Disciplinary skills are not enough: Resituating historical thinking within students’ racialized and linguistic experiences

Background Drawing from research with 11th-grade history students, the authors illustrate how students' racial/ethnic and language experiences influence their analysis of Mexican American discrimination. Latinx students' experiences with white privilege helped them understand why 1940s Mexican Americans claimed whiteness to access better schools. However, students' experiences with instruction for Emergent Bilingual (EB) students interfered with seeing language segregation as a proxy for racial/ethnic discrimination.