From Mops to Microphones: The Latino Child, Early Childhood Education, and the San Antonio Economy
The child’s role in the adult imagination dictates much of our public policy, particularly in the area of education. The way in which adults choose to educate their children is a manifestation of how local communities perceive and respond to the problems that surround them. In clarifying the role the Latino child should play in our economy, both historically and presently, the rhetoric of educational policies and initiatives places the Latino child at the center of the relationship between education and business. That rhetoric has changed drastically over time.
In the early 1900s, ethnic minority, low-income children posed a problem to the public school system in Texas. The state refused to provide adequate education to such a large group that not only needed education in the traditional subjects, but also English language lessons and Americanization instruction.
Beginning in 1910, school systems in El Paso, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Antonio created departments for psychological testing and research to gauge the intellectual abilities of its students. The IQ test justified the beliefs of many social scientists that intelligence was genetic, and more importantly, race-based.
George I. Sánchez was a professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1948, he completed “A Study of the Educational Opportunities Provided Spanish-Named Children in Ten Texas School Systems,” for which he took numerous photographs of school buildings and toilet facilities. The above photograph, taken in 1946, is of the Mexican Ward School in Mathis, Texas. Sánchez’s own caption for this photo reads, “Shows the typical dilapidated, inadequate, rotting old shack, which is one of the mainstays of the ‘Mexican Ward School’ os [sic] Mathis. Notice rotting lumber. No screens on windows. No screen doors. Improper lighting. No fly-proofing or rat-proofing. Inside, it is dark, crowded and generally of an uninviting appearance.” Used by permission of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
In an article for the Los Angeles School Journal in 1927, William J. Cooper, the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, stated, “[W]e build on a biological foundation. We cannot make a black child white, a deaf child hear, a blind baby see, nor can we create a genius from a child whose ancestors endowed him with a defective brain…teachers should study biology.” (As quoted in the book: .)
Believing that ethnic Mexican children’s limited intelligence meant they needed to attend industrial schools, public school officials placed these children in woefully inadequate facilities—in some cases, the student to teacher ratio in segregated schools was 70:1 versus the average 32:1 of Anglo schools—and taught a curriculum that emphasized vocational training over intellectual pursuits.
Vocational education, an Anglocentric curriculum, and school segregation policies, as one historian – Gilbert G. Gonzalez – argues, served corporate interests that required a cheap labor supply. These children would find it very difficult to break the impecunious cycle, finish high school, and attend college. Eventually, vocational schooling began in the earlier grade levels to encourage children to take the same jobs as their parents when they reached adulthood.
The High School in Mathis, Texas, also taken in 1946. For this photo, Sánchez’s caption reads: “Shows the modern Mathis High School with its beautiful architecture, ventilation, lighting system and well-kept grounds. The school has a total of 10 Latin American students and approximately 120 to 150 Anglo American students.” Used by permission of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
Education’s role in frustrating Mexican Americans’ efforts in breaking into the middle-class was not lost on public school officials. Herschel T. Manuel was an educational psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin beginning in 1925. Born in Indiana, Manuel didn’t come into contact with Mexican Americans until he moved to Texas, but in 1928, he received funding to study the state of education for Mexican children.
In 1930, he published The Education of Mexican and Spanish-speaking Children in Texas, in which he discusses attitudes toward Mexican children amongst school officials. In his book, Manuel recorded the unfavorable comments of several superintendents in Texas, and one is worth quoting at length:
“Most of our Mexicans…transplant onions, harvest them, etc. The less they know about everything else the better contented they are. You have undoubtedly heard that ignorance is bliss; it seems that it is so when one has to transplant onions. The white people claim that when a Mexican gets a little education he becomes bigoted, wants to become a contractor, etc.…If a man has very much sense of education either, he is not going to stick to this kind of work. So you see it is up to the white population to keep the Mexican on his knees in an onion patch or in new ground. This does not mix well with education.”
