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The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought an end to the Mexican American War of 1846–1848, marked its sesquicentennial on February 2, 1998. The signing of the Treaty and the U.S. annexation, by conquest, of the current Southwest signaled the beginning of decades of persistent, pervasive prejudice and discrimination against people of Mexican origin who reside in the United States. In this article, Guadalupe San Miguel and Richard Valencia provide a sweep through 150 years of Mexican American schooling in the Southwest. They focus on the educational "plight" (e.g., forced school segregation, curricular tracking), as well as the "struggle" (e.g., litigation) mounted by the Mexican American people in their quest for educational equality. The authors cover four major historical eras: 1) the origins of schooling for Mexican children in the "American" Southwest, 1848–1890s; 2) the expansion of Mexican American education, 1890–1930; 3) the changing character of public education, 1930–1960; and 4) the contemporary period. In their discussion they identify a number of major themes that characterize the education of Mexican Americans in the Southwest from the time of the Treaty up to the Hopwood decision in Texas—the landmark case that gutted affirmative action in higher education. These include the exclusion and removal of the Mexican-origin community and its cultural heritage from the schools; the formation of the template (segregated, inferior schooling) for Mexican American education; the quest for educational equality; the continuing academic gap between Mexican American and Anglo or White students; and the impact of nativism on educational opportunity, as reflected most recently in the regressive and oppressive voter-initiated propositions in California and in the legal decisions in Texas. As such, Mexican Americans face an educational crisis of an unprecedented magnitude in the history of racial/ethnic minority education.

Since 1929 Mexican American organizations, headed by middle class leaders, have played a significant and increasing role in challenging discriminatory school policies and practices.' Led and inspired by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)2 and the G. I. Forum," the challenge to education has been essentially a liberal one. As most liberals, Mexican Americans have perceived discrimination, segregation, inferior schools, and culturally biased curriculum and instructional practices as problems incidental to education, not as specific manifestations of systematic structural inequality. As a result, they have not sought the improvement of the existing educational structure by eliminating those barriers which limit Mexican American access to and participation in that system. Hence, the challenge to education has been limited to abolishing segregated schools and student assignment and classification policies which serve to increase segregation. The following essay is a history of this campaign to eliminate the segregation of Mexican American children in the Texas public schools. Emphasis will be placed on the strategies and tactics utilized by LULAC and the G. I. Forum to desegregate the public schools. The period to be covered will be between 1929 and 1957. The year 1929 marks the period during which the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the first statewide civic organization of Americans of Mexican descent, was organized in Texas. In the latter year the last of a series of desegregation cases filed by the Mexican American community was won. For the next ten years (between 1957 and 1967) because of political, financial, and organizational difficulties, no further legal

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This article provides a rationale and suggests an approach for investigating the school activism of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans in the history of education. This more inclusive and comparative approach to Latino activism deepens the understanding of their complex struggles for equality and pluralism in American education. It shows how different groups of Latinos engaged in multiple but parallel struggles for increased learning across space and time and achieved different results. Their efforts expanded, extended, and diversified the historic struggle for education waged primarily by ethnic Mexican activists in the first half of the 20th century.