Reading, Writing, and Revolution : Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas

2022 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award Tejas Foco Non-fiction Book Award, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies 2021 Tejano Book Prize, Tejano Genealogy Society of Austin 2021 Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History, Webb County Heritage Foundation 2021 Runner-up, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book The first book on the history of escuelitas, Reading, Writing, and Revolution examines the integral role these grassroots community schools played in shaping Mexican American identity. Language has long functioned as a signifier of power in the United States. In Texas, as elsewhere in the Southwest, ethnic Mexicans' relationship to education—including their enrollment in the Spanish-language community schools called escuelitas—served as a vehicle to negotiate that power. Situating the history of escuelitas within the contexts of modernization, progressivism, public education, the Mexican Revolution, and immigration, Reading, Writing, and Revolution traces how the proliferation and decline of these community schools helped shape Mexican American identity. Philis M. Barragán Goetz argues that the history of escuelitas is not only a story of resistance in the face of Anglo hegemony but also a complex and nuanced chronicle of ethnic Mexican cultural negotiation. She shows how escuelitas emerged and thrived to meet a diverse set of unfulfilled needs, then dwindled as later generations of Mexican Americans campaigned for educational integration. Drawing on extensive archival, genealogical, and oral history research, Barragán Goetz unravels a forgotten narrative at the crossroads of language and education as well as race and identity. "From 1880 to 1940, ethnic Mexicans enrolled their children in both public schools and escuelitas (little schools)-"two contradictory educational traditions with mutually exclusive messages," Philis Barragán Goetz writes. Texas public school administrators believed that you could not live in the United States and be a citizen if you did not speak English and demonstrate a familiarity with the laws of the country. Mexican consuls and many upper class Mexican nationals, on the other hand, believed that "the residents of this Mexican colony had a responsibility to keep the true Mexico alive in the United States." Each side demanded that ethnic Mexicans choose the country to which they would belong, scoffing at the notion of anything in between. In this history of escuelitas in Texas, Barragán Goetz marshals deep archival and oral history research to show how, for many decades, numerous ethnic Mexicans did choose something in between, and how the escuelita model slowly transformed to meet the needs of Mexican Americans"-- Provided by publisher