The relationship between childhood education, labor, and business remains with us today, and it’s not limited to finding workers to harvest onions, but also finding workers to fill a great need in San Antonio’s growing technology industries. At present, the San Antonio population can’t provide a sufficient number of skilled and educated employees, so that it has to continually recruit individuals from elsewhere.
Brainpower Initiative Task Force (Click for full PDF)
Recently, a Houston nonprofit organization found San Antonio’s schools to be the lowest performing when compared to Texas’ other metropolitan areas. These two issues came together when a committee led by the CEOs of two of San Antonio’s largest companies, USAA and H-E-B, found that investing in pre-kindergarten programs would help improve the quality of San Antonio’s future workforce.
The Pre-K 4 SA initiative that will be on the November ballot identifies early childhood education as the meeting ground for our present economic woes and our children’s future middle-class prospects. In fact, the relationship between education and business has consumed much of the rhetoric promoting the Pre-K 4 SA initiative. For example, Mayor Julián Castro stated in his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention:
“We know that you can’t be pro-business unless you’re pro-education. We know that pre-K and student loans…are a smart investment in a workforce that can fill and create the jobs of tomorrow. We’re investing in our young minds today to be competitive in the global economy tomorrow.”
The Pre-K 4 SA initiative hopes to give low-income children an opportunity early in their lives to get on a competitive track in becoming middle-class adults. Many of these low-income children are ethnic minorities. Mayor Castro appeared on NBC Latino to promote the Pre-K 4 SA initiative, providing justification for beginning such a program. In the interview, Mayor Castro stated, “The destiny of the United States is interwoven with the destiny of the Latino community.
Graphic courtesy of the City of San Antonio.
“Latinos are the fastest growing segment of the United States, and they’re folks who are a great asset to the United States’ future.” That is, Latino children are a great asset to the United States’ future; therefore, we need to invest in their education. Mayor Castro invokes this relationship between business, education, and Latinos in a way that assumes Mexican American low-income children will find a path to upward mobility, strengthening the San Antonio economy in the process.
In sharing his family’s compelling history in his DNC speech, Mayor Castro stated his mother worked hard “so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone”—a metaphor that captures not only the human ability to overcome hardship, but also the ways in which attitudes toward the Latino child’s role in the relationship between childhood education and business have changed over time.
However, the very need for the Pre-K 4 SA program—one that requires a 1/8 of a penny increase in the sales tax, a brain trust of educational leaders and businessmen, and donations from the community and corporations—points to the inability of the state to fully move passed the lingering effects from turn-of-the-century views on education to provide all of our children with a pathway to the middle-class.
Philis M. Barragán Goetz, a San Antonio native, is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Lecturer in the American Studies program at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her dissertation, “Escuelitas and Children’s Literature of the Southwest,” examines the emergence of Mexican and Mexican American community schools from the late 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century. She lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of central San Antonio with her husband and daughter.
Iris Dimmick was the San Antonio Report’s first managing editor and reported on government, politics and social issues from 2012 to 2025.
More by Iris Dimmick
6 replies on “Support It: The Pre-K 4 SA Initiative”
Wonderful essay. Thank you for placing this important issue in a larger context.
It is remarkable that very little factual information or data about the tax increase is discussed in this essay. None of the mechanics about how this tax increase will be implemented are provided or otherwise explained. There are many valid questions about the specifc kids who will attend, how the kids will get there, why the kids are not presently enrolled in any one of the many, many federally funded Head start programs (and why the parents will all of a sudden decide to enroll their kids in this program) etc.
What about statistics as to why the current pre-K programs offered throught the city are so horrible? What about data showing the current pre-K teachers are somehow insufficient such that we need new “master teachers” at “centers of excellence?”
I think the lack of hard data tells us everything.
