Panel 2: Schools and Education

Event: Legal Histories of American Governance: Institutions and the States
Date: April 5, 2024
Location: Stanford Law School, Room 270
Sponsored by: Stanford Center for Law and History, Stanford Department of History
Will Holub-Moorman
This paper examines the rise of child support enforcement as a legal imperative and institutional form within the American state. It traces how welfare reform’s fiscal prerogatives and administrative demands produced novel efforts to police poor parents’ financial obligations. It argues that this development had profound consequences - not only for “deadbeat” and “deserted” parents, but also in solidifying an extractive and racialized mode of governance that sought to prop up the economic viability of the nuclear family a mid deindustrialization, demographic change, divorce liberalization, austerity, and mass incarceration. In doing so, this paper challenges prevailing historical narratives of welfare reform that privilege the ideological convergence of “family values” conservatism and neoliberalism in the 1990s.
Laura K. Muñoz
This paper reconsiders the idea of “Mexican schools” and the school segregation of Mexican American youth before 1954 as a national phenomenon, as opposed to a regional borderlands issue. Do we have the evidence to shift our analysis of this schooling from a “de facto” to a “de jure” practice based on the systemic racialization of Mexican American youth in public schools across the nation?
Doris Morgan Rueda
This paper explores the institutional histories of Juan Crow segregation and punishment across two southwestern juvenile industrial schools in Texas and Arizona, and as well as the policies created to obscure an enduring history of anti-Latinx racism and xenophobia. The cases of Gatesville, TX and Fort Grant, AZ, and their significant Latinx populations, reveal the bureaucratic ways of punishing and othering Latinx youth that was notably compounded by the erasure of Latinx youth from the histories of these institutions.
Chair: Rabia Belt
Stanford Law School