Un paso hacia adelante, y otro hacia atrás (One step forward, one step back)

Abstract

The tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in important legislative, judicial, and institutional changes impacting the Latino educational experience. The 1968 Bilingual Education Act and subsequent U.S. Supreme Court rulings like Lau v. Nichols (1974) provided federal recognition and reinforcement of the rights of English-language learners. Latino college students entered universities that had established centers for the study of Mexican American and Puerto Rican history and culture. A new generation of Latino scholars broadened the discourse on race and education to include a previously overlooked Latino population. At the close of the 1970s, however, the United States was still recovering from the economic and political consequences of the prolonged and costly Vietnam War. Economic stagnation and further political disillusionment accompanying the Watergate scandal appeared to stall the momentum of the Civil Rights era. At this tenuous juncture in American history, waves of Latino immigrants from both familiar points of origin (Cuba and Mexico) and newer sources (Central America, Latin America, and the Caribbean) transformed the demographic composition of our nation.³

My mother and I sat down for lunch at a leading department store in Miami—an advertisement that Colombian cuisine would be served in observation of Colombia’s Independence Day brought us to the restaurant. In the packed dining room, we ordered from the special menu, but my mother’s Spanish accent infuriated the Anglo waitress. She grabbed the menus from our hands, threw them to the floor, and screamed to a stunned and silenced room, “This is America, speak English!”

—Victoria-María MacDonald, Miami, Florida, 1981¹

Overall, several witnesses agreed that this country is in a state of denial about the existence and causes of, and consequently, the needed solutions to racial and ethnic tensions. Gross institutionalized racial injustice is an issue that the country has never faced fully, or committed itself to resolve. Indeed, at crucial points, American society has retreated from addressing the critical subject of race, and learned to tolerate, rather than to eradicate racial inequality.

—Racial and Ethnic Tensions in American Communities: Poverty, Inequality, and Discrimination, hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1992²