NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

The Challenges and Rewards in Teaching Race and Juvenile Justice History
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, University of California, Davis

Syllabus

The Challenge
Building a course on race and juvenile justice in history seemed like an exciting venture when I first set out to do so in the spring of 2006, especially given that I was a relatively newcomer to the field of youth studies in general. For the previous decade or so, much of my research had focused on Mexican women in nineteenth century California but a fortuitous discovery of qualitatively rich reform school records at the California State Archives turned my attention to Mexican, Mexican American, and African American youth identified as “delinquent” in late nineteenth and early twentieth century California. The prospect of developing a class on youth, race, and delinquency excited me not only because I would finally be able to teach what I research but also because I knew that my students -- many of them youth of color -- would be interested in learning more about youth of color and the juvenile justice system, given the significant rates of incarceration affecting youth of color in California as well as in some of the most populous states across the country, including New York, Illinois, and Texas.

As I set out to find syllabi, readings, and films to teach undergraduate students the ways in which “wayward” youth of color had been dealt with in United States history, I found myself coming up short. In my search, I came across numerous monographs and surveys on “American,” i.e., white, middle class, and ethnic working class youth and their experiences in the colonial, republican, and early national periods. And, I found a growing and vibrant body of scholarship on adolescent females, sexuality, and delinquency. The literature was sparse--to say the least--when it came to African Americans and even sparser for Mexican American and Native American youth.

My strategy then focused on using multiple tactics to find material. First, I contacted senior scholars working in the fields of colonial American and Spanish/Mexican history in the United States, anticipating these persons could perhaps point me in the direction of new scholarship or scholars working in the field. Unfortunately, most could not. (The one exception, Steven Schlossman, has provided many important leads not only in terms of teaching but also research.) Second, I combed the literature--and bibliographies--to find any shreds of evidence or writings that could speak to the experiences of Native American, African American, Mexican American, and if possible Asian American youth prior to the mid-twentieth century. This approach yielded some fruitful leads, not so much in identifying monographs or surveys on the history of wayward youth of color but on published primary sources.

The most useful proved to be Robert Bremner’s Children and Youth in America, a collection of primary documents arranged chronologically and thematically. The sections on “Juvenile Delinquency” and “Immigrant Children” were the most useful for my purposes. They provided significant insight on African slave children and how colonists treated them in the north and in the slave south. As I dug deeper into African American history and the experiences of youth, I found a handful of studies by historians, including Cecil Frey’s study on the “House of Refuge for Colored Children,” as well as by criminologists and sociologists, including Vernetta D. Young and Geoff Ward, respectively. Most recently Jennifer Trost’s Gateway to Justice, a book on white and black children in the south, also promised a new lead from which to cull important information. Other works that included discussions of African American youth, including Tony Platt’s The Child Savers (1977), Mary Odem’s Delinquent Daughters (1995), Anne Knupfer, Reform and Resistance (2001), and most recently David Tanenhuas, Juvenile Justice in the Making (2005), but those generally did not use race or ethnicity as categories of analysis or examined the youth’s experiences within proper cultural contexts.

My search for juvenile justice histories on Native youth and on Mexican and Mexican American youth was less successful. Bremner’s work mentioned some of the experiences of Native American youth in the east coast and I wondered what their histories looked like in the Midwest and Southwest. Fortunately, I found one essay by Frederick Greenwald, “Treatment of Behavioral Problems of Children and Youth by Early Indigenous Americans,” in History of Juvenile Delinquency, Vol. 2. Essays on Mexican or Spanish-speaking youth in the eighteenth and nineteenth proved even more illusory. My previous work on nineteenth century California history indicated that Mexican youth in the Los Angeles regions transgressed the law and social norms of behavior. In Los Angeles’s Mexican tribunal records—the alcalde records—I ran across a handful of court cases involving Native and Mexican youth. Yet, in my mind, those few cases provided far too little evidence to come up with a definitive answer on how Spanish/Mexican authorities in the southwest dealt with minors who carried out anti-social behavior or who transgressed social norms. The most specific findings I cold deduce is that parents, specifically the fathers--with their position as the pater familias and head of the family--took responsibility for their dependents' misdeeds and it was they--not judges or other officials--who ultimately doled out punishments to their children. As I found, this scenario resembled much of what took place in the Euro-American colonial experience in the northeast—with fathers and families exercising the most control over their dependents.

