Abstract
The history of Latina girls and women in education has been woefully neglected. Standing at the intersection of the historiographical strands of women’s, educational, and Latina/o (chiefly Mexican and Puerto Rican) history, it has been hidden away for decades, surfacing briefly in studies on Chicana rights and contemporary analyses. This chapter examines the higher educational experiences of Mexican American women in the Southwest during the transformative decades between World War I and the Civil Rights Movement. Drawing from U.S. census bureau samples, primary textual sources, digitized oral histories and secondary sources, a thematic and chronological approach is utilized. The first section outlines four broad Mexican cultural and U.S. societal factors impacting higher educational access and completion, particularly gendered aspects. The second section introduces historical vignettes from three generations – Interwar Pioneras (1920–1937); Rosita’s Sisters in the World War II and Cold War Eras (1938–1959); and Incipient Chicanas (1960–1965). The third section discusses methodological challenges to researching Mexican educational history narrowly, and Latina/o history broadly. We further suggest ways in which this history can set the stage for future agendas towards a more inclusive mosaic of American higher education.
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Notes
- 1.
Letter from Rosa C. Martinez to Mercurio Martinez, Our Lady of Lake College, October 9, 1961, San Antonio, TX. Mercurio Martinez Collection, Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A & M University, College Station, TX.
- 2.
Letter from Mercurio Martinez to Rosa C. Martinez, October 24, 1961. Ibid. For information on Martinez see Document 5.1 “Teacher’s Certificate, Zapata County, Texas, 1898,” in Victoria-María MacDonald, ed. Latino Education in the U.S.: A Narrated History, 1513–2000 (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 124. Rosa Martinez was his daughter born of his third wife late in life. Biographical description in finding aid at the Cushman Library, http://archon.library.tamu.edu/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=29&q=mercurio+martinez.
- 3.
The Southwest includes Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas.
- 4.
William T. Snyder, Table 24, “Enrollment in institutions of higher education, by sex, attendance status, and type and control of institution: 1869–70 to fall 1991.” 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait. U.S. Dept. of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement (Washington D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 1993), 76–77.
- 5.
The term “Mexican American or Mexican descent” is utilized for anyone born in the United States but of Mexican parentage or heritage (second or more generations). The term “Mexican” refers to those born in Mexico. Latino/a is utilized when more than just Mexicans, but other groups such as Puerto Ricans, and Cubans are included.
- 6.
Claudia D. Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
- 7.
Ruth Zambrana, “From Girlhood to Womanhood,” in Ruth Zambrana, ed. Latino Families in Transition; “Familism,” in Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. Gonzalez, eds. The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Latinos & Latinas In The United States (New York: Oxford Press, 2006).
- 8.
Pierrette Hongdagneu-Sotelo, “Gender and contemporary U.S. immigration,” American Behavioral Scientist, 42, (1999).
- 9.
Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
- 10.
Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows.
- 11.
Sahlin notes of Texas Woman’s State University, “Latinas…attended the school from at least the mid-1950s,” but does not provide any documentation. Claire L Sahlin, “Texas Woman’s University Threats to Institutional Autonomy and Conflict over the Admission of Men,” in Leslie Miller-Bernal and Susan L. Poulson, Eds. Challenged by Coeducation: Women’s Colleges Since the 1960s (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 116.
- 12.
Gilbert Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation, 2nd ed. (Arlington: University of North Texas Press, 2013); MacDonald, Latino Education; and Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Let Them All Take Heed: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).
- 13.
Victoria-María MacDonald, “‘A Few Chosen Mexicans’: High School Access and Opportunity in the World War II Era for Southwestern Mexican Americans, 1920s–1950s” (paper presented at the annual meeting for the History of Education Society, Chicago, Illinois, 2011); MacDonald, The Fractured Pipeline: Mexican American Access to High Schooling, 1920–1954. Manuscript in author’s possession.
- 14.
