Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California. Clayton A. Hurd
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Historicizing Racial Difference and Inequality in Pleasanton Valley
An oft-heard contention among those wishing to make a strong case for the “disfunctionality” of Pleasanton Valley School District as a means of justifying the attempt to split it, is that the communities of Allenstown and Farmingville are two physically separate residential communities with distinct histories and identities that were indiscriminately “thrown together” into a consolidated school district in the late 1960s under the false pretense of financial and organizational efficiency.3 Yet to describe the two communities as geographically distinct does little to account for how, despite their close proximity, they developed into such distinct social, cultural, and socioeconomic “places” in the region, with such dissimilar social and cultural identities.
As Doreen Massey has argued, the nature and identity of any specific community is always constituted by a wider set of social relations, such that what is perceived as “local” often draws as much from relationships outside the area than from those within (see Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Massey 1994b; Stewart 1996). In this sense, appreciating the particular nature and identity of any “place” requires attention to the specific social relations that have historically intersected at that location along with “what people make of those relations in their interpretations and in their lived practice” (Massey 1994a: 117). This is to say that places are fundamentally political rather than simply geographic, and by seeing communities as particular historical intersections of social relations renders struggles of the present—including the antagonisms that constitute them and the political cultures from which they are waged—intelligible. In the case of Pleasanton Valley, paying attention to residential “place-making”—including historical processes of racialization, economic development, and immigrant incorporation—is essential to understanding more contemporary ethnoracial realities as well as existing distinctions related to socioeconomic status, political power, and—particularly relevant in this case—the felt-entitlement of residents in Allenstown to “locally controlled” schools.
Early Racialization Process in Pleasanton Valley—Diversity Structured in Inequality
Farmingville has long been described as a quintessential immigrant town. That its current residential population is nearly 80 percent Latino—the vast majority Mexican Americans who arrived since the mid-1950s—is enough to confirm that status. Farmingville’s historic willingness to incorporate and welcome immigrants—which have included, over the last century and a half, waves from Eu rope and Asia as well as Latin America—is often invoked as a matter of civic pride, particularly by organizations such as the local chamber of commerce and regional historical society. Less acknowledged in recitations of this fabled history, however, is the manner in which the town’s diversity has long been structured in inequality and why, until the early 1990s, the town remained controlled politically by a White elite.
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