TY - JOUR
AU - Perrillo, Jonna
AB - The importance of teaching Spanish to Anglo children could “hardly be stressed too strongly,” argued Myrtle Tanner in a 1950 Texas education journal. Over the previous five years, the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, on which Tanner now served as executive secretary, had made elementary Spanish instruction one of its statewide goals. Teaching Spanish to the youngest citizens of Texas, she explained, was seen by “neighboring nations as a pledge of friendship” and was vital to developing a sense of “hemispheric solidarity” urgently needed during the Cold War. As a leader of the commission and a former researcher for the Texas Department of Education, Tanner was tasked with advocating for Mexican American students' education rights and creating a greater sense of racial tolerance and Pan-American identification among Anglo learners. In her promotion of Spanish instruction, she called on “soft” Cold War rhetoric, stressing the intercultural understanding and empathy that bilingualism could foster. Her motivations differed from the harder, protectionist aims expressed by many of the industrialists who also served the commission, including the chairman and successful oilman Neville Penrose. For Penrose, bilingualism was most important in its potential to combat communism. Because “Communists seize[d] on” stories of American racial discrimination in Mexican newspapers, he warned, improving race relations and rewriting the narrative about them was important. He argued that with Spanish-language fluency, “every school child in Texas … [could] become an effective little secret service man by getting the stories of our side spread by word of mouth all over Mexico.” Yet, while advancing two different ideological premises for Spanish instruction—one based in global outreach, the other in national security—Tanner and Penrose similarly ignored the tens of thousands of young Texas citizens already fluent in Spanish, and they failed to imagine how Mexican American children could be an important resource for changing race narratives and in teaching their Anglo counterparts. Instead, the two prized Spanish itself as a necessary response to a new world order that Anglo children would lead.1 Tanner's and Penrose's shared calculation points to this essay's principal investigation: how Spanish instruction in Texas was a mechanism for responding to a nexus of anxieties about Anglo-American security, prosperity, and identity in the early Cold War. In both an extension of and a departure from borderlands scholarship that has centered on Anglos' use of Spanish as a vehicle for school segregation, I show that Spanish was a commodity that Anglos deeply desired and were hard pressed to acquire precisely because of their marginalization of the people best equipped to teach it to them. We can see that language was not only an instrument of power, as scholars have emphasized, but also one for profit. Understanding Anglos' aspirations for Spanish-language acquisition reveals that they saw their supremacy as more fragile and tenuous than borderlands scholarship often captures and, in turn, can expand our conception of white racial anxiety in postwar America.2 In at least two ways, this account complicates scholarship rooted in a focus on other geographical spaces. Specifically, in contrast to studies that consider foreign-language instruction in American schools a cosmopolitan and pluralist practice, I show how Spanish instruction in the borderlands was driven by conservative interests and outlooks. It was at once an exercise in Anglo entitlement and a response to fear of Anglo decline. More expansively, this story illuminates a powerful example of what the education historian David Labaree has characterized as a tension between public schools and private advantage. Certainly, the public-school curriculum had long served the marketplace by providing elites, boys more than girls, with the credentials needed for economic benefit. In this case, however, we see Anglos altering the curriculum to include language skills that would serve them across class and gender lines. Altogether, the resources that Spanish instruction for Anglos required and extracted, coupled with the exclusion of Mexican American students, provides an early example of what the sociologist Charles Tilly has termed “opportunity hoarding.” Rather than realizing Tanner's dream of improving relationships between Anglo and Mexican Americans, Spanish-language instruction campaigns often deepened the inequities between both groups.3 Nowhere was this truer than in El Paso, the nation's largest border city. Of the five largest school districts in Texas in 1948, El Paso was alone in teaching Spanish throughout the elementary grades. The city was also undergoing significant change. In the decade following World War II, the border region experienced the nation's greatest population growth: between 1940 and 1960, El Paso's population nearly tripled to approximately 270,000 residents, drawing thirty thousand more migrating Anglos than Mexicans, though retaining a Mexican-heritage majority. Simultaneously, the city transitioned from an agricultural-based economy to an industrial and commercial one, from an economy highly dependent on seasonal Mexican workers to one in need of a more permanent work force. Spanish was not just the language of the barrio or the farm but a lingua franca of a growing metropolis. The Spanish instruction movement reached its greatest heights in El Paso precisely because Anglo fear of losing out to Mexicans was highest there, even as the Anglo population grew.4 Anglo and Mexican children were the benefactors and the victims of this anxiety. Historians have demonstrated how images of “happy and afforded children,” reproduced in popular culture, journalism, and government literature, were key evidence in Cold War arguments about the health and benefits of American democracy. The history of Spanish instruction highlights the unrecognized importance of language to these images. The happy child was social, expressive—even loquacious—and unquestionably fluent in English. Commonly white, he or she was a “thin patina” to obscure all of the children democracy had failed, including the Mexican American children who were over 60 percent of the elementary school population in El Paso. The drive for Spanish instruction echoed the political anxieties and moral shortcomings that created cultural investment in the afforded child, from a push for American dominance abroad to the marginalization of some children at home. While Anglo parents' primary concern was their children's economic stability, the objective for people such as Tanner and Penrose was to shape the children into agents of diplomacy. Spanish-language instruction addressed both, all while demarcating which children's welfare mattered most.5 In fact, while Anglos desired fluency in Spanish, their attitudes toward Mexican Americans and the segregationist policies that defined El Paso's schools changed little. As a result, the history of elementary Spanish instruction—the successes and limitations of the enterprise—can be fully understood only in the context of the pervasive school and civic segregation that Mexican Americans experienced in El Paso as much as in other western cities. El Paso public schools were categorized as either “Mexican” or “American”; only a slim percentage of elite Mexican Americans attended school with Anglos. This segregation was most powerfully enforced in elementary schools, where language learning began. Mexican American students who attended elementary schools in the mid- and late 1940s remember not just corporal punishment for speaking Spanish in school but also school suspension and being assigned demerits, detention, or made to stand in closets. In El Paso, where over half of students spoke no English upon entering kindergarten, schools may have been “pioneers in [the] movement” of Spanish instruction, but this movement coexisted with the marginalization of Mexican American students and, by and large, teachers.6 By the postwar decade, Spanish instruction had taken hold in elementary schools in a handful of urban areas with large Mexican-heritage populations, including El Paso, Los Angeles, and San Diego. But Texas, because of the Good Neighbor Commission, possessed a unique organized vehicle by which to promote the language across grade levels and geographic regions. Admittedly, the commission, while advocating Spanish instruction and possessing resources to train teachers, still depended on local support and lacked legislative power or the ability to standardize the movement. As a result, classroom methods and time dedicated to instruction were determined primarily by local demand. Even so, the commission often successfully promoted the demand, particularly at a time when high school foreign-language enrollments bottomed nationally. In 1943 El Paso was one of 331 districts offering Spanish instruction in Texas elementary schools. Only Corpus Christi, a south Texas city with a student population 70 percent as large, rivaled El Paso in the level of attention given to elementary Spanish instruction. There, the movement was led by the charismatic Mexican American educator Edmundo Mireles, who trained teachers not fluent in Spanish to instruct and “learn [Spanish] along with the children,” both Anglo and Mexican. His goal was to foster education in bilingualism and biculturalism and, as Carlos Kevin Blanton has described it, to “rehabilita[te] … Spanish as a civilized and cultured tongue.” By contrast, the El Paso program, driven by anxiety and competition, was administered by and provided for Anglos alone. If Corpus Christi modeled the commission's highest intercultural ideals, El Paso embodied its political priorities.7 This distinction illuminates just how closely bound educational and economic aspiration were in the thinking of urban postwar Anglo Americans and the degree of power that connection could hold. Anxiety over white decline was neither new nor geographically specific, but its particular manifestation—and the seeming success of the commission's efforts—were shaped by changes in the city's economy. By the mid-1920s El Paso was an established center of U.S.