Lessons Learned From Immigrant Latina Mothers on Parent Trigger in Compton, California

• In Event: The Margins of Neoliberal Reform: Envisioning Critical Race Praxis Along the Borders of K–12 Education

Abstract

Objective
This study will interrogate how racial/racist state violence (James, 1996) is manifested through racial capitalist education policy (Watkins, 2001) on all levels of government in what many scholars have identified as an assault on public education (Watkins, 2012). I will demonstrate how policy initiatives such as the California “parent trigger law” are strategies of counter-insurgency that attempt to co-opt local resistance into what are part of larger efforts to privatize public education. While many scholars have noted the current conjuncture that has become highly critical of public education (Ravitch 2013), it is significant to study how this assault on public education is lived and contested by the people who are most impacted. By centering the Spanish speaking immigrant Latina mother, organizer, and community member- this case study reveals how modalities of race, class, gender, and citizenship are contested within a local context.

Author

• Lizette Lucha Arévalo, University of California - Riverside