Migrating from Cuernavaca, Mexico, to escape an abusive husband and with hopes of ‘‘earning enough money to eat,’’ thirty-six-year-old Sara Valdez arrived in 1989 in La Puente, a city in Los Angeles County, California.¹ After acquiring a job in a neighborhood restaurant, she encouraged other family members to join her. She now lives with her two teenage children and her cousin in a converted two-car garage. She works from 5 P.M. until midnight, more than forty hours a week, as a waitress.

Sitting at her kitchen table, Sara speaks candidly about the difficulties she has encountered in the United States....

The views of La Puente residents Silvia Bravo and Denise Villarreal represent two of the most popular perspectives on race/ethnic relations, the assimilationist and the power-conflict perspective. While each perspective has numerous variations, they nonetheless represent two distinct approaches that are used by members of the academic community and by the general public to understand race/ethnic relations and immigration (Mario Barrera 1979; Frankenberg 1993; Omi and Winant 1994).¹

As Silvia Bravo’s comments illustrate, the assimilationist perspective tends to be characterized by an emphasis on integrating into U.S. society by acquiring the English language and middle-class, Anglo American values and traditions....

Television commercials endorsing California’s Proposition 187, dubbed the ‘‘SaveOur State’’ (SOS) initiative, played frequently during the fall of 1994— the period in which I began to systematically interview La Puente residents and to attend community events. During this period California was experiencing the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, and Proposition 187 effectively diverted attention away from the nearly one million jobs that had been lost in the early1990s (Alvarez and Butterfield 2000, 168). Designed to eliminate social services to undocumented immigrants, Proposition 187 was premised on the belief that immigrants were spreading diseases, draining social services, crowding...

The history of colonization and the enduring patterns of exploitation, racism, and discrimination outlined in the previous chapters have set the landscape for contemporary race/ethnic relations. Within the United States, this history has resulted in various paradigms of race/ethnicity. Two, in particular, have been detrimental to the Mexican-origin community. The first one, a biological approach, has existed throughout much of the history of the United States. The underlying premise of this approach was that people of color, including Mexicans, were biologically different from and inferior to Anglo Americans (Mario Barrera 1979).¹ The second approach began in the 1920s and gained...

Sixty-two-year-old Silvia Bravo smiles warmly as she invites me into her home. She escorts me to her kitchen table and offers me a drink. As she walks toward the refrigerator, she gestures to the neatly arranged papers at one end of the table and says she is coordinating a large donation project at the church. I soon learn that she is very involved in the local Catholic church and parochial school. Detailing her involvement in this project, she returns to the table with two glasses of water, sits down, and begins to describe herself and La Puente.

Silvia Bravo is...

Sitting behind her desk, forty-six-year-old Denise Villarreal unwraps her sandwich and motions to me to begin the interview. She is a gregarious woman, and her jovial demeanor creates an inviting atmosphere. Between phone calls, knocks on her office door, and her lunch, she reclines in her chair and talks about her life and her experiences as a La Puente resident and a local school principal.

Denise is the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants. She was raised twenty minutes from La Puente in an area where even today her family members ‘‘are still the only Mexicans on the block.’’ As a result...

To casual observers, the participants in this demonstration are united. They share a common concern for bilingual education and similar racial/ethnic and class positions as working-class and Spanish-speaking or bilingual Latinas/os from the La Puente area. It is this combination of cultural commonalities and connections based on shared social locations and experiences of institutional inequality within the school district that has brought them together. While they are unified in their pursuit of a common goal— the maintenance of bilingual education—among the demonstrators we find much variation. There are organizers of two distinct parent groups—Puente Parents and Parents for...

The telephone rings late Monday evening on July 22, 2002. The familiar voice on the other end of the receiver updates me on the intricacies occurring in La Puente schools—a knife was found on a playground, elementary schoolchildren are being expelled, parents are organizing, there is dissatisfaction with a principal. Amidst the update on these dynamics in the local schools, the conversation shifts to the hiring of a new city manager in La Puente. I am told that the City Council may hire a former member of the Hacienda–La Puente Unified School District—a twenty-year veteran of the...