Historicizing Educational Politics in Pleasanton Valley

       The Politics of Place and Belonging at Allenstown High School

      The first buses appear at the gated entrance of Allenstown High School just before 7 a.m., beginning their winding quarter-mile journey up to the center of the campus. The hilly ascent provides views of well-groomed athletic fields and an expansive, naturally terraced forest of redwood and juniper that rises around the campus on three sides. Passing through a series of staff and visitor parking lots, the bus dips briefly into a canopy of eucalyptus before stopping at the flagpole that decorates the roundabout just short of central campus quadrangle. As the doors swing open, it is mostly brown faces that descend, some having awoken as early as 5:30 a.m. to take the crowded, ten-mile ride from their homes in Farmingville to the Allenstown area high school.

      By 7:45 a.m., hundreds more students have arrived on campus, streaming in from the student parking lots rising up along the north side of campus, moving instinctively down toward the central “Quad” area. The Quad is a fishbowl- style courtyard, lined with concrete and dotted with newt trees, that offers an assortment of painted metal picnic tables and wood benches around which students socialize between classes and before and after school. With the exception of the primary entrance from the bus roundabout, the Quad is largely an enclosed area, buffeted on the right side by an elevated cafeteria and on the left by the recessed gymnasium. In the very back of the courtyard is a narrow staircase that leads to a secondary terrace of classroom buildings. Even at this early hour, the Quad is thick with activity as students mingle on benches, gather around tables, sit cross-legged on the concrete ground, or occupy one of the multiple staircases that surround the enclosure on each side.

      Student peer groups and networks spread across the Quad in a discernible social matrix that students can map in astounding detail.¹ The broad staircase that descends from the cafeteria is reserved as the exclusive domain of the junior and senior male “Jocks.” Below them, in the interior of the courtyard, one finds the “Preps,” a fairly equal mix of fashionably dressed girls and boys who sit in small groups on the ground or congregate around picnic tables to talk, eat, or finish homework assignments. Lounging against a wire fence that stretches around to the back of the gymnasium are the so-called “Dirts,” who, despite their disparaging namesake, are a colorful coalition of coed peers that manages to incorporate a diverse and outwardly eclectic mix of nonconformist, punk, Goth, trench coat, and neo-hippie styles and attitudes. Near the front entrance to the gymnasium, flanking the soda machines, are the male “Surfer” and “Skater” groups, who can often be identified by their Quicksilver sweatshirts, spiked or shaved hair, and occasional skateboard in tow. On the front side of the courtyard and spilling across the driveway into the interior of the bus roundabout are the self-proclaimed “normal girls” who take pride in their tasteful yet understated fashion style and their well-groomed but generally low-maintenance appearance. Students’ social locations in the Quad tend to be remarkably permanent, as most students return to the same spaces before and after school and at nearly every break, some for their entire high school careers.

      At first glance, the central Quad area at AHS would seem to provide space for a remarkably diverse cross-section of student identity and status groups at the high school. Yet, among the several hundred students who settle in and mill through the area, one would be hard pressed to ever find more than a very small handful of Mexican-descent students. Even then, they are likely to be individuals or pairs scattered in the larger social groups. Despite making up nearly half the Allenstown High population, Mexican-descent students are almost entirely absent from the Quad area and the central campus region generally. Instead, they can be found dispersed across the more peripheral areas of campus. For example, groupings of primarily English-speaking Latino students congregate on the far sides of the “G” and “H” classroom buildings, two temporary modular units on the front side of the campus. Groups of more recently arrived Mexican immigrants meet outside the ESL classrooms in the high terrace building beyond the Quad; migrant student peer groups congregate near the “I” building, also on the front side of campus, which houses the MEP office and language arts classes such as “Spanish for Spanish Speakers.” The largest grouping of Mexican-descent students—a rather diverse mix of first- and second-generation Mexican immigrant youth—hang out along the more remote, multipurpose athletic courts that extend beyond the backside of the gymnasium. The only Mexican-descent students who maintain a close proximity to the central Quad area are those found inside the school cafeteria, a situation most attributable to the fact that they—along with a wider representation of the working-class Latino on the campus—tend to rely on the free or reduced price meals made possible by the National School Lunch Program.

       “This Big Ole’ Wall That Nobody Can Ever Cross”

      The sociospatial marginalization of Mexican-descent students on the Allenstown High campus is not a simple consequence of student preferences. Sonia, a sophomore and Mexican migrant student from Farmingville, describes the anxiety and discomfort she experiences—and that many of her peers would claim to share—when moving through central spaces like the Quad:

      You feel like you don’t fit in, just by walking [or] passing through the Quad. When you pass through there . . . they don’t even notice you. And it’s like you don’t belong there. It’s weird, and I don’t know how to explain it but it’s just the feeling you have.

      Beatrice, a sophomore and third-generation Mexican American, explains why she chooses to avoid the Quad area:

      You see all the White people there? Some of them are really cool to be with. But then there’s the little things they say, like when you pass by, they are like “Oh look, there goes another Mexican.” So now we started hanging out by the library. We just stick in our little corner.

      Ana, a junior female and second-generation Mexican immigrant, asked if she believed the feeling of discomfort and displacement she experienced might be the result of active forces of discrimination at play on the campus, responds:

      I don’t know, but it seems that Mexicans are always denied from certain things. Like they hang out in places where they’re not seen. The whole Quad is full of different races except for Mexicans, and it does not feel so cool like that. I think it’s because, I’m not sure, but there’s too many Whites and it seems like they dominate the whole school, and the Mexicans can’t do anything.

      Jennie, an Anglo-American junior from Allenstown, recognizes as well the anxiety that seems to accompany the spatial segregation of White and Mexican-descent students on the campus, and she is quick to express her sense of disappointment about the general racial and class divisions that characterize student interactions:

      My good friend is Mexican, and I’ve never been raised to be prejudiced like that. And it was kind of like it was just forced upon you. In classes, you know, they [Mexican-descent students] would be incredibly friendly and very cool. A lot of times they were more down to my level than a lot of other [White] kids that go to this school because they can be kind of rich and snobby and fed with a silver spoon and never had to want for anything. And then once [class] breaks come along, there was like this big old wall that no one could ever cross [emphasis added].