-Mexican trade—home to copper smelting, cotton farming, and cattle ranching, and, in the words of a city chamber of commerce officer, “a reservoir of Mexican labor.” During the Great Depression, El Paso eliminated one-third of its work force through forced Mexican repatriation. Contrary to government officials' promises that Anglos would find greater work opportunities as a result, unemployment rose in cities such as El Paso, with high deportation numbers. Not only did Anglos infrequently assume formerly “Mexican” jobs but the repatriations shrank the number of high-skilled Anglo-dominated positions—such as administrative, managerial, and sales jobs—that depended on low-wage labor. Anglo El Pasoans' fortunes were tied to, not in competition with, those of Mexican Americans, whether or not they understood this.8 But the character of those fortunes changed after the war; by 1950, 44 percent of the city's jobs were in manufacturing, wholesale, and retail. A simultaneous rebounding of immigration that returned the city's Mexican-heritage population to pre–Great Depression numbers did little to quell Anglo fear. El Paso's industrialization depended on Mexicans and Mexican Americans as laborers, consumers, and negotiators in an increasingly transnational economy. As Anglos struggled to locate their best prospects in a city that was shifting demographically and economically, they saw that at least some of the new jobs, including the high-skilled ones, were conducted in Spanish. Because of these changes in the marketplace, even as the commission called on multiple politically dominant Cold War arguments, the strongest force for Spanish instruction came from El Pasoans who wanted Anglo children to succeed in a changing marketplace.9 The commission is less important to the El Paso story in terms of influence—the city's interest in Spanish instruction both predated and was independent from the commission—than for what it reveals about how localized Anglo anxieties paralleled and diverged from broad fears of Anglo decline. Both the history of language instruction in El Paso and the history of the commission expose how seemingly progressive ideas about education can originate in and coexist with otherwise-conservative political platforms and ideologies. Tanner believed that from Spanish-English bilingualism, “an appreciation for Latin American culture would inevitably result … and this appreciation, more than any other single factor, could help eliminate feelings of intolerance and prejudice.” This liberal impulse, El Paso and many of Tanner's commission colleagues prove, met with powerful reactionary political beliefs. Texas had been identified in 1943 as the best site for establishing a state-based extension of the Roosevelt administration's federal Good Neighbor Policy for two reasons. First, many Americans believed that World War II had created a “wave of Germanophile sentiment” in Mexico, bolstered by “the list of sins against the U.S. and Britain that the Latin Americans had learned in their histories and that the Germans [had] … exploited.” After German defeat, the Soviets represented a similar threat in the eyes of many Texans who, like Penrose, believed that “Communists had rather control Mexico than any other country in the world because then they could bring their Iron Curtain right up to the Rio Grande.” El Paso, separated from Mexico by the river, was an especially important area to secure. Second, racial discrimination across Texas had proved so prevalent, entrenched, and well documented that Mexico halted its bracero program in Texas in 1943. El Paso had been central to the problem; local border patrol officials undermined legal workers (braceros) entering the United States by “arresting” cheaper, undocumented workers at bridge crossings and delivering them to regional farmers. Many commission members, such as Penrose, had made their fortunes by exploiting Mexican labor. No race liberals, they saw Spanish instruction as the foremost means for reestablishing cooperative economic relations with Mexico.10 Open in new tabDownload slide In this 1948 map of El Paso schools, the high school boundary lines also divide South Side/“Mexican” schools from the city's “American” schools. That so many elementary schools fed into Bowie, El Paso's only “Mexican” high school, offers a visual demonstration of unequal resources. The inclusion of several major industries further reveals how closely linked schools and commerce were in the public imagination. El Paso Independent School District school boundaries map, 1948, folder 23, box 12, George I. Sánchez Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy Benson Latin American Collection, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin. Open in new tabDownload slide In this 1948 map of El Paso schools, the high school boundary lines also divide South Side/“Mexican” schools from the city's “American” schools. That so many elementary schools fed into Bowie, El Paso's only “Mexican” high school, offers a visual demonstration of unequal resources. The inclusion of several major industries further reveals how closely linked schools and commerce were in the public imagination. El Paso Independent School District school boundaries map, 1948, folder 23, box 12, George I. Sánchez Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy Benson Latin American Collection, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin. Out of these troubled beginnings, the commission fostered many of the same political tensions found in El Paso education politics. Composed largely of bilingual Anglos, the commission leadership came to the project of good neighborism with conflicting motivations and political beliefs, few of which echoed Tanner's interculturalism. Charged with “promoting the principles of Christ in human relations,” they focused on children as an important means to improve diplomacy. Some of this emphasis stemmed from postwar Mexican American activists' attention to school segregation. War service had mobilized veterans such as Hector García, who battled the Nazis, only to return to the “humiliation and suffering of our children and the children of those soldiers who died fighting for the rights and privileges of our great Democracy.” In identifying children as especially important and vulnerable, the returning veterans advanced a pivotal strand of postwar Mexican American civil right struggles and pushed the less advocacy-oriented commission to do the same.11 Other Mexican American activists likewise influenced the commission, though their contributions were similarly restricted. The University of Texas professors George I. Sánchez and Herschel Manuel had spent much of the 1930s documenting the educational experiences of Mexican American students in Texas. Early in its development, the commission called on Sánchez and Manuel to produce research needed to advocate for improved Mexican American schooling but assigned Anglos to the most important leadership positions on the education board. In fact, the state agency best suited to advocate for Mexican American students resembled the “white architects” who cooperated to enforce Mexican American segregation in localities across the Southwest. Of the six members appointed to the education board in 1943 by Texas governor Coke Stephenson, all were Anglo, including the El Paso newspaperman Dorrance D. Roderick. In 1947 Gov. Beauford Jester appointed a new, nine-member board. Again, all nine members were Anglo. In Jester's view, “Anglo-Americans could more gracefully and effectively advocate to other Anglo-Americans that they could assume better relations with Latin Americans.” Still, many El Pasoans would have agreed with Chris Fox, the city's popular and influential chamber of commerce president, who considered the “creation of [the] Commission … a mistake” and a potential “sounding board for a lot of rousing hell raisers to play upon and to create their symphony of discord.” Fox's umbrage at the commission's founding, and the thinking of many of the commission's members, revealed tensions between an international diplomacy movement and its sponsorship by federal and state governments—and individuals—that promoted or assented to racial segregation.12 The tensions and inconsistencies found in the commission's rhetoric were echoed in language instruction and students' treatment. Even in El Paso, where teaching Spanish-speaking children offered unique opportunities for teachers to distinguish themselves, public schools operated as two different tiers of education, with distinct emphases on what school was preparing students for. As Rosina Lozano has argued, the segregation of Mexican American students, concomitant with the popularization of Spanish as a tool for the realignment of global politics, only reinforced the sense that Spanish was a foreign language rather than the language of American citizens. This alienation of Spanish, spoken by a majority of El Paso residents, extended to its speakers. “Spanish Americans,” as Mexican Americans were persistently labeled, and their language remained associated in the Anglo imagination with poverty, lassitude, and a failure to assimilate. Contrasting visions of what schools should enable for different students revolved around two distinct understandings of Spanish: a signal of foreignness and deficiency for Mexican Americans and a doorway to political and economic opportunity for Anglos. This contradiction was often embedded in the teaching of Spanish to Anglo children whose parents would demand instruction in the language of a people they viewed alternately as consumers, competitors, and a social burden, but rarely as neighbors.13 Teaching and Pathologizing the Mexican American Child In a late 1940s commission report on the education of Mexican American children in Texas, the sociologist Lyle Saunders argued that if “Spanish-speaking children are to be drawn into the educational system and made to feel welcome there, teachers and administrators … have to be people of a broader vision, higher ideals, and keener insight than those of the communities in which they live.” Across Texas, he concluded, “they are not.” Saunders captured several dynamics that worked against Mexican American student achievement, including the role schools played in upholding racial hierarchies. On the ground, reformist educators worked to frame the story differently. “Possibly the most amazing thing about the El Paso schools is the splendid result achieved by the teachers and pupils at the first-year level who must begin their school life together without knowing each other's language,” wrote the assistant superintendent Byron England. England, like Tanner an enthusiastic proponent of inter-American education, presented the classroom as a cross-cultural encounter in which Mexican students and Anglo teachers overcame their differences and the children succeeded. Yet in different ways, both he and Saunders underscored the near total reliance on Anglo teachers in schools in the Southwest, including in El Paso.14 England's optimism was also challenged by local school statistics, which told a story of a highly segregated, inadequate, and unequal education for Mexican American students. Geographically remote from every other major city in Texas, El Paso had led education advances in many areas: it boasted the state's first public kindergarten, first junior high school, first artificially lit football field, and, when other public schools ended in eleventh grade, was the first city to expand high school to twelfth grade. Yet despite its history of pioneerism, the city often deferred to the same social dynamics that defined schools elsewhere in Texas. Of its 32,110 students, the majority were crowded into schools in El Paso's southernmost section, including El Segundo Barrio, one of the city's oldest and most impoverished neighborhoods. Segregation for Mexican students, while not legally codified, was nevertheless enforced by school policy. The 1944 handbook Rules and Manual for School Employees delineated that “children of the south-side districts are not transferred to north-side schools, with the exception of Anglo-Americans upon request and for good cause.” Many students had reason to want to transfer. In El Segundo Barrio, three elementary schools that served over two thousand students had no lunchroom, which meant that they also offered no lunch program. Three of the four elementary schools had no library. The Aoy School, an elementary school opened for Mexican students in 1897, was, by the end of World War I, both El Paso's largest school and the nation's largest school for Spanish-speaking students. Unsurprisingly, it was overcrowded, had inadequate facilities, and a faculty comprising mostly novice teachers. Its 1,400 students attended classes in split shifts; for many students who attended Bowie High School, the city's “Mexican” high school, doing so was their first opportunity to attend school for more than a few hours a day.15 School was the first experience in English immersion for thousands of young American citizens in El Paso. Manuel's 1930 study of Spanish-speaking children in Texas, an influential text on the Good Neighbor Commission, documented that 90 percent