Chapter 10: Strategies of segregation: Race, residence, and the struggle for educational equality

Abstract

David G. García’s Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality, winner of the American Educational Studies Association 2019 Critics’ Choice Book Award, provides a meticulous, nuanced, and brilliant study of the complex layers behind the historical connections of educational and residential segregation in Oxnard, California, from 1903 to 1974. Building on previous scholarship that treated each layer as a singular development, García’s work painstakingly examines the ways in which early-twentieth-century White architects of the city ensured that Oxnard’s bedrock institutions—schools and neighborhoods—would become the two most salient vehicles for establishing and maintaining a racial hierarchy. They implemented their own strategies of segregation so effectively that ethnic Mexican children today are still experiencing the consequences.