Racism
The overwhelming consensus is that overt racial hatred was uncommon. Most interviewees, students or faculty, reported very little, if any, visible tensions. Doré Wong, a student during the 1940s and principal from 1991 to 1997, said she “had a terrific childhood and never saw any prejudice or ethnic distinction.” Fungi Ng, a former Castelar student and employee, said, “We all mixed; we didn’t care about ethnicity. We’d just hang out with each other…I think it wasn’t until junior high at Nightingale that we even became conscious of different ethnicities and cliques.”
At the same time, these glowing testimonies may be less indicative of racial justice than racial apathy. Al Soo-Hoo, a Chinatown community leader who grew up there during the 1940s and 1950s, recalled having a diverse group of friends but also said that “my parents did not allow us to go to Alpine Playground because the Medican kids would bully the Chinese kids.”
Dr. Gay Yuen, who attended Castelar Elementary in the 1950s, recalls an even more jarring experience: a teacher slapped her in the face for speaking Cantonese. Yuen was in first grade at the time.
“The message was clear: do not speak Chinese,” Yuen said. “That was the trauma that started my rejection of being Chinese…Castelar is not a good memory. I left Castelar in the third grade and I have little memory of those early years except for that slap. It is a total blank” (18).
Yuen’s story reflects the historical trend of language racism, which is pervasive in American education. In Teaching to Change the World (2018), UCLA education professor Jeannie Oakes asserts that attempts to eradicate all heritage languages other than English stemmed from a belief that Chinese and other non-white immigrants were morally deficient. Yuen’s teacher likely believed this, and slapping Yuen was their (albeit crude) way of encouraging Yuen to assimilate into American culture.
Ultimately, legal and demographic pressures forced Castelar to reverse course against language racism. The 1965 Immigration Act allowed waves of Asian immigrants to enter Chinatown, and Lau v. Nichols (1974) mandated that Castelar establish bilingual education programs to serve these (often English language learner) students. One of these waves was the influx of “Boat People,” ethnic Chinese who spoke Teo Chew or Vietnamese.
Many Southeast Asian refugee children found themselves at Castelar, and their teachers struggled to reconcile their trauma-influenced behaviors with their own preconceptions of Asian children. Phyllis Chiu, who taught at Castelar during the 1970s, reported being shocked by students hiding, “shooting” at each other, and otherwise “acting out in very inappropriate ways,” claiming that “we had not seen this with the Hong Kong immigrant kids.” Yuen concurred, saying that “As teachers, we knew that developmentally, first-graders do not lie and do not steal. But we caught these little refugee girls stuffing crayons in their underwear.” She eventually began to confront the incongruity of viewing Asians as model minorities:
“I made a snobby comment in a meeting, ‘Well, you are never going to find Asian children like that,’” Yuen said. “If the kids came from Korea or Hong Kong or Japan, they were at grade level in their own country. I had to eat my words. These Southeast Asian kids or rural Chinese kids that were coming never went to school in their lives!”
But for all of its struggles with racism, Castelar captures the public imaginary not as a site of racial oppression but of empowerment. Even Yuen admits that Castelar had a “critical mass of students with the same needs. And there was a critical mass of teachers who could sympathize culturally. That critical mass contributed to make Castelar special.”
Dr. Cheuk Choi, who served as principal from 1997 to the 2010s, is even more complimentary: “Of course, we have some racial tension,” Choi said. “Each family comes to the school with their backgrounds and biases. But over the years, we have done a good job of talking to parents and their children about the district’s policies. Teachers know to educate their classes and the parents as well. It is a minimum problem on this campus.”