Making "Good Neighbors" out of Bad: How Bilingual Education Shaped Educational Opportunities in Postwar Texas

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Abstract

Objective and Background
This paper examines the influence of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission on the education of Mexican immigrant children in El Paso public schools from 1944-60. The decade marked the height of a U.S.-led Pan American political movement as well as Mexican American legal battles for access to racially and linguistically integrated classrooms. In 1943, Texas established the commission with funds from the U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). By the war’s end, one of the commission’s most important objectives was to assess the numbers and experiences of Mexican American students in Texas and to fund El Paso teachers to develop a bilingual curriculum that could be used far beyond the state’s borders. El Paso, with a 68% Latin American student population, was identified by the Commission as a city with potentially more knowledgeable and skilled teachers at working with Mexican students than typical. Yet, the curricula El Paso teachers developed and widely disseminated, while geared towards assimilating Mexican children in Anglo classrooms, nevertheless embodied historic stereotypes of Mexicans as lazy, criminal, and unhygienic—hardly the qualities of good neighbors. That is, even in materials commissioned by the federal and state government to produce more enlightened and culturally respectful models of teaching, El Paso teachers reverted to historic stereotypes and traditional pedagogical associations between language instruction and character reformation.

Theoretical Framework, Methods, and Data
This paper uses historiographic methods and draws on both primary and second research to capture a portrait of teaching and learning in Cold War era borderland public schools. Specifically, it uses commission reports, curricular materials, data on student performance, correspondence between El Paso educators and OIAA staff, and media reports collected from the El Paso Independent School District Archives; the Texas State Archives (which houses the papers of the Goodwill Commission); and the Office of Inter-American American Affairs papers, housed at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

Conclusion and Significance
The failure of teachers to move beyond historic stereotypes was a problem in and of itself and an illustration of a larger vexed commitment towards Mexican students in the borderland, even amongst educators who considered themselves expert in bilingual education. This example helps us to understand why the education trajectory of Mexican students in the area changed little over the decade, despite increased federal and state attention towards Spanish-speaking children. Throughout the 1950s, the number of Mexican students in El Paso schools continued to drop drastically between elementary and secondary schools and many who did attend high school were tracked to vocational “Mexican” schools rather than academic “Anglo” schools. In telling this story for the first time, this paper uncovers the central role schools played in defining “foreignness” in a postwar international order and in upholding and embodying Cold War dissonances between international tolerance and domestic segregation.

Author

• Jonna Perrillo, The University of Texas - El Paso