Citation/Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how Mexican-origin populations' engagements with formal and informal sites of education during the twentieth century shaped their "Mexican American" ethnic identities. Mexican Americans in Chicago came to view schools as important institutions that could serve as nodes of social assimilation and economic integration into an American mainstream while simultaneously reinforcing their ethnicity and culture. My examination suggests these two sets of aspirations were in tension with one another. My analysis of the role education played in the contentious processes of Mexican American identity formation during the twentieth century in a Midwestern region complicates contemporary interpretations of Mexican American educational history, which mainly focuses on the Mexican-origin populations of the American Southwest. Mexican-origin populations found greater freedom in multiethnic and racially diverse environments of industrial urban centers like Chicago than in the Southwest to engage debates about their Mexicanness. Mexican-origin populations invariably chose schools as the realms in which those debates would occur, deciding that schools were the social institutions that could best articulate and reinforce their varying notions of "Mexican American."