Gateways to Powerlessness: Incorporating Hispanic Deaf Children and Families into Formal Schooling

Because of the legal and organizational structures which are built into the special education system, its institutions provide interesting sites for the study of interactions between Third World peoples, such as Hispanics, and U.S. society. In the interests of developing an understanding of these interactions, an intensive two-year ethnographic field study of the formal intake process (assessment, programming, placement and evaluation) involving pre-school-age Hispanic deaf children in a school in New York City was conducted. This paper discusses practices of ‘noninvolvement’ of Hispanic parents in educational decision making, as well as the construction of particular ideological and social relations between participants in the intake process. The progress of one family through the intake is analyzed in detail to demonstrate the social and cultural complexities of these relationships.