High School As an Arena for Cultural Conflict and Acculturation for Latino Angelinos

Schooling has traditionally been viewed as the means of integrating ethnic and linguistic minorities into the educational, and by implication into the wider sociocultural, mainstream. As a result, schools are commonly thought of as arenas for cultural assimilation. For areas like inner‐city Los Angeles, where a Latino “minority” has become so dominant that it has begun to reproduce its own cultural patterns in richly networked cultural enclaves, this assimilationist frame becomes problematic. This qualitative study examines the cultural dynamics resulting from the advent of the “minority‐majority” in one innercity high school with a large (more than 80%) Latino student population. It focuses on the relationship between the predominantly mainstream teaching staff and the predominantly Latino student body. Ethnographic data collected from 1986 to 1989 indicate that high school is an arena in which the boundary between Latino and Anglo culture is being negotiated, with “minority” and “majority” in conflict over the extent to which their versions of a cultural identity are to be reproduced in the American educational system. The mutual accommodation necessary to resolve this conflict and negotiate acceptable group boundaries is a daily enterprise for the school community.