of Mexican American children spoke no English upon entering school. Of 523 Mexican elementary school children Manuel polled in El Paso, only six had heard English to any degree at home. This challenge was all the more important because almost half of the Mexican American children enrolled in school were in the first grade; three-quarters of all Mexican American students attended the first to the fourth grades. English acquisition was not just the challenge of beginner students; it was, in addition to retention, the definitive academic issue for Mexican American students. This was a fact that teachers, most of whom lacked strong skills in speaking Spanish, lamented and pathologized. Nationally, intercultural textbooks, seeking to explore and celebrate cultural difference, characterized Mexicans as idle, folksy, and coming from “a ‘hacienda’ way of life.” Thomas Sutherland, who served as executive secretary of the commission from 1948 to 1951 and who others might have hoped would articulate a more enlightened view, called on the same primitivist stereotypes, explaining that “Mexicanos … except for their educated class, are an earthy folk, rooted in an ancient culture more in harmony with the thirteenth century than with ours” and possessed “a lack of materialism” that “enriched their lives with spiritual qualities.” His failures are especially important given how many Texas teachers were taking their cues from the commission.16 Open in new tabDownload slide In this 1946 photo of the first-grade class at Alamo Elementary in El Paso, the three boys in front dressed in military uniforms are decorated in United Service Organizations badges. Meant to celebrate patriotism, the costumes also evoke the often-overlooked contributions of Mexican Americans to the World War II effort. Courtesy C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, University of Texas at El Paso. Open in new tabDownload slide In this 1946 photo of the first-grade class at Alamo Elementary in El Paso, the three boys in front dressed in military uniforms are decorated in United Service Organizations badges. Meant to celebrate patriotism, the costumes also evoke the often-overlooked contributions of Mexican Americans to the World War II effort. Courtesy C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, University of Texas at El Paso. Like Sutherland, teachers depicted ethnic Mexican students as emotionally and socially restricted and unprepared for the fast-moving urban centers of the United States. For example, an El Paso teacher explained that “the Spanish-speaking child usually has such a limited contact with the English-speaking public that he has little opportunity outside of the school either to hear English spoken or to practice it himself. His opportunity for practice at school is limited by his supersensitiveness to racial differences.” Teachers consistently depicted Mexican students, in contrast to the happy and afforded child, as a conflicting mixture of lazy but anxious, uninterested yet hypersensitive. They described students' difficulties with language as psychological, cultural, and racial rather than political in nature. “Too often it is impossible to ‘interest’ the Spanish-American child,” another El Paso teacher explained. “His poor clothes, his unkempt appearance, his so-called dumbness (which is usually only a language handicap) make him unattractive, personally, to the teacher, and for this reason it is difficult for her to reach him, because the pupil senses the teacher's feelings unconsciously.” The teacher-writer's conflation of language (Spanish) with national origin (Spanish American) points to how language marked Mexican American children as diametrically opposed to the afforded child: poor, foreign, emotionally limited, and, in turn, fundamentally un-American in spirit.17 Tellingly, even teachers who elected to work on behalf of educating Spanish-speaking children often upheld these stereotypes. In 1946 a group of El Paso teachers was selected by the commission to prepare materials on teaching English to Spanish-speaking children. The funding represented an opportunity for El Paso educators—geographically and politically marginalized within state education politics—to demonstrate some of what they knew from their own experiences. The selected teachers attended workshops that summer, where they wrote and later published their own lengthy primer on language instruction. The materials that resulted from the workshop were, in Sánchez's view, “amongst the best that have been produced … from the standpoint of organization and from that of their value in the education of Spanish-speaking children.” But if the curriculum worked, other writings by this group of teachers indicated the challenges to implementing it, including their own prejudices. The introduction they wrote emphasized the importance of “exercise[ing] a genuine interest in the Mexican child” and for the teacher “to acquaint herself in so far as possible with his cultural heritage, his mother tongue, and his home environment.” This was challenging work, they admitted, as they continued to characterize Mexican students much as everyone else did: as possessing “disciplinary problems brought about by a poor type of guidance in the home” and preoccupied with extracurricular interests that were “foreign to school activities” and “frequently antisocial.” As a result, teachers of Spanish-speaking students were expected to teach English as a pathway to “a rightful place in a democratic society” and to teach a host of skills that Anglo students of the same age were expected to know already, including taking pride in one's personal appearance, the importance of flushing a toilet, and the appropriate amount of clothing to wear indoors and outdoors. If these skills did not make students more sociable, happy, and psychologically healthy, they would at least address their physical well-being.18 Racist theories about Mexican students' social deficiencies were buttressed by a Cold War theory of language instruction that vocabulary should echo more than expand students' communities and experiences. This theory encouraged El Paso teachers to hypothesize, generalize, and interpret those experiences and, in turn, fall back on discourses of health and hygiene that Anglos had deployed to segregate schools and justify the poor conditions of “Mexican” schools. They then applied these discourses to the curriculum. While El Paso first graders learning both English and Spanish focused on common basics, including numbers, colors, and pronouns, the differences were substantial from there. Throughout the interwar period, the city's south side had been wracked with tuberculosis, diphtheria, smallpox, and typhoid fever outbreaks, presenting a serious threat to neighborhood residents and the city's economy, which, like many southwestern localities, sold itself as a sanctuary for patients suffering from tuberculosis. When the Alameda Housing Project opened on the south side in 1940, new residents were required to have all of their possessions fumigated before moving in—an act that echoed the ritual disinfections of bracero workers upon entry to the United States. In accordance with these kinds of events, the instruction manuals produced through the El Paso curriculum workshops prescribed that Spanish-speaking first graders focus on expressing ideas about health, sanitation, and social habits (“My nose is clean” and “Jose went to the clinic”). Even as south El Paso struggled to gain access to basic housing and sanitation standards (a 1940 Federal Public Housing Authority study showed that over half of the city's dwelling units lacked an indoor toilet or private bath or needed major repairs), Mexican students were taught that public health concerns were acts of individual, private responsibility.19 Open in new tabDownload slide This 1940 photograph of children playing in El Segundo Barrio in El Paso was taken by Russell Lee as part of a larger project, “Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas.” The project, commissioned by Lyle Saunders, was to provide visual documentation of the sociologist's research on the aspirations and unequal living conditions of Mexican Americans. Lee's image of seemingly happy children playing outside of a dilapidated building captures both. Russell Lee Photograph Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy Briscoe Center for American History. Open in new tabDownload slide This 1940 photograph of children playing in El Segundo Barrio in El Paso was taken by Russell Lee as part of a larger project, “Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas.” The project, commissioned by Lyle Saunders, was to provide visual documentation of the sociologist's research on the aspirations and unequal living conditions of Mexican Americans. Lee's image of seemingly happy children playing outside of a dilapidated building captures both. Russell Lee Photograph Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy Briscoe Center for American History. The purposefulness of these pedagogical decisions is especially clear when compared to what their Anglo counterparts were learning in Spanish as part of the commission's push for bilingualism. English-speaking first graders were taught the details of house furnishings, including the phrases “En el aparador hay dos candeleros” (“On the buffet there are two candlesticks”) and “Estos son los muebles de la sala: el sofá, el sillón, una mesita con flores, una mesita con una lámpara, el piano, y el radio (tocadiscos)” (“This is the furniture of the living room: the sofa, the armchair, a small table with flowers, a small table with a lamp, a piano, and a radio [record player]”). Anglo students learned a language of cataloging and plentitude—vocabulary and acts of mind intended to be useful for local and global capitalists alike. Even differences among similar acts of speech could be revealing. Teachers were instructed to introduce Spanish-speaking children to the compound phrase, “I went to the toilet. I washed my hands,” while English-speaking children learned “El niño se lava las manos y la cara en el lavabo” (“The boy washes his hands and face in the washbowl”) and “un excusado” (toilet) only as a bathroom fixture. While Anglo children learned to describe washing as a private if ordinary act of the home, Spanish-speaking children practiced identifying it as a task to be reported to and monitored by the teacher. In all, the guidelines found in the materials the El Paso curriculum builders designed mirrored their sense of the values and habits students brought to school and embedded a belief that teachers were expected to train students to succeed in the social class structures into which they were born.20 Yet vocabulary was only half the battle. Educators saw themselves as addressing two main issues when they were teaching English to Spanish-speaking students. The first of these was the problem of interest or desire to speak English, since so many students seemed to resist doing so. Teachers were encouraged to create “motivating instruction” and to provide “opportunities for the child to recognize the necessity of using a second language.” “Bilingualism is the objective, not the substitution of English for Spanish,” the workshop teachers explained, in hopes that teachers would not produce greater insecurities for already insecure students. Educators focused on oral facility and sound over reading and writing as critical elements of elementary language acquisition. They worried that Spanish-speaking children arrived at high school with “a definite foreign accent” rather than “good colloquial speech” and saw elementary teachers' most important goal was to “attune [students'] ears to American speech