Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality

Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality. By Richard R. Valencia. Critical America. (New York and London: New York University Press, c. 2008. Pp. [xx], 484. $49.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-8819-6.)

This study ably addresses the long and wide-ranging legal battle for equal rights for Mexican-heritage schoolchildren. Although Rubén Donato and Guadalupe San Miguel have each chronicled aspects of Mexican American educational history, Richard R. Valencia's Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality constitutes the first full-fledged account of this crucial topic.

Valencia does a real service in chapter 1 by outlining the early and sustained efforts of Mexican American plaintiffs to challenge segregation between 1925 and 1985, even as he demonstrates the importance of these cases for civil rights broadly defined. Méndez v. Westminster (1946), for instance, was central to Chief...