Commentary

In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, informally known as the Kerner Report, concluded that America was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” (p. 1). In 1968, it seemed reasonable to a whole generation of historians and social scientists to embrace a Black/White binary paradigm of segregation and racial inequality. Meanwhile, parallel changes in the 1960s would eventually compel us to realize that the Kerner Report’s forecasting of a Black/White binary of American race relations was not only wrong for its era and America’s past but even farther off the mark for predicting our future and the history necessary to inform present and future directions.

The Centennial article by Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson demonstrates the critical importance of writing the history of America’s variegated ethnicity not only for a comprehensive understanding of the past but also to inform future struggles to overturn segregation and inequality in America’s schools (see e.g., Ball, 2006). We learn from “In These Towns” that the segregation of Mexicans in Kansas differed from other patterns of segregation and inequality in important respects. Virtually all of the scholarship on the history of school segregation focuses on a legally mandated dual system between Whites and African Americans. Donato and Hanson portray a quasi-legal, largely de facto tri-racial stratification system in Kansas designed mainly to accommodate White civic interest in segregating Mexican students. From the outset, this was a challenging and complicated task as Kansas law did not specify persons of Mexican descent as a separate and distinct race from Whites. Indeed, Kansas’s law defined Mexicans as Caucasian. The authors do an excellent job of uncovering the nuanced, contradictory, and customary ways in which various cities within Kansas arranged to segregate Mexican students in segregated schools. They also demonstrate the international context in which Mexican segregation unfolded; Mexican nationals with children in Kansas’s schools frequently contacted their consul to protest the assignment of their children to separate and unequal schools and classrooms. In vital respects, the segregation of Mexicans in Kansas represents segregation through institutionalized racism in contradiction to the legally mandated system that characterized the segregation of African American children. Hence, this history informs current and future struggles for education equality as school segregation and inequality in today’s America is based squarely on institutional racism.

The history of Mexican and Chicano experiences contributes to a multiethnic paradigm that enables us to understand the variegated racism of the past and develop the capacity for civic engagement in the next America. Even as the Kerner Report forecasted a Black/White nation, other events of the same era pointed to the need for a multiethnic history of the America yet to be. For example, the Hart-Celler Immigration Bill of 1965, phasing out the national origins quota system instituted in 1921 and modified in 1952, ushered in a new wave of immigration unprecedented in its ethnic and linguistic diversity (Qin-Hilliard, Feinauer, & Quiroz, 2001). The ending of the national origins quota in 1965 opened the door to significantly increased immigration from Asia and Latin America (see e.g., Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Qin, 2005). Since 1965, more than 40 million immigrants have arrived, about half of them Hispanics and nearly 3 in 10 Asians. In the early 20th century, about 90% of immigrants came from Europe. In the early 21st century, only about 12% are from Europe. The United States is on its way to becoming a majority population of color and should reach that destination by 2065. The nation’s school population has already become a majority-minority population, reaching that mark in 2014 when the overall number of Latino, African American, Asian American, and Native American students in public K–12 classrooms surpassed the number of non-Hispanic Whites (Maxwell, 2014). The new K–12 majority of color is driven mainly by significant increases in the Latino population and also by a rapidly growing Asian population.

This article reaffirms the necessity to understand our multiethnic struggles for education equality. Eradicating segregation and inequality among Mexican American children requires an understanding of institutional racism predicated on language and a complicated ideology of ancestry and race. The America of the mid–21st century is bound to contain a very large population of children of Mexican descent, and it is critical for all Americans to possess an understanding of their origins and development as we prepare to live, study, and work in a multiethnic democracy with no majority population. Donato and Hansen’s historical analysis enables us to comprehend segregation and resistance from an angle of vision that is uniquely Mexican.