Lemon Grove Incident Sparknotes

The film, Lemon Grove Incident, depicts the hardships a community of Mexican Americans endured as education, a tool commonly used for upward mobility and inclusion into the dominant American society, became another form of racialization against them. In this community discourse driven by stereotypes and actions geared by academic profiling, denied Mexican Americans students from co-existing in the same school as their white peers. Members of the Lemon Grove PTA and School Board, believed that segregation of the two races would create better learning environments for both parties because the Mexican students lacked full ability of speaking the English language. Mexican American students were targeted because their ability of speaking Spanish

In the Anglos eyes, Spanish is an inferior tongue that should be erased and replaced by English. For example, Roberto, an older student, who was highlighted as an example to the class by Ms. Katherine Elliot as “someone they should aim to be.” A student who is fully assimilated into “American culture” by carrying manners that shows respect and who speaks English fluently. Here the ability of speaking Spanish is stigmatized as holding back the Mexican American students from fully integrating with American society. Most importantly, they are not only pushing students to adhere to the dominant language but they are also teaching them that one linguistic capability is preferred and legitimized over the

Even if the Mexican students assimilated through the Americanization classes, like the student Roberto, they were academically profiled as deficient and non-white and casted away to the “New School” based on their race and not on their academic fall backs. Borrowing the words from Ofelia Garcia, “The Spanish language (and bilingualism) in the United States have become markers of being nonwhite, of being out of place, thus minoritizing the position of U.S. Latinos and excluding them” (Garcia, 2009). Anglos in this community were creating a visible divide by using Spanish language as a marker of “otherness” and framing racial stereotypes to this linguistic