Victoria-María MacDonald, “Demanding Their Rights: The Latino Struggle for Educational Access and Equity,” American Latinos and the Making of the United States: A Theme Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Interior, 2013). http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/american_latino_heritage/American_Latinos_and_the_Making_of_the_United_States_%20A_Theme_Study.html; and David G. Garcia, Tara Yosso & Frank Barajas, “‘A Few of the Brightest, Cleanest Mexican Children’: School Segregation as a Form of Mundane Racism in Oxnard, California, 1900–1940,” Harvard Educational Review 82, (2012): 1–25.
- 15.
Philippa Strum, Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican American Rights (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 20.
- 16.
Rubén Donato, Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, 1920–1960 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
- 17.
In 1940 the census bureau included a 5% sample of individuals whose mother’s native tongue was not English. In addition to the small sample size, researchers believe many people of Mexican/Spanish heritage who no longer spoke Spanish were omitted. U.S. Census of Population: 1950. Vol. IV, Special Reports, Part 3, Chapter C, Persons of Spanish Surname (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), 3C-6.
- 18.
Laura Kathryn Muñoz, “Desert Dreams: Mexican American Education in Arizona, 1870–1930” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2006), 187–8.
- 19.
Anne M. Butler, Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2012).
- 20.
Vicki L. Ruiz, “’And Many Miles to Go…’: Mexican Women and Work, 1930–1985,” in Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, & Janice Monk, eds. Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 117–125.
- 21.
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: “An Instrument of Great Good” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
- 22.
John Aubrey Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
- 23.
Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows; Laura K. Muñoz, “The Historical Restoration of the Mexican American Teacher in South Texas,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession, 2016.
- 24.
Names of colleges and universities in this essay are based upon those utilized during these times in the primary sources. Many institutions changed their names as they expanded, changed missions, or closed.
- 25.
Robert R. Treviño, “Facing Jim Crow: Catholic Sisters and the “Mexican Problem” in Texas,” Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Summer 2003): 139–164.
- 26.
Jovita González, Dew on the Thorn. Ed. José Limón (Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 1997), xii.
- 27.
Maria Eugenia Cotera, “Jovita Gonzalez Mireles: A Sense of History and Homeland,” in Vicki Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds., Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community (New York: Oxford Press, 2005), 158–174.
- 28.
“Enrollment of Spanish-Surname Students,” in Thomas P. Carter, Mexican Americans in School: A History of Educational Neglect (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1970), 30.
- 29.
“Eva Antonia Wilbur,” in Patricia Preciado Martin, Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 171–195.
- 30.
Women’s Basketball Team photograph from 1935, http://digitalarchive.library.woodbury.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p16229coll1/id/29
- 31.
Martin, Songs My Mother Sang, 191.
- 32.
Ibid, 214.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Snyder, 120 Years of American Education,76–77.
- 35.
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and The Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
- 36.
Naomi Quiñonez, “Rosita the Riveter: Welding Traditions with Wartime Transformations.” In Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, ed. Mexican Americans and World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Richard Santillán, “Rosita the Riveter: Midwest Mexican American Women during World War II, 1941–1945,” Perspectives in Mexican American Studies 2 (1989): 115–47; Elizabeth R. Escobedo, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); and Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (New York: New American Library, 1987).
- 37.
Muñoz’s parents were Methodist missionaries Reverend Esau P. and Febronia Muñoz, assigned to Spanish-speaking churches in Texas, Arizona, and California from 1918–1950. Félix F. Gutiérrez, “The Mexican Voice Goes to War: Identities, Issues, and Ideas in World War II-Era Mexican American Journalism and Youth Activism,” in Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and B.V. Olguín, eds,. Latina/os and World War II: Mobility, Agency, and Ideology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 122.
- 38.
“After 400 years of Arizona Catholicism, followers get a college.” East Valley Tribune, Feb. 6, 2012. http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/local/education/article_35116a1e-4ec8-11e1-80e0-0019bb2963f4.html
- 39.
Gutiérrez, “The Mexican Voice,” 115.
- 40.
Armando Navarro, Mexican American Youth Leadership Conference: Avante-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
- 41.
Gutiérrez, “The Mexican Voice,” 116.
- 42.
