Revisiting Education in the New Latino Diaspora

A volume in Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural StudiesSeries Editors Edmund T. Hamann, University of Nebraska-Lincolnand Rodney Hopson, George Mason UniversityFor most of US history, most of America's Latino population has lived in nine states-California, Arizona, New Mexico,Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Florida, New Jersey, and New York. It follows that most education research that consideredthe experiences of Latino families with US schools came from these same states. But in the last 30 years Latinoshave been resettling across the US, attending schools, and creating new patterns of inter-ethnic interaction in educationalsettings. Much of this interaction with this New Latino Diaspora has been initially tentative and improvisational,but too often it has left intact the patterns of lower educational success that have prevailed in the traditional Latinodiaspora.Revisiting Education in the New Latino Diaspora is an extensive update, with all new material, of the groundbreakingvolume Education in the New Latino Diaspora (Ablex Publishing) that these same editors produced in 2002. This volumeconsciously includes a number of junior scholars (e.g., C. Allen Lynn, Soria Colomer, Amanda Morales, RebeccaLowenhaupt, Adam Sawyer) and more established ones (Frances Contreras, Jason Irizarry, Socorro Herrera, LindaHarklau) as it considers empirical cases from Washington State to Georgia, from the Mid-Atlantic to the Great Plains,where rural, suburban, and urban communities start their second or third decades of responding to a previously unprecedentedgrowth in newcomer Latino populations. With excuses of surprise and improvisational strategies less persuasive as Latino newcomer populations become lessnew, this volume considers the persistence, the anomie, and pragmatism of Latino newcomers on the one hand, with the variously enlightened, paternalistic, dismissive,and xenophobic responses of educators and education systems on the other. With foci as personal as accounts of growing up as an adoptee in a mixed race family and thetestimonio of a 'successful' undocumented college graduate to the macro scale of examining state-level education policies and with an age range from early childhoodeducation to the university level, this volume insists that the worlds of education research and migration studies can both gain from considering the educational responsesin the last two decades to the 'newish' Latino presence in the 41 U.S. states that have not long been the home to large, well-established Latino populations, but that nowenroll 2.5 million Latino students in K-12 alone.