The history, theory, and economics of Chicanos: A phenomenological study of participants in segregated Mexican schools

The achievement gap among Chicano youth and their Anglo counterparts in public schools has been well documented for the past thirty years. Many researchers have offered a multiplicity of reasons for the lag in academic progress by Chicanos. From hereditarian notions of intelligence to cultural deficit models of socialization, researchers of all bents have sought to explain the egregious, yet persistent, failure of the Southwest's most populous minority group. If one were to review the history of education for Chicanos in this country, it would reveal many of the answers sought by the aforementioned researchers as to why Chicanos have faltered in America's public school systems.; This phenomenological study did just that. It attempted to review the historical failure of Chicanos as Cortes (1987) and others purported one should: through the lens of a societal interaction model. That is, there exist factors in a given society---political, historical, economic, societal---that shape the lives of its inhabitants, both negatively and positively. As such, this study examined the practice of Chicano segregation and its impact on the lives of the people who lived through it. The purposes of this study were to examine the historical effects of segregation on the Chicano community in the American Southwest in general and to ascertain how it impacted the lives of the participants of this study in particular.; Being a phenomenological study, seven individuals who attended Mexican segregated schools in the American Southwest between 1930 and 1950 were selected to participate in the study. The participants were asked to participate in a tape-recorded interview. The taped interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed. In addition to the taped interviews, further data were collected through a personal profile questionnaire that each individual was asked to complete at the conclusion of each interview. The analysis of the data produced several emergent categories and themes relative to the segregated school experiences of the participants.; The literature review and the data analysis revealed that, by and large, segregation for the seven participants was a negative experience. Since segregating Chicano youth was an integral aspect of what Acuna (1972) termed "interna1 colonialism," the fact that the voices of the participants spoke of teachers who were unresponsive and ill-prepared to teach them, a curriculum that was myopic and irrelevant, and of inadequate facilities was no surprise. One important corollary revealed in the data analysis was that the participants of this study were all members of the middle class. However, the data analysis also revealed that their entrance to the middle class occurred in spite of the subtractive schooling they received in segregated schools. The segregated school system socialized and prepared Chicano youth for a particular kind of work and life: to take their places at the lower rungs of the complex division of labor.; It is desired that teachers, administrators, and school staffs will listen to the collective voices of the participants of this study to ascertain the definition of subtractive schooling so that the lives of Chicanos in schools today will improve.