sounds, and to train [their] speech organs to make them.” The focus on oral instruction meant that evidence for student learning could be all the more difficult to pin down. The workshop teachers' argument that the “action of children themselves yields an intangible means of evaluation; their interest in learning and speaking a new language, their desire to speak, and their ability to understand are all valuable indexes of success” was potentially problematic given so many teachers' convictions that Mexican American students were antisocial and uninterested. Both the issue of continued accents after a decade of school and of motivation for learning English might have pushed educators to think about how few native English speakers were encountered by Mexican American students in school. Instead, the city continued to systematically contain the majority of Mexican Americans to entirely Mexican schools.21 Despite teachers' worst assumptions and characterizations, evidence shows that Mexican American children and their parents were interested in English instruction and that their best opportunities to express their shared interest existed outside the classroom. At Alamo Elementary in El Segundo Barrio, a group of 230 students formed a citizenship club, the Crusaders of the Silver Shield, that focused on improving members' English vocabulary. To do so, they required each student to write an essay on a topic in El Paso history and to present it before an audience. At San Jacinto Elementary School, also in El Segundo Barrio, the fourth grade organized a Speak English Club, which met every Friday and “encouraged the speaking of English in its correct form.” At Zavala Elementary School, club members recorded their voices and studied their speech for irregularities. One way to understand these clubs is in their ubiquity; both English clubs and citizenship clubs were founded at Mexican and Anglo schools across the city. At the unusually integrated Houston Elementary School, in a neighborhood that bordered El Segundo Barrio, the seventh-grade English club was led by Gilbert Siquieros and Willard McDaniel. Across the city, students with differing relationships to both Spanish and English joined English clubs. In this way, the clubs marked a meeting ground of beliefs; they may have performed more as language remediation aids than as rhetoric study groups in some schools, but they represented a shared ideal that English proficiency, sociability, and good citizenship were connected skills to be mastered by all. Undoubtedly, Mexican students believed in this ideal more than teachers believed in Mexican students.22 Teaching and Empowering the Anglo Child Within this typically segregated education system for Mexican students in the Southwest, El Paso had produced a more unusual history of experimentation in teaching Spanish to young students well before the development of the commission. The adoption of courses in Spanish for English-speaking children in 1940 by eight “American” elementary schools was the district's fourth attempt since 1914 to make Spanish part of the elementary curriculum. In her school newspaper in 1931, the Crockett Elementary School sixth grader Marion Fisk wrote about how much she enjoyed learning a “beautiful” language such as Spanish, as opposed to “guttural” German. Learning Spanish at an early age “is of benefit to me because I am going to take Spanish in High School,” Fisk reflected. “If I choose to take it in College it will be of more benefit.” Fisk failed to specify how the language would serve her as anything more than an academic subject, but her teachers held clear goals. The Crockett teacher Grace Munro expected her students to possess a five-hundred-word vocabulary by the end of the seventh grade that would prepare them to conduct important transactions. Munro encouraged students to “pretend that you are lost in a Mexican town where no one can speak English. Try to give directions so that a Mexican policeman can take you home.” She urged girls, presumably, to “pretend you have a maid working for you who understands no [English]. Give directions your mother would have to give at home, such as ‘Maria, please hurry, sweep the floor [and] wash the windows’ or, to the gardener, ‘how much do I owe you?’” Whether abroad or in the home, Spanish for Anglos was imagined to be a language of affluence and exchange that illuminated existing racial and ethnic hierarchies and revealed the position of Crockett Elementary School students within them.23 Popular booklets published in El Paso in the early 1950s with titles such as Learn How to Speak Spanish with Your Servant and Your Spanish Servant reflect the stability of these ideas about language and privilege during the Cold War. Directed at married Anglo women, the booklets promised readers aid in “translat[ing] your wants and needs to your Spanish speaking help,” by providing vocabulary for every room of the house, and phrases such as “Va a dormir en la recamara de los ninos” (“You will have to room with the children”) and “No soy exigente, pero el cuidad de los ninos es lo importante” (“I'm not hard to please, but the care of the children is the important thing”). These informal instructional materials echoed much of the vocabulary that Anglo students had long learned in school, especially in focusing on household objects and fixtures. Yet while these books and the curriculum suggest that the ultimate value of Spanish for middle-class women was to oversee “servants” in their homes, many found the language equally useful in the marketplace. In 1940 male and female El Pasoans attended college in almost equal numbers (3,509 men and 3,334 women reported completing college programs of some kind). In addition to such a high number of women with college preparation, employment opportunities that the war opened to women and a growing economy after the war resulted in “an unusually large segment of the labor force” being occupied by women. According to a city study, over 23 percent of the work force in El Paso was female, with almost equal numbers of women hired in domestic service (2,869) and clerical work (2,884), which included stenographers, receptionists, secretaries, and bookkeepers. These employment changes also altered the reasons for Anglo women to speak Spanish. Classified advertisements in the El Paso Herald-Post from 1946 to 1950 reveal that employers frequently, though not predominantly, required proficiency in Spanish for exactly these kinds of semiprofessional positions. Even if such women eventually entered into marriage and motherhood and left the work force—and booklets such as Your Spanish Servant reminded women that this was the ultimate goal—the market shows that Spanish proficiency held economic value for women beyond directing household staff.24 If Spanish instructional values and content were marked by ideological stasis throughout the prewar and postwar periods, the perceived need for Anglo bilingualism grew in the late 1940s and 1950s. As always, El Paso politics “were controlled by the Anglo-American business interests,” stated a report on the postwar economy, and some of the city's most powerful industries, including its utility companies, were known to hire only Anglos. Charting the city's pattern of neighborhood segregation, job discrimination, and voter suppression for the Nation, Carey McWilliams contended that if El Paso's “‘better elements’ are fearful of the potential strength of the Spanish-speaking group, they show no inclination to remedy the condition under which it suffers.” Writing for the commission as its first executive secretary, Pauline Kibbe reported after a visit to El Paso that, despite meeting Anglos who were “sincerely and actively engaged in promoting better conditions among the Latin American population of the city,” they remained “isolated individuals.” The majority possessed “not only apathy but the open prejudice and hostility born of ignorance.” The city's business elite consistently denied claims of discrimination, arguing, as did one El Paso Chamber of Commerce member, that “people of Latin-American extraction hold important positions in the city” and, for jobs where Spanish was an asset, such as in retail, “they are the preferred employees.” To some degree, all of these claims were true; El Paso continued to be run based on Anglo interests, but often these interests were best communicated in Spanish. Bilingualism had become a progressively more important skill, both as the immigrant population grew after the war and as the Mexican economy recovered from the Great Depression, especially in cities (such as Ciudad Juárez, just across the river from El Paso) in the northern border states, where the citizenry—and consumer base—grew by several hundred percent. Addressing American Legion members in 1948, Penrose reminisced about working in Mexico in the 1910s. At the time, he found “American storekeepers and shop keepers, hundreds of them, and farmers, ranchers, and bankers. Americans everywhere. We owned and operated most of the railroads, oil fields, refineries, public utilities, and the mining industry.”25 This narrative of Anglo decline was one of the most important beliefs that El Pasoans shared with commission members. As anxious El Paso business leaders sought capital investments from outside the city to grow its changing economy, they drew on long-standing stereotypes of its Spanish-speaking workers as one of its greatest assets. The El Paso Industrial Development Committee, for example, sought to entice textile industries to establish new factories in the city, arguing that the city's abundant Mexican American workers were “particularly good at repetitious operations,” a common stereotype that teachers as much as industrialists subscribed to. But statistics show that Mexican American workers were making strides in new areas of the economy, despite such efforts to characterize them as low-level workers. The number of workers in manufacturing doubled in the city between 1937 and 1949; by 1951, El Paso's three oil refineries employed more than 750 people with a payroll of over 2.5 million dollars. Even if professional positions and the city's highest-earning work remained dominated by Anglos, an increasing number of middle-range jobs in these industries went to people who spoke Spanish. From 1940 to 1950 the number of Mexican Americans in low white-collar positions such as clerks, foremen, and secretaries grew by 8 percent. The percentage of Mexican Americans and Anglos in semiskilled and service positions had been nearly equal in 1940; one decade later Mexican Americans occupied twice as many (33.2 percent) of these positions as Anglos (15.6 percent). Classified advertisements in El Paso newspapers frequently asked for Spanish speakers for jobs in sales, while also requesting that Anglos (or “locals”) apply. Even entry-level positions were important because they could lead to more profitable management positions in the future. In 1948 a plant foreman, likely to direct workers who spoke Spanish, could earn up to five times as much as an unskilled worker and twice as much as a lineman.26 Unable to resist these changes in the same ways that they had resisted school integration, Anglos saw that their best hope was to prepare themselves better to compete. Even before the war, the school superintendent A. H. Hughey enthusiastically promoted the elementary Spanish program, explaining that “teaching Spanish to our American-speaking students certainly is one of the biggest educational problems in the Southwest.” Hughey attributed the failure of previous attempts to make Spanish part of the curriculum on insufficient numbers of qualified teachers, principals' resistance, and a lack of interest among Anglo