Although common schools were established to create a unified culture and communal scholastic experience, the presence of segregation and discrimination in American societies negatively affected many aspects in education by creating unfair environments for “non-white” immigrants including the Asian, Mexican, Native, African, and Puerto Rican Americans.
Chapter 7 discusses how these groups of people endured many hardships due to the adverse racial attitudes of the Anglo-Americans. One of the major issues was that, like other immigrants, Latin Americans had a difficult time attaining full citizenship in the United States. I had a hard time understanding the fight to restrain Mexican Americans, already living in the US, from their rights to citizenship if they were already technically living in the territory after the end of the Mexican-American War of 1848 where Mexico lost much of its land to the United States. Similarly, the same thing happened to Native Americans where the Anglo-Americans wanted to eradicate these groups of people by forms of cultural and ethnic cleansing. Later, these and other adversities came to affect the many children attending schools as the gap between educational discrimination and equal education opportunities increased.
Many immigrants hope to enter into the United States with open arms to escape the economical, educational, social, and/or religious deprivations in their countries. Unfortunately, as we have seen historically, this was and is not the case for many immigrants. Have attitudes towards migrants changed since the first “non-white” migrants entered into United States? Have there been any positive changes/negative changes? What can be done to make things better for immigrants(citizenship/language)? Has the citizenship process become more difficult to obtain?
