Learning Nationalism at the El Paso-Juarez Border
Routledge – 2003 – 208 pages
Offering a critical ethnography of education at the U.S.-Mexico border, Pledging Allegiance explores how public schools teach cultural and national values explicitly and implicitly. Susan J. Rippberger and Kathleen A. Staudt illuminate the complex overlays of culture and learning through the eyes of students, teachers, and administrators in U.S. and Mexican schools. This book examines nationalism and civic ritual, bilingualism, technology, and classroom organization to discover how educators along the border impart senses of national and cultural identity to their students.
"With probing intelligence and graceful, limpid prose, Rippberger and Staudt have written an important book on how the school systems of the U.S. and Mexico manage to instill national identity in their new citizens. Those interested in border issues will find much food for thought in this book." -- Pablo Vila, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Texas at San Antonio and author of Crossing Borders: Reinforcing Borders and Ethnography at the Border
"The authors probe the geographic, in-between space that is the U.S.-Mexico border to consider, for example, the identities of children who find themselves pledging allegiance to two flags and two countries while living and breathing a syncretic culture. The assessment here, along with the questions asked, will help us to understand the future of two countries whose histories continue to be enmeshed." -- Emma Pérez, author of The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History
"Provides perhaps the best comparative description available of how educational structure, teaching methods, classroom interaction, technology, and language instruction in each country help produce national culture." -- Chad Richardson, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Borderlands Studies at the University of Texas-Pan American
Susan Rippberger is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Foundations and Assistant Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Texas, El Paso. Kathleen Staudt is Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, El Paso.