Introduction

      Time magazine has called the continuing racial segregation of U.S. public schools one of the most underreported news stories of our time (Fitzpatrick 2009). While it is historically viewed as an African American/White issue, Latinos¹ are now in fact more segregated than African Americans in southern and western regions of the country. In the Western states,² the number of Latinos in intensely segregated minority schools— that is, schools with a 90–100 percent racial minority population—increased from 19 percent in 1980 to over 40 percent in 2005 (Orfield and Lee 2007). California is now the national leader for the isolation of Latino youth, with approximately 90 percent attending majority minority schools and nearly half (47 percent) attending intensely segregated minority schools (Orfield and Lee 2006).

      A distinguishing feature of this increasing White/Latino segregation is that it is no longer limited to metropolitan areas. Rapid increases in the ethnoracial and socioeconomic diversity of U.S. suburbs has led to thousands of communities experiencing significant shifts in their public school enrollments, many for the first time (Frankenberg and Orfield 2012; Frankenberg and Lee 2002). As Latino immigrant and nonimmigrant populations move beyond “suburban ring” satellite areas of metropolitan centers to further removed, more affluent, and traditionally White suburban areas as well as small to mid-sized towns across the United States (Orfield and Luce 2012), they often find themselves in communities that have relatively little experience in bringing youth and adults together across lines of racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic difference (Frankenberg and Orfield 2012), and that lack adequate services to facilitate the adaptation of immigrant students (Waters and Jiménez 2005).

      Unfortunately, in a number of U.S. suburbs facing increased immigration and ethnic and racial diversification, public school