Overall, I found little to no work on juvenile justice and race in the southwest. Much of the work on Mexican origin youth and delinquency focuses on the pachucos and pachucas (or zootsuiters) of the 1940s, a topic that has been covered quite extensively. Fortunately, I found a personal narrative, To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back: Memories of an East LA Outlaw (2005), of an individual, Ernie Lopez, who spent much of his young and adult life in and out of jails and prisons. As an eighty year old man, his story provided significant insight on how and why young Mexican boys and, later, men are caught in the vicious cycle of the prison system. Other than that life history and my own recent work on Mexican and Mexican American youth at Whittier State School, California’s premier reform school established in the 1890s, I found little to recount the experiences of youth of color in history. At the time, I found myself telling my students that scholarship had yet to be written on the experiences of youth of color, on Mexican Americans in particular, in the juvenile justice system. The setbacks notwithstanding, I forged ahead with the course, anticipating I would eventually stumble across more resources.

The Course
I organized the ten-week course around a basic question: How have “wayward” youth of color been dealt with in United States history? To unpack this query, I structured the class chronologically and thematically, beginning in the Euro-American colonial period and ending in the late twentieth century. For the colonial and early republican eras, I assigned primary source material on youth of color identified as troublesome and antisocial. As my students soon discovered, the reality was that most “delinquents” were neglected, impoverished, and often orphaned children and adolescents who had few resources, if any, at their disposal. Youth of color, Native and Black youth, found themselves at the extreme end of the process of marginalization that most poor young people experienced. To discuss the experiences of youth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I turned to Steven Schlossman’s Transforming Juvenile Justice (2005), a reprint of his Love and the American Delinquent (1977), though not focusing on youth of color, his work examines two of the most important institutions in juvenile justice history—reformatories and the juvenile court—that also impacted (and continues to impact) youth of color. Initially, though those institutions largely excluded African American and Native youth. To understand the kinds of experiences faced by Mexican and Mexican American youth in the twentieth century, we read Edward Escobar’s Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945, which provided insight on pachucos and the “zoot suit” riots of the World War Two era, and Ernie Lopez’s story of growing up in Los Angeles and his life of incarceration. We also read important works (dissertation chapters) on the historical experiences of pachucas, Mexican American young women of the zoot suit generation.

Looking back at the course I developed, I would change many elements. And, in fact, I have done just that given that I am currently teaching the course. I am using the primary sources again but am also including several articles on Native American, African American, and Mexican American youth in the juvenile justice system. And, I am using Eric Schneider’s In the Web of Class (1993) because of the breadth of his work and inclusion of ethnicity, gender, and class (see attached syllabus). I am also including a section on “race” – that is, having students read about the ways in which race has been historically constructed and having them think about it informs the juvenile justice system. For this, we have read Barbara Jeanne Fields’ work on race, slavery, and ideology. I could find no overview on how Mexicans or Mexican youth, for that matter, have been racialized—but is an important theme we will cover in the course.

Many positive developments came out of planning and teaching the course. In the process of putting my class together and in conducting my own research on Mexican-origin youth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I realized that the experiences of youth of color cannot be inferred from the experiences of white, native-born and immigrant working class youth. Most simply, this is because many of the institutions—such as reformatories--did not allow non-whites into their institutions. In the south, for instance, as Vernetta Young, Geoff Ward, and Jennifer Trost have found, African American youth were not allowed access to the latest reformatories. Enslaved black youth who committed acts deemed anti-social or threatening in any way, were handled within the plantation system of justice. After 1865, southerners established few institutions for Black youth. Instead, delinquent Black children and adolescents had to labor in the convict lease system along side adults. Not until the late nineteenth century, philanthropic African Americans worked to establish homes for delinquent and dependent children. Only then did they have access to any kind of assistance. As I argue elsewhere, research on youth and the juvenile justice system that takes into account race and ethnicity is still wanting.

Another fortuitous development out of my attempt to build a course on race and juvenile justice is the network of colleagues that I developed from my inquiry into the scholarship of youth of color and teaching such history. These scholars have not only shared their scholarships and insight but also their moral support. Junior scholars such as Bill Bush, Geoff Ward, and Ellen Wu have proved to be very helpful with their insight, as have senior scholars including Steven Schlossman, Ed Escobar, and Tony Platt.

Finally, my interest in finding materials on youth of color and to the field of juvenile justice more broadly led me write an article examining the field of juvenile justice studies in the last forty years, specifically since the publication of Anthony M. Platt’s The Child Savers (1969, 1977). That research confirmed my initial suspicion that little has been said on youth of color despite the need to explore this history given the current crisis in the juvenile correctional system. In the essay, I make a call for all scholars of youth to explore in more detail race and ethnicity as well as class, gender, and sexuality. Not until we do so, I argue, can we profess to teach an inclusive and accurate history.

Ed. note:  Check out the most recent syllabus  (Winter 2008) for Miroslava Chavez-Garcia's course on Race and Juvenile Justice.