The Magic Key
The Educational Journey of Mexican Americans from K-12 to College and Beyond
Mexican Americans comprise the largest subgroup of Latina/os, and their path to education can be a difficult one. Yet just as this group is often marginalized, so are their stories, and relatively few studies have chronicled the educational trajectory of Mexican American men and women. In this interdisciplinary collection, editors Zambrana and Hurtado have brought together research studies that reveal new ways to understand how and why members of this subgroup have succeeded and how the facilitators of success in higher education have changed or remained the same.
The Magic Key’s four sections explain the context of Mexican American higher education issues, provide conceptual understandings, explore contemporary college experiences, and offer implications for educational policy and future practices. Using historical and contemporary data as well as new conceptual apparatuses, the authors in this collection create a comparative, nuanced approach that brings Mexican Americans’ lived experiences into the dominant discourse of social science and education. This diverse set of studies presents both quantitative and qualitative data by gender to examine trends of generations of Mexican American college students, provides information on perceptions of welcoming university climates, and proffers insights on emergent issues in the field of higher education for this population. Professors and students across disciplines will find this volume indispensable for its insights on the Mexican American educational experience, both past and present.
An outstanding scholarly accomplishment . . . [that] deserves a wide readership and promises to have major policy impacts.
A rare multidimensional and multi-data-source exploration into Mexican American student success. . . . The book brings together some of the best thinkers in higher education.
We are left with a sense of hope . . . that the prized llave májica can certainly be placed within the reach of every Latina/o student.
RUTH ENID ZAMBRANA is a professor in the Department of Women’s Studies, director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity, and adjunct professor of family medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Medicine.
SYLVIA HURTADO is a professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, where she also served as Director of the Higher Education Research Institute.
- Foreword by Patricia Gándara
- A Personal Narrative by Sally Alonzo Bell, PhD
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Part I: Setting the Context
- 1. Locked Doors; Closed Opportunities: Who Holds the Magic Key? (Ruth Enid Zambrana and Sylvia Hurtado)
- 2. History's Prism in Education: A Spectrum of Legacies across Centuries of Mexican American Agency; Experience and Activism 1600s–2000s (Victoria-María MacDonald and Jason Rivera)
- 3. Trend Analyses from 1971 to 2012 on Mexican American/Chicano Freshmen: Are We Making Progress? (Sylvia Hurtado)
- Part II: Conceptual Understandings
- 4. An Intersectional Lens: Theorizing an Educational Paradigm of Success (Ruth Enid Zambrana and Sylvia Hurtado)
- 5. Parental Educational and Gender Expectations: Pushing the Educational Trajectory (Ruth Enid Zambrana and Rebeca Burciaga)
- 6. Examining the Influence of K–12 School Experiences on the Higher Education Pathway (Ruth Enid Zambrana, Anthony De Jesús, and Brianne A. Dávila)
- Part III: Contemporary College Experiences
- 7. The Ivory Tower Is Still White: Chicana/o-Latina/o College Students' Views on Racism, Ethnic Organizations, and Campus Racial Segregation (Nolan L. Cabrera and Sylvia Hurtado)
- 8. Campus Climate, Intersecting Identities, and Institutional Support among Mexican American College Students (Adriana Ruiz Alvarado and Sylvia Hurtado)
- Part IV: Implications for Educational Policy and Future Practices in P–16 Pathways and Beyond
- 9. Mexican American Males' Pathways to Higher Education: Awareness to Achievement (Luis Ponjuan and Victor B. Sáenz)
- 10. The Role of Educational Policy in Mexican American College Transition and Completion (Frances Contreras)
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Contributing Authors
- Index
Quality Education for Latinos and Latinas
Print and Oral Skills for All Students, K–College
By Rita Portales and Marco Portales
Conditionally Accepted
Navigating Higher Education from the Margins
Edited by Eric Joy Denise and Bertin M. Louis
