ABSTRACT
The contemporary issues engaging scholars and practitioners of Latino/a education are rooted in a long and complicated sociohistorical context. This chapter provides an overview of the most salient themes in the history of Latinos and education from the 16th century Spanish presence in North America to the present. Several themes and tensions are recurrent throughout the history of Latino/a education. First, the relationships between Latinos and others in society, namely, the positioning of Latinos in society; the variousways inwhich social categories and social relations have been structured (particularly by the United States, Mexico, and Spain); and the ways in which agency of Latinos has conditioned, challenged, and altered those categories and social relations. Social structures constrain and also enable, as we can see in the legal system that defines who is in which ethnic or racial category
and how people deemed members of those categories are accorded or denied rights and benefits in society. Agency is also clearly at work, as wewill see from the segregation of childrenwho “looked Spanish’’ into substandard classrooms, to the changes during the 1960s and 1970s because of the Chicano movement. Power and its negotiation are central in these dynamics; power relations condition the ways that ethnic and racial peoples have been able to participate in society, to challenge its inequities, and to change it from the inside out.
