ABSTRACT
During the early 1990s the premier case of privatization of a complete public school system, in a worn-out industrial city on the northern border of Boston, catapulted Chelsea and its Latino community into metropolitan and national headlines. Prior to the Boston University takeover of the public schools in 1989, Chelsea's Latino community, if not having slept through Chelsea's civic affairs, found itself more a hapless supplicant to the powerful than a respected player in city politics. The coming of Boston University provided an opportunity to observe systemic educational privatization in a “natural” setting, and to recognize the critical role of grievance in stimulating Latino political mobilization. 1
