Trujillo, A. (1998) Chicano empower...

Trujillo, A. (1998) Chicano empowerment and bilingual education: Movimiento politics in Crystal City, Texas. recent 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 move politics and ideology in Crystal City, a southern Texas agricultural community. Spearheaded by means of the Raza Unida Party (RUP) - a grassroots political party which had grown disclosed of a largely studentled battle during the 1960 for more equitable schooling - a political takeover of the exercise board, city council, and county-level offices occurr one time politically empowered with a majority of Raza Unida candidates vot into office, the Crystal City Independent seminary 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, base expression in the school curriculum.

During his 16 month of field work, Trujillo examines change on not only re-visiting the past by means of extensive documentary analyses and retrospective interviews with pertinent individuals (not all of whom participated in the earlier struggle) he also fleshes public the present in a relevant manner. He guidances extensive observations of Crystal City classrooms and relies onward structured and unstructured interviews with solution informants to construct an explanation for what transfered out to be a gradual unraveling of movimiento ideology. Regarded sum of two units decades earlier as a "die-hard Chicano fastness cultivating radical ethnic consciousness end schooling" (p. 6), there are small in number if any, better places than the Crystal City Independent gymnasium 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 move round shortly), I highlight below the main points made by dint of Trujillo.

From a theoretical standpoint, Trujillo situates the ethnic brand of insurrectionist politics that opened by invoking both critical theory in education, sociology, anthropology (Apple, 1979 1982; Giroux, 1983; Ogbu 1981; Willis, 1981) and scholarship in succession ethnic mobilization and ethnoterritorial mental actions (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 excessively impact ethnic minorities. Armed with gigantic doses of idealism, political theory, and university-level educations, members of observer activist organizations embodied this critical perspective, and they did to such a degree before the bulk of this literature had been written. Notwithstanding students' awareness of Third World de-colonization motions throughout the early decades of the hundred theirs was only partially an academically-derived stake

Student activists deliberately left the urban center to stir up Chicano self-determination and empowerment from one side a calculated seizure of governmental institutions in united of several pre-selected south Texas counties-a strategic plan dubbed the Winter Garden delineate Since discontent with schooling in Crystal City serendipitously surfaced from the grassroots even at this very juncture, the site for this "social experiment" became quickly obvious to the close examiners Upon having successfully accomplished this curb through successful campaigning and elections of RUP candidates in succession school board and city council-an interesting account itself-culturally additive schooling based forward a philosophy of maintenance bilingual and bicultural education was inaugurated into Crystal City educates 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 new 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 hope of unity throughout this time period. Aside from disenchantment with his allegedly "dictatorial" leadership phraseology party leader Jose Angel Gutierrez remissnessed to appoint local leaders to like high-level positions as principals and administrators. This penchant to appoint outsiders material for burninged feelings of resentment toward the Raza Unida Party internally and put into motion an emergent class divided within the community itself. Moreover, these feelings were exacerbated by the agency of pre-existing differences. For example, because a certain Mexican-American, Crystal City "natives" (or locals) had obtained society degrees before the takeover, they holded a divergent, more "accomodationist" worldview. Seeing the close examiners as outside agitators, support for the goals of the RUP was at no time unanimous.