Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston

Strikes, boycotts, rallies, negotiations, and litigation marked the efforts of Mexican-origin community members to achieve educational opportunities and oppose discrimination in Houston schools in the early 1970s. The Houston Independent School District sparked these responses because it circumvented a court order to desegregate by classifying Mexican American children as ""white"" and integrating them with African American children - leaving Anglos in segregated schools. In ""Brown, Not White"", Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., traces the evolution of the community's political activism in education during the Chicano Movement era of the early 1970s. San Miguel also identifies the important implications of this struggle for Mexican Americans and for public education. The political mobilization in Houston signaled a shift in the activist community's identity from the assimilationist ""Mexican American Generation"" to the rising Chicano Movement with its ""nationalist"" ideology. It also introduced Mexican American interests into educational policy making in general and into the national desegregation struggles in particular. This important study will engage those interested in public school policy as well as scholars of Mexican American history and the history of desegregation in America.