Ms. Goetz, provides an interesting history lesson, but is short on facts as to why the mayor’s initiative will solve the challenges facing the 2300 children (the Target Population) who are not enrolled in a preK program. These target children are not real children, they are statistics based on demographic data only. Voters must understand that Texas already requires every school district with 15 or more eligible students to offer a preK program. School districts are funded some $4,000 for each student in PreK. Over the 8 years of the initiative the city will drain $48 million from our schools. Because acceptance into the city centers will be by lottery run by the school district, the probability that a school will be able to eliminate a PreK class room is remote. Thus the schools will still have to pay the same number of teachers and aids to teach a preK class that may have lost 2 or 3 children in the lottery. These costs will have to be made up out of the school budget. So we end up penalizing a whole school full of children with names and addresses to solve the problems of the 2300 target population that the demographers have identified.
This initiative of the mayor is even more discriminatory when you look at the probability that any significant number of these target students will actually be selected for one of the slots in a city PreK center. First the parent who has not enrolled the child in the existing free preK programs will have to enroll the child. Second the child will have to be selected in a lottery run by each school district. If you look at the numbers, there are roughly 17,000 eligible 4 year old children in San Antonio each year. If you subtract from the 2300 number the special education children (10% ) who are covered under a separate program, and the children who are home schooled (10%) you are left with roughly 1,900 children. The probability of getting any significant number of the target population into the city centers is small at best.
The city plan lacks detail. From the detail we do know the flaws are numerous and the costs too high. Voters need to vote NO and tell the city to stick to its core missions: public safety, roads, sidewalks, drainage, etc.
What the author misses is no one doubts the benefits of education.
City Hall’s thrown together $350 million spending plan includes $35 million for 4 mega-size 500-student “model” centers where teachers will be paid $65,000 to $80,000, over $15,000 more than ISD teachers earn.
So hastily was this rushed onto the ballot no transportation is planned for the centers other than a suggestion 4-year olds ride VIA busses — how crazy is that?
Nor is the city honest about how much the average household’s share of the $280 million in added sales taxes will be. It is much more than $7.81 a year. Divided by the city’s 450,000 households, the 8-year total is $622 per household.
First, I want to thank everyone for reading my essay and taking the time to give me feedback. I will try and respond to everyone’s concerns about what the essay is lacking and clarify my point of view. Felix, I am aware of the omission of numbers and statistics regarding tax data. Every article covering the Pre-K 4 SA initiative has that information, so I wasn’t trying to obfuscate information readily available via a google search, but rather, my hope was to introduce a new dimension to the important conversation all of us concerned citizens are having about this proposed program. My purpose was to bring attention to the historical roots of poverty and education ingrained in this city—something that other articles have failed to discuss.
Rich and MD, I understand your valid concerns about the way the program will be implemented and its corollaries for the school districts, but I am a historian, not a politician. In writing this article, I wasn’t attempting to unconditionally glorify anything (the way all politicians are forced to do), but on the contrary, my intention was to complicate the community’s discussion even further by taking a historical approach to focus on the ways in which concerned citizens, public school officials, and politicians use the idea of the child—specifically the Latino child—to shape policy regarding education, particularly in regards to how education is expected to affect the Latino child’s future. In fact, I find Felix’s comment, “These target children are not real children,” fascinating because it’s getting at exactly what my underlying argument is: the role of the child in the adult’s imagination dictates public policy, despite the fact that people will always disagree about the way that policy should be constructed and/or implemented. Finally, I respectfully disagree with the statement that it’s not the city’s responsibility to provide education for our children because we can’t rely on the state to do so. All the cutbacks in education that the state of Texas has passed has spurred several school districts to sue the state for violating the state constitution (See http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/education/texas-schools-districts-suing-state-over-budget-cuts). If our city and our community don’t attempt to fix this issue, no one else will. I agree that it’s going to be laborious, people are going to disagree, the discussions will be heated, and our first attempt will certainly not be flawless. But I do think that our history tells us that something needs to be done about educating all of our children, and though this proposed program isn’t perfect, it’s attempting to remedy problems that have been with us since the Texas public school system began in 1854.
In conclusion, I want to unequivocally state that I believe that all of these comments are vital in making our city a better place to live, so thank you for engaging in this discussion. These challenging questions and insights are necessary in making public policy beneficial to everyone.
