Word: mexicans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nation that could afford to enjoy itself. On terraces high above torpid Manhattan, in screened lanais in Dallas and Miami, and in cattle camps along the Mexican border, Americans grilled their steaks and warded off the heat with long, cool drinks. Caravans of tourists swarmed to the mountains and national parks. Ten thousand pleasure craft were anchored in California's San Diego and Mission bays, and beaches everywhere were jammed. Minneapolis braced itself for 50,000 fun-loving American Legionnaires on convention bent. Almost every event seemed to draw big crowds: thousands of Chicagoans tensely watched the league-leading...
Until he was 14, squat, jolly, Texas-born Felix Tijerina could not speak a word of English. He was like thousands of other Mexican-American children: his mother taught him to read and write in Spanish only. And had he gone to school, he might still not have learned English. At the time (1920), Texas segregated Mexican-American schoolchildren on the basis of language-a discrimination usually as enduring as skin color. According to the odds, Felix seemed doomed to stagnate behind the language-discrimination barrier for the rest of his life...
Pointing the Finger. Texas has long since dropped separate schools for Mexican-American students. But this is no full solution. When Tijerina tackled the problem two years ago, he discovered that as many as 200,000 Texas five-year-olds still could not speak English. The inevitable result: the children enter first grade normally at six, make no headway in school, and eventually drop out. Tijerina found that in five Texas counties alone, where the population is 90% Mexican-American, the state spent $3,000,000 a year to support dependent children...
...neighboring towns of Ganado and Edna near Houston. Purpose: to teach 400 words of basic English to 42 five-year-olds, all of whom spoke Spanish only. After 3½ months the "graduates" entered first grade in the town's public schools-where more than half the Mexican-American first-graders had failed the year before-and all passed with flying colors...
...communities were ready to start Tijerina schools this fall, in a grand attack aimed at smashing the language barrier forever. Already Latin Americans are trying to launch similar schools in New York City, Buffalo, and Elizabeth, NJ. Last week Tijerina himself was hard at work stumping Texas to sell Mexican parents on the scheme, broadcasting urgent appeals in Spanish on 38 radio stations. Good Citizen Tijerina will not say how much of his own money he has spent so far: "I'm just paying a little back from what the people of the community have done...