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This article describes how an anti-racist curriculum constructed on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Latino Critical Pedagogy (LatCrit) helped Mexican and Chicano middle school students enrolled in an alternative education program to alter their attitudes toward the use of English, and to change their forms of self-identification resulting in the development of a Chicano consciousness. In the beginning of this fourteen-month study, 9.6% of the students identified with the Chicano label. However, at the end of the study, 77% of the class selected the Chicano label for self-identification. Moreover, this investigation bridges the theoretical concepts of Critical Pedagogy to everyday practice in a middle school classroom. In short, the tenets of this theoretical framework were applied in the design and the implementation of the curriculum.

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The Mexican American population in the United States, as all other human groups, employ a number of strategies and practices in order to ensure the maintenance and continuation of its members. These strategies are culturally derived, and they have been created by the interaction of people's practices with the social, economic, and political forces of the larger environment. Mexican American culture is reproduced across generations through the enactment of historically constituted social practices or funds of knowledge. These practices are "acted out" by actors within the domain of the household or the family in its relation to the capitalist system. In order to understand cultural reproduction in the Mexican American community, the structure and operation of four households were examined. The practices used by people to meet household members' sustenance, shelter, education, household management, and emotional/psychological needs are explored. Household members practices were divided in three domains: economic, social/recreational, and ceremonial/religious. In a sense then, Mexican Americans are enculturated by carrying out activities appropriate to the immediate cultural setting. In this social setting, children learn appropriate ways of behaving by interacting with other people whom, through verbal and nonverbal ways, teach them the norms appropriate to their cultural group. In addition, children spend a great part of the day in another setting (the school). This setting, as part of the larger environment, influences household members practices, but the institution is affected in return. The interplay of these factors affects students' academic achievement.

This work is intended to provide a synthesis on the development of a political ethos among Mexican Americans during the decades of the 1960s to the 1970s. This political ethos was neither uniformed nor overwhelmingly acceptable, but it nonetheless formed the ideological nucleus of what came to be known as the Chicano Movement. And this author would contend that some of those ideological strains remain important today among Mexican American leaders. This ethos was undoubtedly nationalistic, but it also incorporated race and class as elements of the Mexican American experience. Chicanismo, as it came to be known, would be the unifying theme for diverse groups involved in a myriad of causes and activities. To understand the development of this ethos, it is necessary to understand the generations of Mexican Americans of the post-war years. Also important to understand are those events, organizations and particularly individuals who began to have an impact on the minds of many Mexican Americans who saw a need for change in the way they lived, thought, and in the way they participated in American society. There are at least four phases to the development of the Chicano philosophical strains that guided the movement. First, the Mexican American intellectuals, politicians, students, and others came to be believed that the liberal agenda which had been seen as the solver of the community's problems was simply morally corrupt. It was a failure. This rejection of the liberal agenda led to a searching for new solutions. These solutions would be oriented toward a philosophical separatism. Second, Mexican Americans saw a need to re-interpret the past as it related to their own history and that of the Anglos who lived nearby. New heroes arose, and the community discovered its legacy of struggle. Also, they discarded the stereotypes of the lazy, passive, feebleminded Mexican American. Third, Mexican American activists, intellectuals and artists affirmed a rediscovered pride in their ethnicity and class status. Many found similarities between themselves and African Americans in their struggle for equality; others saw the similarities with Third World liberation movements of peasants and oppressed workers; and others simply saw themselves continue the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Chicano uprisings of the early 20th century. Finally, this philosophy was perpetuated through the individual and collective struggles of the organizations that promoted it as they met resistance or faced external attacks.

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This study explored community building as a method for addressing the problems faced by Mexican Immigrant and Mexican American communities. One of the assumptions that underpinned this study is that community building can be used to counteract racist attitudes toward ethnic minorities. Historically, people of Mexican descent have been the victims of such attitutudes have found their way in oppressive social and economic policy.

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Using the 1979 Chicano Survey, this thesis examines three measures of ethnic identity as they relate to ethno-political attitudes and hypothesized structural determinants. While this study indicates that the three measures may each tap into separate dimensions of the self concept, it is determined that statement of interaction preference is the measure most suited to contemporary theories of ethnic identity. / Master of Science