Hi:
Well, this was a long article and I had to skim through it. But did you really explain how the money would be spent in this program? I know you, like all of us, realize the importance of educating our community at an early age; and you gave a truck load of reasons for educating our community but this did not answer anything about where these schools would be built and what the cost would be and just a lot of unanswered details of what this early education is going to teach???????
We all know how important the first three years of a child’s life can be in learning and being exposed to ideas and such, but I have not seen exactly what the plan is. This whole vote is all about surface and no substance.
This is why we now have fluoride in our water, WE were sold something that doesn’t really work.
I ask you: How many toilets are there in San Antonio? And how many times do they get flushed everyday? Don’t Know!!! And how much fluoride gets literally flushed down the toilet every day?? How much does this cost?
Now add watering your lawn, wasting the clothes, the car, the dog and how much waste is here?
How is this a better teeth program than just going into the schools and teaching children who to take care of their teeth and not spending $$$$$ on poisoning the water for everyone?
This is what we are talking about with the NO on this program. We are tired of being taken and having money wasted.
Gene Elder
HAPPY Foundation
Archives Director
Trinity Art Graduate, 1973
Comments are closed.
📍 Local news that’s actually local.
We love San Antonio, just like you. Subscribe to our free daily newsletter for the latest headlines first thing every morning.
![Shows the typical dilapidated, inadequate, rotting old shack, which is one of the mainstays of the ‘Mexican Ward School’ os [sic] Mathis. Notice rotting lumber. No screens on windows. No screen doors. Improper lighting. No fly-proofing or rat-proofing. Inside, it is dark, crowded and generally of an uninviting appearance.](https://i0.wp.com/sanantonioreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/sanchez-ward-photo.png?ssl=1)
Wonderful essay. Thank you for placing this important issue in a larger context.
It is remarkable that very little factual information or data about the tax increase is discussed in this essay. None of the mechanics about how this tax increase will be implemented are provided or otherwise explained. There are many valid questions about the specifc kids who will attend, how the kids will get there, why the kids are not presently enrolled in any one of the many, many federally funded Head start programs (and why the parents will all of a sudden decide to enroll their kids in this program) etc.
What about statistics as to why the current pre-K programs offered throught the city are so horrible? What about data showing the current pre-K teachers are somehow insufficient such that we need new “master teachers” at “centers of excellence?”
I think the lack of hard data tells us everything.
Ms. Goetz, provides an interesting history lesson, but is short on facts as to why the mayor’s initiative will solve the challenges facing the 2300 children (the Target Population) who are not enrolled in a preK program. These target children are not real children, they are statistics based on demographic data only. Voters must understand that Texas already requires every school district with 15 or more eligible students to offer a preK program. School districts are funded some $4,000 for each student in PreK. Over the 8 years of the initiative the city will drain $48 million from our schools. Because acceptance into the city centers will be by lottery run by the school district, the probability that a school will be able to eliminate a PreK class room is remote. Thus the schools will still have to pay the same number of teachers and aids to teach a preK class that may have lost 2 or 3 children in the lottery. These costs will have to be made up out of the school budget. So we end up penalizing a whole school full of children with names and addresses to solve the problems of the 2300 target population that the demographers have identified.
This initiative of the mayor is even more discriminatory when you look at the probability that any significant number of these target students will actually be selected for one of the slots in a city PreK center. First the parent who has not enrolled the child in the existing free preK programs will have to enroll the child. Second the child will have to be selected in a lottery run by each school district. If you look at the numbers, there are roughly 17,000 eligible 4 year old children in San Antonio each year. If you subtract from the 2300 number the special education children (10% ) who are covered under a separate program, and the children who are home schooled (10%) you are left with roughly 1,900 children. The probability of getting any significant number of the target population into the city centers is small at best.
