Chicano empowerment and bilingual education: Movimiento politics in Crystal City, Texas

Bilingual Research Journal, Winter 2000 by Valenzuela, Angela

Trujillo, A. (1998). Chicano empowerment and bilingual education: Movimiento politics in Crystal City, Texas. New York: Garland Publishing.

Covering a 20-year period and beginning in 1969, Chicano Empowerment and Bilingual Education is a multilevel ethnography that provides a historical perspective of Chicano Movement politics and ideology in Crystal City, a southern Texas agricultural community. Spearheaded by the Raza Unida Party (RUP) - a grassroots political party which had grown out of a largely studentled battle during the 1960s for more equitable schooling - a political takeover of the school board, city council, and county-level offices occurred. Once politically empowered with a majority of Raza Unida candidates voted into office, the Crystal City Independent School District inaugurated an unprecedented districtwide policy that called for maintenance bilingual and bicultural education. For the first time in Crystal City's history, a distinctive "Chicano view" of the self and society, and a bilingual and bicultural philosophy, found expression in the school curriculum.

During his 16 months of field work, Trujillo examines change by not only re-visiting the past through extensive documentary analyses and retrospective interviews with pertinent individuals (not all of whom participated in the earlier struggle), he also fleshes out the present in a relevant manner. He conducts extensive observations of Crystal City classrooms and relies on structured and unstructured interviews with key informants to construct an explanation for what turned out to be a gradual unraveling of movimiento ideology. Regarded two decades earlier as a "die-hard Chicano stronghold cultivating radical ethnic consciousness through schooling" (p. 6), there are few, if any, better places than the Crystal City Independent School District to study the challenges that face those seeking a sustainable, culturally additive alternative to historically subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999). Although this account raises a number of still unanswered questions (to which I shall turn shortly), I highlight below the main points made by Trujillo.

From a theoretical standpoint, Trujillo situates the ethnic brand of insurrectionist politics that unfolded by invoking both critical theory in education, sociology, anthropology (Apple, 1979, 1982; Giroux, 1983; Ogbu, 1981; Willis, 1981), and scholarship on ethnic mobilization and ethnoterritorial movements (Hechter & Levi, 1979; Foley et al., 1988). These combined literatures critique the dominant narrative of meritocracy and acknowledge instead the reproductive functions of schooling and other societal institutions that unduly impact ethnic minorities. Armed with huge doses of idealism, political theory, and university-level educations, members of student activist organizations embodied this critical perspective, and they did so before the bulk of this literature had been written. Notwithstanding students' awareness of Third World de-colonization movements throughout the early decades of the century, theirs was only partially an academically-derived venture.

Student activists deliberately left the urban centers to promote Chicano self-determination and empowerment through a calculated seizure of governmental institutions in one of several pre-selected south Texas counties-a strategic plan dubbed the Winter Garden Project. Since discontent with schooling in Crystal City serendipitously surfaced from the grassroots level at this very juncture, the site for this "social experiment" became quickly obvious to the students. Upon having successfully accomplished this control through successful campaigning and elections of RUP candidates on school board and city council-an interesting account itself-culturally additive schooling based on a philosophy of maintenance bilingual and bicultural education was inaugurated into Crystal City schools. Hence, against a conceptual backdrop of critical theory, meshed with understandings about ethnic mobilization and a lived minority experience (Acura, 1972; Almaguer, 1971; Barrera, 1979), Trujillo provides a fresh, focused perspective on bilingual education.

Discord within the RUP and resistance from within the community to bilingual/bicultural education were major factors that plagued the prospect of unity throughout this time period. Aside from disenchantment with his allegedly "dictatorial" leadership style, party leader Jose Angel Gutierrez neglected to appoint local leaders to such high-level positions as principals and administrators. This penchant to appoint outsiders fueled feelings of resentment toward the Raza Unida Party internally and set into motion an emergent class divided within the community itself. Moreover, these feelings were exacerbated by pre-existing differences. For example, because some Mexican-American, Crystal City "natives" (or locals) had obtained college degrees before the takeover, they possessed a divergent, more "accomodationist" worldview. Seeing the students as outside agitators, support for the goals of the RUP was never unanimous.