students. But Anglo interests had changed, as was especially evident when the El Paso Times editor W. J. Hooten argued for the inclusion of conversational Spanish in elementary schools in 1946; his comments began what would become a three-month-long debate with readers. While some readers wrote to Hooten to critique the new program, many more were in favor of Spanish, often because they understood they were at a disadvantage without it. As one reader described it, “in all businesses in and around El Paso Spanish is used almost as much as English…. You can bet those children of ours that live here all their lives would certainly be grateful to us if … they had the opportunity to learn Spanish and learn it right. I'm all for it and I know plenty of other mothers are too.”27 In focusing on the opportunities they were losing to Spanish speakers, many El Pasoans specifically disavowed the cultural and social claims the commission made about the importance of Spanish-language acquisition. For example, one El Paso Times reader questioned “the advantages of speaking Spanish as an asset in the ‘Good Neighbor Policy.’” “I doubt if our ability to speak Spanish is conducive to a more friendly relationship between the peoples of the two countries,” she wrote. But she was strongly in favor of Spanish instruction nevertheless because of the “economic value of such a move…. If you want your child to feel fairly certain of employment in hard times, your child has a tremendous advantage if he or she knows both Spanish and English.” Postwar El Paso parents had known hard times, first in the Great Depression and then in World War II. More than neighborliness and cultural appreciation, El Paso Times readers worried about Anglo children's ability to compete in a growing border city where more citizens spoke Spanish than English. Hooten, strongly in favor of daily Spanish instruction, reminded readers that they would discover “practically all of the Americans of Latin descent will be bi-lingual, while those of Anglo descent will know only the one language.” It made little sense for El Pasoans, with a Mexican American student population of 64 percent by 1946, “to teach our children along the same lines as children are taught in Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, and Lubbock,” he urged. Hooten made an important point. Of the major cities in postwar Texas, only San Antonio approximated El Paso's demographic proportions. In Dallas County, the ethnic Mexican population was 3.4 percent; in Bexar County, home of San Antonio, 49 percent; in Harris County, which contained Houston, the population was 17 percent. El Paso's relative population statistics more closely resembled rural districts along the border such as Brownsville and McAllen, which might house only a handful of schools, than they did other major urban areas. If El Paso was to develop into a metropolis on the scale of other Texas cities, and if Anglo El Pasoans were to remain afforded Americans, schools were going to need to educate young Anglos uniquely from other big cities in the state.28 Class anxiety was not the only factor to affect Spanish instruction after the war, however, and El Paso school goals and commission goals overlapped in other ways. While earlier experiments in elementary Spanish instruction always focused on oral facility, politics as much as pedagogy now pressed educators to focus on sound and, more specifically, on sounding “Mexican.” In the 1930s students needed to worry about making themselves clear to their house staff or other subordinates; in the 1940s and 1950s, Anglos were more concerned about winning over others, in the workplace and abroad. In announcing the beginning of conversational Spanish lessons in eight elementary schools in 1941, Superintendent Hughey assured parents that “El Paso's native color and Mexican vocabulary will be used in the course. Fluency in speaking and a ‘Spanish ear’ will be the aim of the teachers rather than teaching pupils to read Spanish.” The focus on colloquial “Americanized” Spanish, rather than on Castilian Spanish, which dominated high school instruction in the previous decades, was in line with larger trends in foreign language instruction throughout the Cold War. The trends stemmed from reasons other than Hughey's economic concerns. Federal Education Commissioner Earl James McGrath argued that foreign language mastery was essential to building alliances and fighting communism, and for an emphasis on “idiomatic speech, the everyday language of people of other lands.” American children could only be Pan-American if they sounded like native speakers and natural global citizens with “as little accent as possible,” rather than people who had studied Spanish in a classroom for two years. In this sense, he and others argued, Spanish must be taught to the youngest children, who were better at imitating sounds than were adolescents. Focusing on elementary-aged children required disposing of traditional methods of language instruction such as “direct memorization of vocabulary, the conjugation of verbs, and the declension of nouns” and instead using what would “excite the interest of pupils” and nurture “verbal facility.” This meant enabling students to converse about the kinds of things expected to interest Anglo children: their families, their homes and possessions, and the animals and objects found on the ranches and farms that surrounded El Paso.29 The emphasis on the colloquial and on sounding natural only brought greater attention to the fact that few El Paso teachers sounded like native speakers. Of the 592 teachers in the El Paso schools in the 1945–1946 school year, just eighteen possessed Spanish surnames. Tanner advised that anyone preparing to teach elementary school in Texas take twelve hours of Spanish, but this recommendation lacked teeth, in El Paso or anywhere else, and it offered an unrealistic view of the time it took to learn a language, especially as an adult. A study of fourth-grade and fifth-grade El Paso teachers who had majored in Spanish revealed that few felt they spoke fluently; their own education had focused on reading and writing in Spanish. As Hughey faced growing pressure to expand Spanish instruction in the schools beyond fifteen minutes of conversation per day, the superintendent, who five years earlier had argued for change, took on the “considerable comment in the local newspapers” to defend the status quo. Hughey pointed to the lack of qualified teachers and the inadequacy of “having a teacher read out of a book, mispronouncing the words because they don't understand the language.” “We are teaching Spanish when we can get teachers who speak it well enough to teach children,” he contended. In fact, the teacher issue, coupled with community interest, was the most important challenge to expanding Spanish instruction everywhere in Texas. To implement the 1940 initiative, the district persuaded the high school instructor Carlos Rivera to leave El Segundo Barrio school where he worked and to serve as a traveling teacher, teaching twenty-five lessons a week to elementary students. The schools expanded this model in the 1950s, when a team of seven itinerant teachers alone served ten thousand elementary students. While the city's percentage of Mexican American teachers grew steadily if incrementally throughout the 1950s and 1960s, not until the late 1970s did it top 30 percent, still less than half the percentage of the Mexican American student body.30 Despite these shortcomings in resources, middle-class Anglos continued to push for more Spanish instruction. E. M. Pooley, the editor at the El Paso Herald-Post, like his competitor at the El Paso Times, made scaling back instruction difficult for Hughey. Reminding his readers that “there are 10,000 qualified teachers of Spanish in this City,” Pooley shamed Hughey with claims such as “when the cooks and maids of El Paso do a better job of teaching Spanish to small children than the School System, somebody ought to hand in his head.” He railed against the state education board for denying “hundreds of women capable of teaching Spanish to the small fry” from doing so because “they do not have the ‘hours’ required by Austin.” Pooley's ideas were difficult to take seriously given the class dynamics of the city and state politics, but decades before the paraprofessional movement, he considered something previously ignored by the commission in pushing for the inclusion of nontraditional teachers to provide Spanish instruction. Despite these challenges, however, the efforts of the commission and the appeal of Spanish instruction came to fruition in El Paso. When Hughey retired in 1957, his replacement initially claimed the budget contained no room to continue elementary Spanish. Once again, local newspapers brought attention to the issue, and the local board revised the school's position. Now, Spanish lessons would be offered after school to interested students. To the surprise of the board and the superintendent, over six thousand elementary students showed up for lessons. Whether this interest was due to Good Neighborism or simply the pragmatic appeal of bilingualism in a border city, the demands of the after-school program signaled a major shift in Anglo thinking, from Spanish as a helpful tool for taking vacations and overseeing house staff to an essential skill for academics and life.31 Anglo El Pasoans' belief in the importance of Spanish instruction grew during the Cold War, even as they still feared their children attending school with their Spanish-speaking neighbors. As such, they exhibited greater interest in bilingualism than did many Americans, even if their motivations stemmed from a conservative world view. They understood that Spanish acquisition was a skill from which Anglo children would profit throughout their working lives. In 1947 Governor Jester considered putting forth legislation making Spanish teaching compulsory in the state's elementary schools. Anglo El Pasoans voted with their feet, not waiting for a mandate that never arrived. They may not have exhibited Tanner's cultural or political consciousness, but in realizing they lived in a bilingual society, they recognized their need for Spanish mastery. Yet if they saw the pragmatic value in learning the language, it did not mean they understood it as their ethical or political responsibility to become better neighbors in the most literal sense of the term. Even in the city's few racially integrated schools, wrote one El Paso Times reporter, Anglo students were unlikely to learn the language because “Spanish-American students seem to drift off amongst themselves and American children do likewise.” In the early years of the Cold War, Anglo and Mexican children may have functioned as neighbors in reality, but the organization and dynamics of school life in El Paso indicated that they were infrequently so in spirit.32 Bilingualism and School Segregation To George Sánchez, the half million children living in the Southwest constituted a “natural resource” for the nation. “These children and their English-speaking fellow-students are in an enviable cultural situation,” as he saw it, and offered “a tremendous ‘head start’ to the curriculum designer … seriously concerned with adjusting the program of education to the demands of a hemispheric and world order that already looms large on the horizon.” Sánchez envisioned a system in which Spanish-speaking and English-speaking children attended school together and taught each other language more authentically and intensively than either group could experience in the classroom alone. Understanding that the “traditional inertia” of school segregation threatened any such possibility, Sánchez pushed the commission to adopt