The city plan lacks detail. From the detail we do know the flaws are numerous and the costs too high. Voters need to vote NO and tell the city to stick to its core missions: public safety, roads, sidewalks, drainage, etc.
What the author misses is no one doubts the benefits of education.
City Hall’s thrown together $350 million spending plan includes $35 million for 4 mega-size 500-student “model” centers where teachers will be paid $65,000 to $80,000, over $15,000 more than ISD teachers earn.
So hastily was this rushed onto the ballot no transportation is planned for the centers other than a suggestion 4-year olds ride VIA busses — how crazy is that?
Nor is the city honest about how much the average household’s share of the $280 million in added sales taxes will be. It is much more than $7.81 a year. Divided by the city’s 450,000 households, the 8-year total is $622 per household.
First, I want to thank everyone for reading my essay and taking the time to give me feedback. I will try and respond to everyone’s concerns about what the essay is lacking and clarify my point of view. Felix, I am aware of the omission of numbers and statistics regarding tax data. Every article covering the Pre-K 4 SA initiative has that information, so I wasn’t trying to obfuscate information readily available via a google search, but rather, my hope was to introduce a new dimension to the important conversation all of us concerned citizens are having about this proposed program. My purpose was to bring attention to the historical roots of poverty and education ingrained in this city—something that other articles have failed to discuss.
Rich and MD, I understand your valid concerns about the way the program will be implemented and its corollaries for the school districts, but I am a historian, not a politician. In writing this article, I wasn’t attempting to unconditionally glorify anything (the way all politicians are forced to do), but on the contrary, my intention was to complicate the community’s discussion even further by taking a historical approach to focus on the ways in which concerned citizens, public school officials, and politicians use the idea of the child—specifically the Latino child—to shape policy regarding education, particularly in regards to how education is expected to affect the Latino child’s future. In fact, I find Felix’s comment, “These target children are not real children,” fascinating because it’s getting at exactly what my underlying argument is: the role of the child in the adult’s imagination dictates public policy, despite the fact that people will always disagree about the way that policy should be constructed and/or implemented. Finally, I respectfully disagree with the statement that it’s not the city’s responsibility to provide education for our children because we can’t rely on the state to do so. All the cutbacks in education that the state of Texas has passed has spurred several school districts to sue the state for violating the state constitution (See http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/education/texas-schools-districts-suing-state-over-budget-cuts). If our city and our community don’t attempt to fix this issue, no one else will. I agree that it’s going to be laborious, people are going to disagree, the discussions will be heated, and our first attempt will certainly not be flawless. But I do think that our history tells us that something needs to be done about educating all of our children, and though this proposed program isn’t perfect, it’s attempting to remedy problems that have been with us since the Texas public school system began in 1854.
In conclusion, I want to unequivocally state that I believe that all of these comments are vital in making our city a better place to live, so thank you for engaging in this discussion. These challenging questions and insights are necessary in making public policy beneficial to everyone.
Hi:
Well, this was a long article and I had to skim through it. But did you really explain how the money would be spent in this program? I know you, like all of us, realize the importance of educating our community at an early age; and you gave a truck load of reasons for educating our community but this did not answer anything about where these schools would be built and what the cost would be and just a lot of unanswered details of what this early education is going to teach???????
We all know how important the first three years of a child’s life can be in learning and being exposed to ideas and such, but I have not seen exactly what the plan is. This whole vote is all about surface and no substance.
This is why we now have fluoride in our water, WE were sold something that doesn’t really work.
I ask you: How many toilets are there in San Antonio? And how many times do they get flushed everyday? Don’t Know!!! And how much fluoride gets literally flushed down the toilet every day?? How much does this cost?
Now add watering your lawn, wasting the clothes, the car, the dog and how much waste is here?
How is this a better teeth program than just going into the schools and teaching children who to take care of their teeth and not spending $$$$$ on poisoning the water for everyone?
This is what we are talking about with the NO on this program. We are tired of being taken and having money wasted.
Gene Elder
HAPPY Foundation
Archives Director
Trinity Art Graduate, 1973