CHAPTER 12 · Up from Mexico
Why did some growers try to limit Mexican American students’ education?
A practice question that prepares your thinking for the aim. Study how the model works, then build your own answer to your assigned question.
The model paragraph
Some growers tried to limit Mexican American education because greater opportunity could weaken their control over the future workforce. The sugar-beet growers, employers who depended on field labor, worried that high-school graduates would stop picking their crops. Their concern treated children’s futures as a problem of maintaining the labor supply. Takaki explains that young Mexican Americans were “trained to become obedient workers” (YPT 246). This says segregated schooling prepared students to follow instructions in subordinate jobs. It shows how education could reproduce an unequal labor system instead of expanding children’s choices. One teacher told a student, “I don’t think any of you should plan to go to high school” (YPT 247). This says the teacher discouraged an entire group from continuing its education. It shows how an adult with classroom authority could turn employers’ preference for obedient labor into a restriction on students’ ambitions. However, Ernesto Galarza, a Mexican American student who later described his schooling, remembered teachers who respected his language and identity. Their example shows that educators could strengthen students’ dignity rather than narrow their possibilities. The conflict illustrates the Key Idea that economic forces drive history. Growers wanted a continuing supply of fieldworkers, so they favored limits on education that might keep the next generation available for that work. Because schooling could change children’s employment choices, access to high school became part of a struggle over who controlled their future.
1 POINT TO NAME IT · 1 POINT TO EXPLAIN IT
How this model earns its key idea points
Gist
People make choices to get land, money, and the things they need. Those choices can change other people’s lives.
Check your understanding
Academic definition
Economic interests shape historical change when people use power to control resources, organize labor, and distribute wealth. Explain the decisions connecting an economic goal to its consequences.
Check your understanding
Elaboration
- Name the idea
- Key Idea 1: Economic forces drive history
- Point to the evidence
- Mexican American students were trained as obedient workers, and a teacher discouraged an entire group from attending high school (YPT 246–247).
- Explain how it works
- Growers feared that schooling would give students alternatives to field labor. Restricting educational opportunity could therefore help reproduce the workforce employers wanted.
- Make the connection explicit
- Name the idea for one point. For the explanation point, connect the employers’ interest to the institution: growers needed fieldworkers, feared graduates would choose other work, and supported limits on schooling. The contrast with supportive teachers shows these restrictions were choices rather than inevitable features of education.
Check your understanding: explain how this model’s evidence shows its key idea without looking at the explanation above.
Compare your explanation
Growers feared that schooling would give students alternatives to field labor. Restricting educational opportunity could therefore help reproduce the workforce employers wanted.
How the argument builds
Follow what each move adds to the answer. Then map your own paragraph in your notebook.
- Claim
Growers’ labor demands shaped their views of schooling.
- Employer interest
High-school education could give students alternatives to field work.
- First quotation
Segregated schools prepared students for obedience rather than broad opportunity.
- Second quotation
A teacher used classroom authority to discourage further education.
- Alternative
Supportive teachers showed that education could also build dignity.
- Key Idea
Control over schooling helped determine who would supply future labor.
Build your own sentences · Chapter 12
Choose the relationship your argument needs. These are sentence models to study; your paragraph should use your own reasoning and your assigned four words of the day.
Appositives · rename a noun precisely
A noun phrase between commas renames the noun before it. It adds useful information, not another sentence. You need two.
Check: remove the phrase between the commas. The main sentence should still work.
Lydia Ramos, a worker who refused to break the 1933 strike, connected her support for fellow laborers to a belief in equality and justice.
YPT 243Mexican women, organizers who sustained the strike’s picket lines, urged replacement workers to join the struggle while growers and police tried to break worker resistance.
YPT 243Barrios, Mexican American neighborhoods that offered mutual assistance, helped newcomers find work and shelter while preserving cultural connections in a society that often excluded them.
YPT 246 YPT 250Asistencia, a practice of helping others with the expectation of future reciprocity, turned shared hardship into practical support among families and newcomers in the barrios.
YPT 250Ignacio, an American-born child expelled with his family in 1931, was denied the secure belonging that citizenship should have provided and later struggled to return.
YPT 252–253Repatriation, a removal campaign that also expelled American citizens, treated many US-born children as outsiders despite their legal right to remain in their own country.
YPT 249 YPT 252–253
The nine connectors · choose a relationship
But
Adds a contrast.
American employers relied on Mexican workers to harvest crops and build industries, but segregated jobs and schools restricted the opportunities available to workers and their children.
YPT 240–241 YPT 246–247So
Shows a result.
Immigration restrictions reduced California growers’ access to Asian workers, so they turned to Mexican labor to keep farms supplied with workers for demanding agricultural tasks.
YPT 241Because
Gives a reason.
Many rural Mexican families looked north because large landowners had displaced them from small farms and unstable employment offered limited alternatives in Mexican cities.
YPT 238If
Names a condition.
If we treat repatriation as a simple return home, we miss the forced removal of American-born children whose actual home was the United States.
YPT 252–253Unless
Means if not.
The labor system’s inequality remains hidden unless we ask why Mexican American students were discouraged from high school while growers expected them to become fieldworkers.
YPT 246–247When
Means if with expectation.
When California farmworkers’ wages fell sharply during the Depression, Mexican laborers organized strikes to defend their pay and their right to dignified treatment.
YPT 242–243Despite
Takes a noun phrase.
Despite evictions and arrests during the 1933 strike, Mexican women sustained the picket lines and urged replacement workers to support the demand for justice.
YPT 243Although
Takes a subject and a verb.
Although American courts blocked Sikh men from buying land through racial citizenship rules, some Sikh-Mexican families acquired farms through their Mexican wives.
YPT 245However
Starts a new sentence.
Segregated schools often prepared Mexican American children for obedience and manual labor. However, Galarza remembered teachers who supported both American belonging and pride in Mexican identity.
YPT 246–247After despite, use a noun phrase. After although, use a subject and a verb. In your rubric’s pattern, put a period before however and a comma after it. The contrast must make sense in context.