Abstract

This chapter is about community activism that seeks to affect change in public school policy with the goal of improving the education of Latina and Latino students in U.S. schools. As Puerto Rican activist Antonia Pantoja (1989) reminds us, it is part of a broader struggle for a just and humane society. Activism in response to oppression, powerlessness, and invisibility has a long history in the Americas, as the historical record documents. However, the goals and purposes of Latino community activism have changed over time as U.S. communities grapple with dramatic demographic change as well as the changing dynamics of geographical, political, social, and economic forces that shape and influence all facets of life. Michael Apple illuminates the problem when he says that, “powerful movements and alliances can radically shift the relationship between educational policies and practices and the relation of dominance and subordination in the larger society, but not in a direction that any of us find ethically or politically justifiable” (2006, p. 203). Events during the last two decades of the 20th century, beginning with one of the legacies of the Reagan Administration, A Nation at Risk, are testimony to changing dynamics that have had an adverse impact on Latino communities.