two education platforms simultaneously: promoting bilingualism and desegregating schools.33 But the commission was far more comfortable with bilingualism than with desegregation. Historically, the commission, like Anglos broadly, had failed to recognize its resources. It also wanted to avoid any appearance of attempting to advance African American civil rights, as its support of Texas House Concurrent Resolution 105, the “Caucasian Race—Equal Privileges” resolution, in 1943 signified. To the commission, the promise that “all persons of the Caucasian race … are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of all public places,” appeared a legitimate and supportable form of civil rights legislation. The fundamental racism of Caucasian rights aside, resolution 105 meant little for Mexican Americans who were already legally classified as white and still faced discrimination. Relatedly, the commission claimed influence in bringing about the State Board of Education's 1950 declaration prohibiting school segregation based on language. As with all of the commission's education platforms, however, success was highly dependent on local context. The declaration should have made school transfer policies such as those of the El Paso schools more difficult to maintain. Instead, the city continued to preserve what the 1976 U.S. District Court case Alvarado v. El Paso Independent School District would call “ethnically identifiable schools.”34 Sánchez's vision of language instruction was impossible to realize in a segregated school system, and it was not well supported by larger ideas about bilingualism early in the Cold War. Pushing for the expansion of Spanish instruction nationally, U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs education director Harold Davis explained that “complete cultural assimilation may eventually eliminate bilingualism. But meanwhile many considerations urge the desirability of the study of Spanish, by English-speaking as well as Spanish-speaking groups, in a region like the United States Southwest where the two cultures are meeting.” Davis revealed the potential entanglements between inter-Americanism and Cold War American expansionism; bilingualism to him was both a solution to an immediate problem and a complication in itself that could be remediated by assimilation. This view of cultural assimilation undoubtedly expected more accommodation from Mexicans than from Anglos. Because of segregation and the lack of opportunity for cultural exchange, El Paso schools operated along this line of thinking. Superintendent Hughey maintained, at the same time Spanish was being taught to Anglo children across the city, that “the practice of bilingualism in an American public school is inconsistent with good school operation.” By bilingualism he meant the casual, natural exchange in Spanish between Mexican American children on the playground or in other locations; in his eyes, such use of Spanish necessarily led to the “neglect [of] the English language … all-important to their American education.” The only kind of bilingualism consistent with school goals was the adoption of English by Mexican American students and the practice of Spanish by Anglo learners.35 Mexican American civic leaders could lend support to this flawed conceptualization of bilingualism and its merits. Among El Paso's small but significant middle-class Mexican American community, support for English-only instruction was especially strong. Since 1929, members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (Lulac) had fought for Mexican American civil rights across the Southwest, largely by arguing that Mexican Americans were legally white. This strategy was at the root of Lulac campaigns for equal and integrated schools. The centrality of whiteness to the league's conceptions of race equity and its dedication to integrationism—a strategy that Cynthia Orozco and others have argued was a response to Anglo anxiety over a “Mexican problem” such as that found in El Paso, preconditioned its allegiance to English as the language of the public sphere. Like other locals, the El Paso Lulac chapter saw English as “necessary for the enjoyment of our rights and privileges,” and therefore “the official language of this Organization, and we pledge ourselves to learn, and speak and teach same to our children.” Just as significant, by the 1940s, Lulac had surrendered its original commitment to promoting Spanish language maintenance. Lulac members, who lived predominantly among Anglos in the city's neighborhoods just north of El Segundo Barrio, shared their neighbors' investment in ideas about the afforded child and saw English and education as keys. Their dedication to English was even more uniform than were their ideas about education. For example, William Flores, who was the national Lulac president in 1944, remembered that while he “always lived on the American side” of El Paso and attended school there, his presidential predecessor Modesto Gómez “liv[ed] himself on the Mexican side most of the time because he go[t] his business there” and sent his children to Bowie, the city's Mexican high school. Flores questioned Gómez on his decision when he could have sent his children to school on the north side, but Gómez “stayed firm, that he was going to help Bowie[,] and his children were going to graduate from there.” Yet no parallel debates took place within Lulac about the privileging of English as an expression of citizenship and security.36 This view of Spanish as secondary, even for native speakers of the language, was certainly not the only one held, and the middle-class Mexican Americans who composed Lulac were unrepresentative of the city's larger working-class and poor population, even as they advocated for them. But if the interests of different groups of ethnic Mexican students varied, their outcome appeared much the same in this respect. Spanish was much more popular at Austin High School, the city's Anglo high school, where 47 percent of students studied the language, than at Bowie High School, located in the heart of the city' south side, where only 25 percent did so. Given the dearth of qualified teachers and their own oral mastery of the language, Bowie students had less to gain by studying Spanish in school. Studying Spanish also might have presented an unwelcome struggle for them, given its absence from the curriculum in the earlier grades. Esther Brown, a Bowie teacher, argued that Mexican American students needed to study Spanish even more than Anglos did. While the Spanish-speaking child “knows how to speak the language of his forefathers, he needs to be taught to read and write it,” she contended. But neither the school structure nor the elementary curriculum supported her contention. Instead, most Mexican American students spent their school day operating in English, surrounded almost entirely by nonnative speakers of it. When the El Paso attorney Luciano Santoscoy wrote to Sánchez to protest that Spanish-speaking elementary students received no Spanish instruction while Anglo children received fifteen minutes per day, Sánchez answered that “slight variations in curriculum do not constitute discrimination” and encouraged Santoscoy to contact the superintendent. For Sánchez, the absence of fifteen minutes of Spanish appeared “slight,” but Santoscoy underscored the way Spanish instruction stemmed from Anglo privilege and why it mattered. In contrast to neighboring New Mexico, where Spanish-speaking citizens argued forcefully for formal Spanish instruction for their children, relatively few El Paso parents expressed a similar desire. Instead, Hughey claimed, “complaints from Spanish-speaking parents who send their children to school to learn English” had led schools to enforce English-only policies and suspend students for the “habitual speaking of Spanish on school grounds.” The habitualness of Spanish speaking was enabled by the fact that for Mexican American youth, Spanish was the shared language in their schools. They were expected to feel a need to speak English on the playground and elsewhere even though school demographics provided them with little reason to do so.37 The city's dedication to Spanish instruction for its Anglo students, conversely, remained strong over time, even as the commitment to Spanish in Texas waned in the 1950s. By 1952, Tanner reported, only 10 percent of the elementary schools in the state that had offered Spanish instruction in 1945 still did. El Paso and Corpus Christi retained “outstanding elementary programs,” but Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Austin, Amarillo, Galveston, and Lubbock had all dropped theirs. El Paso remained the exception in what the Modern Language Association's executive secretary characterized as “ill-fated statewide Spanish ventures.” The reasons for the steep decline, the commission found, were rooted in the problems the movement had experienced all along, including an insufficient teaching force and a fundamental lack of faith in the diplomatic, inter-American ideals that Tanner espoused but few Texan Anglos seemed to share in their purist, least opportunistic forms. The continued dedication to Spanish instruction in El Paso proved the importance of an immediate sense of need that, far from Tanner's liberal ideals, stemmed from prejudice, anxiety, and self-interest. These beliefs would change little over the early Cold War, throughout which Spanish would be viewed as the most desirable foreign language to learn and, at the same time, the greatest foreign language threat in American classrooms. Spanish became and has remained the most commonly studied foreign language in the high school grades since 1948, even as the real number of students studying languages remained low during the Cold War's first decade. This irony reveals the degree to which the push for Spanish acquisition was driven by competition rather than neighborliness and about the terms upon which each language would be spoken. Spanish may have been the language of profit, but English was to remain the language of power.38 Notes Thank you to Jonathan Zimmerman, Zoe Burkholder, Robert Gunn, David García, and the Department of History colloquium at the University of Texas at El Paso for their insightful and instructive responses to drafts of this essay. I benefited enormously from the comments and attention of the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of American History, and from the copyediting assistance of Cynthia Gwynne Yaudes. Thank you also to Gyneth Garrison for gifting me copies of two Spanish manuals for Anglo housewives. Research for this essay was funded with a grant from the Spencer Foundation. Footnotes 1 Myrtle L. Tanner, “Spanish in the Elementary Schools,” Texas Outlook, 34 (Oct. 1950), 24, 37; “Multiple Troubles Faced by the Good Neighbor Body,” Dallas Morning News, April 9, 1948, p. 24; Neville G. Penrose to Members of the Legislature, Nov. 7, 1949, folder 18, box 1989/059-47, Texas Good Neighbor Commission Records (Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin). 2 Carlos Kevin Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (College Station, 2007); Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (College Station, 2000); Rubén Donato, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era (Albany, 1997); Jeanne M. Powers, “Forgotten History: Mexican American School Segregation in Arizona from 1900–1951,” Equity and Excellence in Education, 41 (Oct. 2008), 467–81. 