ABSTRACT
At the crux of our current Latin@ educational discussion is the current global state and the manner it impacts the movement of people across the globe, citizenship rights across borders, redefi nes racial and ethnic belonging, and infl uences educational policies and politics at home. As Gomez-Peña (1996) suggests, although we fi nd ourselves in the midst of transcultural consumerism and global economics, ultranationalism and ideological borders still prevail. While the United States’ history of slavery, imperialism, and colonization has defi ned its transcultural contacts, relationship to the “other,” and threats to its hegemonic power (Acuña, 2006), the timespace compression of the era introduces new understandings, problems, and solutions to historically constituted legacies. Contemporary legislative policies have mirrored the xenophobic upheaval of the times in border-state operations (border enforcement such as Gatekeeper in San Diego, Operation Hold-the-Line in El Paso, and Operation Rio Grande in McAllen; Cornelius, 1998) and in the passing of several propositions attempting to deny Latinos and other marginalized pockets of the population their civil rights (Proposition 187, 227, 209 in California and the English-Only movement).
