UC Riverside

The following study is an examination of how racialized forms of citizenship were produced and reinforced pedagogically as part of placemaking efforts centered around whiteness in Riverside, California during the period between 1915-1933. Through programs of Americanization and practices of segregation, educational figures, parent groups, churches, and service clubs mobilized to strategically implement a curriculum that reproduced a racial and class hierarchy for Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in the city. The study centers on the formation and early functions of an explicitly "Mexican school," known as the Independiente School, for the children of Mexican citrus laborers in the Riverside community of Arlington. This little known school in the history of the city exemplifies how racialization occurred pedagogically through coordinated training, curriculum, segregation, and expulsion to make Riverside a place structured around and identified with white citizenship.