3 The movement for Spanish-language instruction in Texas differed politically from the Foreign Language in the Elementary Schools movement of the 1930s and 1940s. On pluralism and language education, see Theodore Andersson, The Teaching of Foreign Languages in the Elementary School (Lexington, Mass., 1953); Blanton, Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 24–41; Jonathan Zimmerman, “Ethnics against Ethnicity: European Immigrants and Foreign-Language Instruction, 1890–1940,” Journal of American History, 88 (March 2002), 1383–1404; and Jeffrey E. Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European Immigrants (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). On the tension between public schools and private advantage, see David F. Labaree, How to Succeed in School without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education (New Haven, 1997), 15–52; David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New Haven, 1988); David Hogan, “‘To Better Our Condition’: Educational Credentialing and ‘the Silent Compulsion of Economic Relations’ in the United States, 1830 to the Present,” History of Education Quarterly, 36 (Fall 1996), 243–70; and Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (New York, 2019). Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley, 1998). 4 “Minutes of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission Meeting, March 1948,” folder 1, box 18, George I. Sánchez Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection (University of Texas Libraries, Austin). For the population statistics, see Oscar J. Martínez, Border Boom Town: Ciudad Juárez since 1848 (Austin, 1978), 159–60. Oscar J. Martínez discusses the difficulty of capturing statistics for the Mexican American population between 1950 and 1960 and doubts that the population truly dropped from 56% of the total to 45% between 1940 and 1960, as numbers suggest. On ethnicity and migration in El Paso prior to World War II, see Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2017). On population growth in the Southwest, see Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), 59–60; and Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington, 1985), 108–10. 5 Margaret Peacock, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill, 2014), 31. On the use of images of children in Cold War political culture, including in arguments about the health of American democracy, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988); and Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, 2000). On the thin patina, see Peacock, Innocent Weapons, 31. On El Paso student demographics, see Texas State Department of Education, Statewide Survey of Enumeration, Enrollment, Attendance, and Progress of Latin American Children in Texas Schools, 1943–1944 (Austin, 1944). 6 Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York, 2010), 66–67. The system of punishments for speaking Spanish echoes throughout scholarship on Mexican American education and has been reinforced by El Pasoans. See Genevieve Gonzalez interview by Jonna Perrillo, April 17, 2017, digital file (in Jonna Perrillo's possession); Elena Tovar interview by Perrillo, April 25, 2017, digital file, ibid.; and Raul Villa interview by Perrillo, May 13, 2017, digital file, ibid. See also Rosa R. Guerrero interview by Paulina Aldrete, May 3, 1983, audio and transcript, interview no. 611, Institute of Oral History (C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, University of Texas at El Paso Library, El Paso); and Joe A. Rosales interview by Homero Galicia, Feb. 7, 2009, audio and transcript, interview no. 1532, ibid. On the marginalization of Mexican American students and teachers, see Tanner, “Spanish in the Elementary Schools,” 24; and “Multiple Troubles Faced by the Good Neighbor Body,” 24. 7 Myrtle L. Tanner, “The Study of Spanish in Texas Schools,” Texas Outlook, 28 (May 1944), 39. In 1920, 27% of high school students studied a foreign language; by 1950, the number had dropped to 14%. See Earl James McGrath, “Foreign Language Instruction in American Schools,” Modern Language Journal, 37 (March 1953), 116. See also Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform (New York, 2000), 350–51. On Spanish instruction to Anglos in the Southwest, see Ruth R. Ginsberg, “The Los Angeles Spanish Program,” Hispania, 34 (Feb. 1951), 94–95; and Grace E. Hotchkiss, “The Role of the Principal in the Program of Teaching Spanish in the Elementary School,” ibid., 37 (March 1954), 72–75. An important movement for teaching Spanish to Spanish-speaking children developed in New Mexico. See Rosina Lozano, An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (Oakland, 2018); and Lynne Marie Getz, Schools of Their Own: The Education of Hispanos in New Mexico, 1850–1940 (Albuquerque, 1997). E. E. Mireles, “Spanish Program in Corpus Christi,” Texas Outlook, 25 (May 1941), 62; Blanton, Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 103. A more detailed description of the Corpus Christi program can be found in Edmundo E. Mireles, “Corpus Christi Kids are Bilingual,” Texas Outlook, 35 (May 1951), 10–12. 8 Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill, 2010), 31. For a history of El Paso's industrial development before World War I, see ibid. Jongkwan Lee, Giovanni Peri, and Vasil Yasenov, “The Employment Effects of Mexican Repatriations: Evidence from the 1930s,” Sept. 2017, pp. 19–20, 24, 32, working paper 23885, National Bureau of Economic Research, http://giovanniperi.ucdavis.edu/uploads/5/6/8/2/56826033/mexican.pdf; Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque, 2006); S. Deborah Kang, The Ins on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (New York, 2017). 9 Bradford Luckingham, The Urban Southwest: A Profile History of Albuquerque, El Paso, Phoenix, and Tucson (El Paso, 1982), 105. While the number of ethnic Mexicans rose in El Paso in the 1940s, their percentage of the urban demographic dropped, particularly because of the postwar expansion of Fort Bliss. The percentage of Spanish-surnamed students in El Paso County dropped from 70.77% to 68.19% between 1929 and 1942. See Lyle Saunders, The Spanish-Speaking Population of Texas (Austin, 1949), 44. 10 Tanner, “Spanish in the Elementary Schools,” 37. Tom Sutherland to Neville G. Penrose, Oct. 7, 1949, folder 17, box 1989/059-47, Texas Good Neighbor Commission Records; Penrose to Sam M. Tabor, Jan. 27, 1950, ibid. On the bracero program and its implementation in El Paso, see Martínez, Border Boom Town, 110–14; Richard B. Craig, The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy (Austin, 1971); Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill, 2011); and Cristina Salinas, Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century (Austin, 2018). On the Texas Good Neighbor Commission and Mexican labor, see Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II (College Station, 2009). 11 Pauline R. Kibbe, Community Organization for Inter-American Understanding (Austin, 1944), 6; Hector P. García, “School Inspection Report on Fourteen Schools,” May 1949, folder 61, box 1989/59-16, Texas Good Neighbor Commission Records. 12 I allude here to David G. García's argument that Anglos coordinated as “white architects” to segregate Mexicans. See David G. García, Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (Oakland, 2018). García borrows the term “white architects” from William H. Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York, 2001). On George I. Sánchez's life and work, see Carlos Kevin Blanton, George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (New Haven, 2014); Américo Paredes, ed., Humanidad: Essays in Honor of George I. Sánchez (Los Angeles, 1977); and Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven, 1989). Herschel Manuel was Sánchez's graduate adviser at the University of Texas. See Blanton, George I. Sánchez, 28–30. T. Nellie Ward Kingrea, History of the First Ten Years of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission and Discussion of Its Major Problems (Fort Worth, 1954), 81. On the race politics of the governors who were critical to the commission's early work and of several commission members, see George Norris Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics: The Primitive Years, 1938–1957 (Westport, 1979). Chris Fox to Dorrance D. Roderick, Dec. 4, 1947, folder 2, box 2, Chris Fox Collection, Ms 150 (Sonnichsen Special Collections Department). 13 Lozano, American Language, 178. 14 Lyle Saunders, “Educational Problems of the Spanish-Speaking Child in Texas,” [1949], folder 10, box 32, Sánchez Papers; Byron England, “El Paso Develops Aids for Teachers of Bilinguals,” Texas Outlook, 29 (Oct. 1945), 42–43. 15 Byron England, “El Paso Forges ahead in Curriculum and Building Design,” American School Board Journal, 114 (Feb. 1947), 44. On the statistics of students from El Paso's south side, see A. O. Wynn, “A Study of the Operations of the El Paso Public Schools during the School Years 1930–31 through 1945–46” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at El Paso, 1948), 45–46, table IV-C. Texas State Department of Education, Statewide Survey of Enumeration, Enrollment, Attendance, and Progress of Latin American Children in Texas Schools. Public Schools of El Paso, Texas, Rules and Manual for School Employees (El Paso, 1944), 76. All African American students in the city attended the Douglass School, also located in south El Paso. On conditions in the schools, see El Paso Committee on the Border Project, A Study of the Conditions Affecting Children in El Paso County (El Paso, 1948), 116; El Paso Public Schools, Take a Good Look at Your Schools (El Paso, 1951); Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920 (New Haven, 1981), 6; Pauline Kibbe, “Report to Dr. Sánchez on Trip to El Paso and Del Rio, Texas, May 19–26, 1943,” p. 4, folder 14, box 32, Sánchez Papers; and Lucille Prim Jackson, “An Analysis of the Language Difficulties of the Spanish-Speaking Children of Bowie High School, El Paso, Texas” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1938), 48. 16 Herschel T. Manuel, The Education of Mexican and Spanish-Speaking Children in Texas (Austin, 1930), 120, 119. On Mexican students' attendance rates, Wilson Little, Spanish-Speaking Children in Texas (Austin, 1944), 26. Lloyd Cook and Elaine Cook, Intergroup Education (New York, 1954), 23; Thomas S. Sutherland, “Texas Tackles the Race Problem,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 12, 1952, pp. 22, 23, 64, 66, esp. 23. 17 Jackson, “Analysis of the Language Difficulties of the Spanish-Speaking Children of Bowie High School,” 6; Esther Brown, “Some Aspects of Teaching Languages in the Grades in the Southwest,” Hispania, 23 (May 1940), 173. 18 George Sánchez to Fred McCuisition, Feb. 5, 1946, folder 1, box 56, Sánchez Papers. El Paso Public Schools, A Manual of Aids and Devices for Teaching Bilingual Children in the El Paso Public Schools, Grade 5 (El Paso, 1947), 4; El Paso Public Schools, A Manual of Aids and Devices for Teaching Beginning Non-English-Speaking Children, Level One (El Paso, 1946), 1; El Paso Public Schools, Workshop for Developing Teaching Aids for Non-English-Speaking Children (El Paso, 1945), 44, 56, 61–62. 19 On the relationship between health and school segregation, see David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin, 1987), 194; García, Desert Immigrants, 13–16; and San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed,” 49. Raymon E. Patton, “A History of the Housing Authority of El Paso and Low-Rent Housing,” ca. 1953, p. 22, History no. 73, Seminar Papers (Sonnichsen Special Collections Department). For Federal Public Housing Authority statistics and on housing and public health in the city, see El Paso Committee on the Border Project, A Study of Conditions Affecting Children in El Paso County (El Paso, 1948), 106. On public health concerns and reality in El Paso, see Mario T. García, “Mexican Americans and the Politics of Citizenship,” New Mexico Historical Review, 59 (Spring 1984), 187–204; John Mckiernan-González, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Chapel Hill, 2014); Ann Gabbert, “Defending the Boundaries of Care: Local Responses to Global Concerns in El Paso Public Health Policy, 1881–1941” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at El Paso, 2006); and Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, “Good Neighbors and White Mexicans: Constructing Race and Nation on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 33 (Fall 2013), 5–34. On public health and Mexican Americans more broadly, see Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley, 2006). 