[Review of] Un Nuevo Dia

Un Nuevo Dia is a bilingual (Spanish/English) quarterly publication whose purpose is to report on the progress being made both locally and nationally in new and improved educational programs for minority children. 1 It is achieving this goal by printing articles which deal with discriminatory practices against minority students in various community public schools. Many of the articles offer solutions to this problem, emphasizing community action as an effective political tool

[Review of] Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman. Beyond Words: Images from America\u27s Concentration Camps

Shikataganai! Shikataganai! It cannot be helped. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II devastated the Japanese community, ruined businesses, and destroyed families. Memories and recollections of the Japanese American concentration camp experience are collected in this beautifully crafted work illustrating in text and prints the images produced by the incarcerated Japanese Americans. Beyond Words captures the personal insights of this experience, the unjust accusations and imprisonment of a people, their treatment as enemy aliens and foreigners, and those damned barbed wire fences enclosing them. Many found solace in expressing themselves in art and poetry illustrating their insights into the harshness of their displaced lives

[Review of] Joseph Hraba. American Ethnicity

Hraba uses the social science disciplines--i.e., sociology, history, and psychology--to set the scope of his research on American ethnicity. Hraba combines the theoretical premises of assimilation, pluralism, and ethnic conflict theory as methods for Viewing ethnic group convergence to and divergence from American society. Each theory is only a partial explanation of societal modernization and ethnic evolution . . . and together they offer a fuller understanding of ethnic evolution in the modernization process (p. 7). Societal modernization and ethnic evolution are keys for understanding the convergence (inclusion) and divergence (exclusion) process

Critique [of Chicano Ethnicity and Aging by Marvin A. Lewis]

Lewis\u27s article presents a creative and exciting approach for understanding the importance elderly people have not only in the family but in the community as well. He blends literary personification, cultural integration, and social science strategies for illustrating Chicano traditions and their relationships to the aging process. Literary works involving curandero/curandera and abuelo/abuela folk traditions depict reverance [reverence], honor, power, and prestige as engaging qualities inherited by the elderly. Lewis\u27s analysis of Anaya\u27s Bless Me Ultima and Santiago\u27s Famous All Over Town illustrate the congruence folk traditions have with the positive aspects of the aging process. By using literature to illustrate how cultural traditions are transmitted, Lewis shows social scientists the importance of creative fiction in rendering accurate, realistic portraits of people

Critique [of Asians, Jews, and the Legacy of Midas by Alan Spector]

The author of Asians, Jews, and the Legacy of Midas presents a provocative comparative analysis of Asians and Jews. Spector utilizes both a cultural and economic basis for understanding the function of Asian stereotyping and applies his analysis to the Jewish situation. While the American context provides the locus of his research, he does present his argument in an international context. Spector illustrates how the categorization of Asians and Jews as the model for economic success is dehumanizing as such a perception drain(s) the life out of human beings and concretizes them into non-human statues. The conclusion of this author\u27s work in dealing with oppression based in stereotype is actually a starting point which scholars should begin addressing. To be sure, the model minority, as applied to Asians and Jews, has generated numerous articles and papers, and yet scholars have failed to develop analyses which reflect an interdisciplinary and historical approach to the reasons for propagating such stereotypes

Critique [of Identity as Theory and Method for Ethnic Studies by John Hatfield]

Ethnic Studies is generally viewed as a minor program in the academy, lacking research philosophy and methodology. Consequently, scholars who attempt research concerning peoples of color focus on the group : their social history, migration patterns, political and economic development, educational attainment, and lifestyle. Social science disciplinary guidelines are the usual framework. John Hatfield\u27s Identity as Theory and Method for Ethnic Studies provides a basis for truly understanding ethnicity

Critique [of Alternative Education for the Rom]

Alternative Education for the Rom concerns a little written about ethnic group, the Gypsy, and concentrates on the dilemma of cultural resistance on the part of the Rom and cultural change for their survival in the U.S. Leita Kaldi discusses an educational alternative the Rom in Seattle, Washington find acceptable to bridge the gap between traditional Rom culture and the U.S. social structure

GUEST EDITORIAL

The National Association of Interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies (NAIES) is an organization dedicated towards finding solutions to some of the Ethnic problems which plague U.S. society. Some of these solutions are found when people from a variety of cultural, ethnic, and environmental backgrounds are brought together to communicate and discuss germinal ideas. To this end, the NAIES, in the recent past, has set up regional conferences in various parts of the United States. These regional conferences are a microcosm of the national conference. The regional conferences follow similar guidelines as set up for the national conferences. I attended one of these regional conferences at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, California, in November, l979. A critique of this conference will illustrate how such regional conferences are about solutions

[Review of] Martha Montero, ed., Bilingual Education Research Handbook: Strategies for the Design of Multicultural Curriculum and Language Issues in Multicultural Settings

Bilingual Education Teacher Handbook is a two volume collection of articles developed by bilingual staff at the Boston University Training and Resource Center of the National Network of Centers for Bilingual Education. The goal of this project is to develop teacher awareness of those areas that underlie bilingual education, namely, (a) the role of the systems-context approach; (b) the role in curriculum design of goals and objectives; (c) the development of pedagogical skills in bilingual education. (p. 3) The articles were not intended to be neatly packaged curriculum kits, but rather to provide the fundamental basis for developing and evaluating bilingual programs. Their major focus is on the junior high school and adult school population. The successful use of these volumes as handbooks is dependent upon the devoted energies of teachers, community members, parents, and administrators who are totally involved in bilingual education

Critique [of Symbolic Interaction and Black Mental Health: Understanding Black Self-Conceptions]

Shirley Vining Brown\u27s “Symbolic Interaction and Black Mental Health: Understanding Black Self Conceptions” presents significant and vital information concerning the effects of negative self-concepts on black Americans. The most interesting aspect of the paper is the development of the concept of negative belief systems