particularly communities and people of color, in grim, dismal ways.”

Author

• Bryant Partida, University of California - Los Angeles