Hispanos were approximately 40% of the state’s population. Phillip B. Gonzales, Forced Sacrifice as Ethnic Protest: The Hispano Cause in New Mexico & the Racial Attitude Confrontation of 1933 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 71.
- 43.
Nancy González, Table I, “Membership in University of New Mexico Greek Social Clubs,” The Spanish-Americans of New Mexico: A Heritage of Pride, rev. ed. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 112.
- 44.
González, The Spanish-Americans, 188.
- 45.
Ibid. See also Victoria-María MacDonald, “Beyond “El Movimiento:” Latino Student Culture Building in the Pre-Civil Rights Twentieth Century,” paper presented for the Organization of American Historians annual meeting March 17–20, 2011, Houston, TX.
- 46.
Félix F. Gutiérrez, “The Mexican Voice,” 127.
- 47.
Joanne A. Sanchez, “Rafaela Muñiz Esquivel,” The Voces Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/voces/template-stories-indiv.html?work_urn=urn%3Autlol%3Awwlatin.029&work_title=Esquivel%2C+Rafaela+Muniz.
- 48.
Bellafaire, “The Contributions of Hispanic Servicewomen.”
- 49.
A recent publication is Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and B.V. Olguín, eds. Latina/os and World War II: Mobility, Agency, and Ideology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).
- 50.
Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2006), 49.
- 51.
Ruiz, From out of the Shadows.
- 52.
The Hispanic professors Esquivel mentions were frequently hired in Departments of Romance Language and Literature.
- 53.
Frances Esquivel Tywoniak & Mario T. García, Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 163.
- 54.
- 55.
Table 3.16, “Selected characteristics of institutions with 4,000 Hispanic students or more: Fall 1978.” In George H. Brown, et al. The Condition of Education for Hispanic Americans. National Center for Education Statistics (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980).
- 56.
Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
- 57.
Wayne J. Urban, More Than Science and Sputnik: The National Defense Education Act of 1958. (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2010).
- 58.
“Gloria E. Anzaldua,” American National Biography online (2014) www.anb.org/articles/16/16-03593.html
- 59.
- 60.
Victoria-María MacDonald & Teresa Garcia, “Latino Higher Education: Historical Pathways to Access,” in Lester Goodchild, Harold Wechsler, and Linda Eisenmann, eds., The History of Higher Education, 3 rd ed. (Needham Heights, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2007).
- 61.
“Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; February 2, 1848,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/guadhida.asp#art8. Accessed March 4, 2016.
- 62.
Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Susan Yohn, A Contest of Faiths: Missionary Women and Pluralism in the American Southwest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
- 63.
Vicki Ruiz, “Dead Ends or Gold Mines? Using Missionary Records in Mexican American Women’s History,” in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol Dubois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd Edition (New York: Routledge, 1994): 298–315.
- 64.
Butler, Across God’s Frontiers
- 65.
Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 104–127.
- 66.
Mary J. Oates, “The Development of Catholic Colleges for Women, 1895–1960,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 7 (4) Fall 1988, 413–428.
- 67.
Fernanda Perrone, “Vanished Worlds: Searching for the records of Closed Catholic Women’s Colleges,” Archival Issues 30 (2006): 119–149 and “To Save Them from the Dangers to Their Faith?” Journal of Archival Organization 1 (2002): 65–76.
- 68.
MacDonald & García was originally published as “Latino Higher Education: Historical Pathways to Access,” in The Majority in the Minority: Retaining Latina/o Faculty, Administrators, and Students in the Twenty-first Century, Lee Jones and Jeanette Castellanos, Eds. (Sterling, VA: Stylus Press, 2003), 15–43.
- 69.
Victoria-María MacDonald & Benjamin P. Hoffman, “Compromising La Causa?: The Ford Foundation and Chicano Intellectual Nationalism in the Creation of Chicano History, 1963–1977,” History of Education Quarterly, 52 (2012), 251–281.
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MacDonald, VM., Cook, A. (2018). Before Chicana Civil Rights: Three Generations of Mexican American Women in Higher Education in the Southwest, 1920–1965. In: Nash, M.A. (eds) Women’s Higher Education in the United States. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59084-8_11
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