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2 “U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of the Census, Twenty-First Census of the United States, 1990: Area and Population (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990), 645.Google Scholar

3 Scholars do not agree on classifying Latinos as a race. Furthermore, in the U.S. census Hispanic is not a race, but an ethnicity. In this article I am using the term of race as the point of conflict. Part of this conflict includes the historical disinclination and construction of Latinos as “white.”Google Scholar

4 Rich, Wilbur C. Black Mayors and School Politics: The Failure of Reform in Detroit, Gary, and Newark (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 5.Google Scholar

5 Henig, Jeffrey R. Hula, Richard C. Orr, Marion, and Desiree Pedescleaux, S. Color of School Reform: Race, Politics, and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 118.Google Scholar

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7 For discussion of internal solidarity within African-American communities, see: Orr, Marion Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986–1998 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999).Google Scholar

8 For example the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the NAACP working together in pre-Brown era school desegregation cases and the NAACP filed a friend of the court brief for the 1946 Supreme Court decision Mendez v. Westminster, which declared separate “Mexican schools” unconstitutional. Westminster School District of Orange County v. Mendez, 161 F.2d 774 (9th Circular, 1947); Victoria-María MacDonald, Latino Education in the United States: A Narrated History from 1513–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 119.Google Scholar

9 For example of scholarly work, see: Dougherty, Jack More than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Formisano, Ronald Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); Podair, Jerald E. The Strike that Changes New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press); Daniel Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). For more popular works, see, for example, Kozol, Jonathan Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992); Suskind, Ron A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (New York: Broadway Books, 1998).Google Scholar

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11 For example: Dona, Ruben to, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Miguel, Guadalupe San Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001). Some work has been done on black-Latino relations, though not specifically in schools. For example, see: Mohl, Raymond A. “Blacks and Hispanics in Multicultural America: A Miami Case Study,” in The Making of Urban America, ed. Mohl, Raymond A. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997), 283–308; Vaca, Nicolás C. The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means for America (New York: Rayo, 2004). For Compton, see: Camarillo, Albert M. “Black and Brown in Compton: Demographic Change, Suburban Decline, and Intergroup Relations in a South Central Los Angeles Community, 1950 to 2000,” in Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, ed. Foner, Nancy and Fredrickson, George M. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 358–76; Camarillo, Albert M. “Cities of Color: The New Racial Frontier in California's Minority-Majority Cities,” Pacific Historical Review 16 (2007): 1–28; Regina F., “Black Brown Cities: Black Urban Regimes and the Challenge of Changing Demographics” (unpublished paper presented at the Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, March 27–29, 2003).Google Scholar

12 For works about disadvantaged groups in multi-ethnic communities struggling over limited resources see Perlmann, Joel Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Cohen, Ronald D. and Mohl, Raymond A. The Paradox of Progressive Education: The Gary Plan and Urban Schooling (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979); Perlstein, Daniel Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Sieglinde Lim de Sanchez, “Crafting a Delta Chinese Community: Education and Acculturation in Twentieth-Century Southern Baptist Mission Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 43, no. 1 (March 2003): 74–90.Google Scholar

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15 Arnold, Les W. “A Promise for the Future,” in Compton Journal Pictorial Review & 1945 Annual (Compton: Compton Journal, 1945); Josh Sides “Straight Into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb,“ American Quarterly 56 (September, 2004): 583–606; Becky M. Nicolaides My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). For discussion of declining inner suburbs, see Myron Orfield Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1997).Google Scholar

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27 Ibid.Google Scholar

28 El Espejo 1911, Manuel Dominguez Senior High, 1977.Google Scholar

29 Ibid.Google Scholar

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32 Ibid., 304–5; Johnson, James H. Jr., Farrell, Walter C. Jr., and Guinn, Chandra, “Immigration Reform and the Browning of America: Tensions, Conflicts, and Community Instability in Metropolitan Los Angeles,” in The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, eds. Hirschman, Charles Kasinitz, Philip, and DeWind, Josh (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 394–95,403–6; Jonathan Musere, “Southern Californians’ Attitudes to Immigrants: Blacks Compared to Other Ethnics” (MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), 29; Sides, “Straight into Compton,” 593; Lichter, Michael I. and Oliver, Melvin L. “Racial Differences in Labor Force Participation and Long-Term Joblessness among Less Educated Men,” in Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles, eds. Bobo, Lawrence D. Oliver, Melvin L. Johnson, James H. Jr., and Valenzuela, Abel Jr. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 220–48.Google Scholar

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34 Cervantes, Lorraine interview with author, October 20, 2004, Compton, CA, interview in possession of author.Google Scholar

35 “Bilingual Act of 1968,” in Latino Education in the United States, 249–52.Google Scholar

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45 Miguel, San Brown, Not White.Google Scholar

46 Kelley, Daryl “6% Raise for Teachers Rejected in Compton,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1985, SEI.Google Scholar

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48 Quoted in Ritter, Kenneth M. “Compton Students ‘Robbed',” Compton Herald American, January 15, 1986, 1,3.Google Scholar

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50 Quoted in Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales (New York: The New Press, 2002), 282.Google Scholar

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53 “Compton Asked to Boost Latino Representation,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1976, SEI. Also see “Group Questions City on Hiring Practices,” Compton Herald American, October 14, 1976, 1; and “Compton Latinos Demand City Data on Hiring, Jobs,” Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1976, SEI.Google Scholar

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57 Although created to prevent cronyism, such tests were often biased against newcomers and outsiders to the system. See Christina Collins, “‘Ethnically Qualified': A History of New York City Public School Teachers, 1920–1980” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2006).Google Scholar

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78 Ibid.Google Scholar

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83 As cited in Sam Roberts, “Hispanic Population Outnumbers Blacks in Four Major Cities as Demographics Shift,” New York Times, October 9, 1994, 34. Similar tensions can be seen in other areas. In Miami, for example tensions arose between blacks and Latinos over competition for jobs and government contracts. For more information, see Wilson, “The Political Economy and Urban Racial Tensions,” 5.Google Scholar