20 El Paso Public Schools, Manual of Aids and Devices for Teaching Beginning Non-English-Speaking Children, Level One, 14, 17, 24; El Paso Public Schools, A Manual of Materials, Aids, and Techniques for the Teaching of Spanish to English-Speaking Children, First Grade (El Paso, 1952), 45, 31, 89. 21 El Paso Public Schools, Workshop for Developing Teaching Aids for Non-English-Speaking Children, 33. 22 “Alamo Students Form Club to Increase English Vocabulary,” El Paso Herald-Post, April 4, 1946, p. 9; “English Club at San Jacinto,” ibid., Sept. 17, 1948, p. 12; “Better English Is Goal of New Club,” ibid., Oct. 6, 1950, p. 31; “Better English Is the Club Aim,” ibid., Oct. 2, 1940, p. 14; “Mexican Group Gives Party,” ibid., April 24, 1940, p. 4; “Form English Club,” ibid., Sept. 29, 1950, p. 16. 23 Marion Fisk, “Spanish, How It Can Help Me,” Crockett Elementary School Sun (El Paso, Tex.), Dec. 18, 1931, p. 4. Grace Munro, “Resume of Spanish for the School Year 1931–1932,” ibid., May 20, 1932, p. 5. 24 Sandoval News Service, Learn How to Speak Spanish with Your Servant (El Paso, 1952), 4–5; Sandoval News Service, Your Spanish Servant (El Paso, 1952); Bureau of Business Research of the College of Business Administration at the University of Texas, “Table 15: Years of School Completed in El Paso County and El Paso, 1940,” in An Economic Survey of El Paso County Prepared for the Texas and Pacific Railway Company (Austin, 1949), folder 29, box 57, El Paso Department of City Planning Records, Ms 204 (Sonnichsen Special Collections Department). 25 Patricia Reschenthaler, Postwar Readjustment in El Paso, 1945–1950 (El Paso, 1968), 4. Carey McWilliams, “The El Paso Story,” Nation, July 10, 1948, p. 46; Kibbe, “Report to Dr. Sánchez on Trip to El Paso and Del Rio,” 1, 10. Despite her strong criticism of El Paso, Pauline Kibbe noted that she could not find an Anglo in Del Rio who would meet with her and support her views. Ed Holden to Nelville Penrose, June 21, 1950, folder 43, box 1989/59-18, Texas Good Neighbor Commission Records. On how El Paso's economic development compared to the economies of other southwestern cities, see Cadava, Standing on Common Ground; Luckingham, Urban Southwest; and Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, 2016). On the changing economic relations between the sister cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in this period, see Martínez, Border Boom Town, 95–115; and “Address by Neville G. Penrose to Texas Post Commanders and Adjutants of the American Legion,” Dec. 11, 1949, folder 18, box 1989/059-47, Texas Good Neighbor Commission Records. 26 El Paso Industrial Development Committee, “Opportunities in El Paso,” ca. 1953, p. 8, folder 14, box 46, El Paso Department of City Planning Records. Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., for example, quotes Aoy Elementary School principal Kathering Gorbutt, who praised Mexican students for their “painstaking capacity for little things” and their “ability to make the best of a bad bargain.” See San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed,” 45. On changes in El Paso industries and economics, see Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “El Paso,” Monthly Business Review, 36 (July 1951), 92. Martínez, Border Boom Town, 164–65; and Stephan Thernstorm, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 290–92. Bureau of Business Research of the College of Administration at the University of Texas, “An Economic Survey of El Paso County, Prepared for the Texas and Pacific Railway Company,” March 1949, folder 29, box 57, entry 3.0206, El Paso Department of City Planning Records. 27 Raymond J. Stover, “Eight Schools Try Spanish,” El Paso Times, April 12, 1940, p. 16; W. J. Hooten, “Everyday Events,” ibid., Jan. 29, 1946, p. 4. 28 W. J. Hooten, “Everyday Events,” ibid., Feb. 4, 1946, p. 4; “Everyday Events,” ibid., Jan. 26, 1946, p. 4; “Everyday Events,” ibid., Feb. 11, 1946, p. 4. For statistics of all Texas counties, see Texas State Department of Education, Statewide Survey of Enumeration, Enrollment, Attendance, and Progress of Latin American Children in Texas Public Schools. 29 “Conversational Spanish to Begin in E.P. Fifth Grade,” El Paso Times, Aug. 21, 1941, p. 2. On the changes in upper-level Spanish instruction between 1925 and 1941, see Muriel Grace David and Henry Grattan Doyle, “Spanish Language Textbooks,” in Latin America in School and College Teaching Materials: Report of the Committee on the Study of Teaching Materials on Inter-American Subjects, ed. American Council on Education (Washington, 1944), 275–315. McGrath, “Foreign Language Instruction in American Schools,” 117. 30 For El Paso teacher statistics, see Oscar J. Martínez, The Chicanos of El Paso: An Assessment of Progress (El Paso, 1980), 27; Tanner, “Spanish in the Elementary Schools,” 24; and Carlos Rivera, “The El Paso Spanish Program: Grades One through Seven,” Hispania, 41 (May 1958), 264. “School Chief Defends Spanish Instruction,” El Paso Times, Feb. 9, 1946, pp. 1, 10; Bill Broom, “‘Buenos Dios, Ninos,’ Opens Spanish Teaching in Schools,” El Paso Herald-Post, Sept. 24, 1951, p. 3; Rivera, “El Paso Spanish Program,” 265. To chart the changing composition of El Paso teachers over time, see table 15 in Martínez, Chicanos of El Paso, 27. 31 E. M. Pooley, “Side Bar Remarks,” El Paso Herald-Post, Feb. 12, 1946, p. 4; E. M. Pooley, “Texas Schools in Danger,” ibid., March 30, 1949, p. 10. Rivera, “El Paso Spanish Program,” 265. 32 On Beauford Jester see, “History of the Good Neighbor Commission,” 1952, unpublished report, pp. 51–52, folder 4, box 1989/059-48, Texas Good Neighbor Commission Records. The idea of statewide compulsory Spanish instruction was ultimately rejected because of teacher supply. Raymond J. Stover, “Eight Schools Try Spanish,” El Paso Times, April 12, 1940, p. 16. 33 George Sánchez, “Inter-American Education: The New Frontier,” in Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Annual Convention of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, May 3–7, 1942, San Antonio, Texas (Chicago, 1942), 39. 34 “History of the Good Neighbor Commission,” 26–28. On the history of the commission's stand on desegregation, see Natalie Mendoza, “The Good Neighbor Comes: The State, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and Regional Consciousness in the U.S. Southwest during World War II” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2016), 50–54. On Mexican Americans' relationship to Black civil rights in Texas, see Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill, 2011); and Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). Alvarado v. El Paso Independent School District, 426 F. Supp. 575 (W.D. Tex. 1976). 35 Harold E. Davis, “Education Program for Spanish-Speaking Americans,” World Affairs, 108 (March 1945), 45. On interwar thinking about bilingualism, see Blanton, Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas; Zimmerman, “Ethnics against Ethnicity”; and Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism. On the role of the U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs in American military and business interests in the United States and Mexico, see Monica A. Rankin, México, La Patria! Propaganda and Production during World War II (Lincoln, 2009); Julio Moreno, Yankee Don't Go Home! Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill, 2003); and Darlene J. Sadlier, Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II (Austin, 2012). A. H. Hughey, “Speaking English at School,” Texas Outlook, 28 (Nov. 1944), 36. 36 Cynthia Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin, 2009), 59–61. Other works that stress the efficacy of League of United Latin American Citizens racial strategies as a political calculation include Craig A. Kaplowitz, Lulac, Mexican Americans, and National Policy (College Station, 2005); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, 1995); and Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas. More critical accounts of the League of United Latin American Citizens and Caucasian rights include Benjamin Márquez, Lulac: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin, 1993); Thomas A. Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas,” Journal of American History, 92 (March 2006), 1212–37; and Neil Foley, “Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and the Faustian Pact with Whiteness,” in Reflexiones 1997: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, ed. Neil Foley (Austin, 1998), 53–70. League of United Latin American Citizens Council No. 132, “Aims and Purposes of the League of United Latin American Citizens,” Oct. 11, 1945, folder 3, box 1, Lulac Presidential Papers Project, Modesto Gómez Collection, 1945–1974, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection (University of Texas Libraries); Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 163. On El Paso residency, see “Master List of Members—Lulac—Council No. 132, El Paso, Texas, Dec. 8, 1945,” folder 21, box 3, Lulac Presidential Papers Project: William Flores Collection, 1934–1975, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection (University of Texas Libraries); and William Flores interview by Oscar J. Martínez, Nov. 26, Dec. 4, 1975, audio and transcript, interview no. 333, Institute of Oral History. 37 “Project Stated to Teach Spanish in All Grades,” El Paso Herald-Post, July 14, 1945, p. 1. Brown, “Some Aspects of Teaching Languages in the Grades in the Southwest,” 173. Emphasis in original. Luciano Santoscoy to Sánchez, Sept. 29, 1949, folder 23, box 12, Sánchez Papers; Sánchez to Santoscoy, Oct. 4, 1949, ibid. Carlos Kevin Blanton shows that Sánchez's fears of segregation led him to diminish the importance of Spanish instruction until later decades. See Blanton, George I. Sánchez, 229–31. On New Mexico, see Lozano, American Language; Phillip B. Gonzales, “The Political Construction of Latino Nomenclatures in Twentieth-Century New Mexico,” Journal of the Southwest, 35 (Summer 1993), 158–85; and “Spanish Ban in School Is Tightened,” El Paso Times, July 8, 1944. 38 “Survey Shows Drop in Spanish Teachers,” Biweekly Report of the Good Neighbor Commission, 2 (April 1952), folder 13, box 1989/59-47, Texas Good Neighbor Commission Records. Kenneth W. Mildenberger, “The Current Status of the Teaching of Spanish in the Elementary Schools,” Hispania, 37 (March 1954), 63–65, esp. 64. National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 56. Enrollment in Foreign Language Courses Compared with Enrollment in Grades 9 through 12 in Public Secondary Schools: Selected Years, Fall 1948 through Fall 2000,” https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_056.asp. © The Author 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Perils of Bilingualism: Anglo Anxiety and Spanish Instruction in the Borderlands
JO - Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaab064
DA - 2021-06-01
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VL - 108
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