For Rafael Vásquez, seeing his book on the shelves of the Santa Monica Public Library is more than a professional milestone. It is a return to the building where, as a middle and high school student, he did his homework until closing time.
"It truly feels like a full-circle moment, and it means a lot to me," Vásquez said.
Vásquez, a Santa Monica native and graduate of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District and Santa Monica College, coauthored "Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Mexican Students" with William Pérez, a professor and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at Loyola Marymount University. Vásquez is affiliate graduate faculty in the College of Education at Oregon State University and board president of the Mixteco/Indígena Community Organizing Project. The Los Angeles Unified School District recently purchased 600 copies for educator professional development, and the book is now available at the Santa Monica library.
"It means a great deal to me because the Santa Monica Public Library was part of my educational journey long before I ever imagined writing a book," Vásquez said. "When I was in middle school and high school, I would walk to the main library after school almost every day to study, do my homework, and read. Many times, I would stay until closing."
He hopes the book finds a wide audience there. "I hope another student, parent, teacher, or community member will pick it up," he said. "I hope the work can contribute something back to the community that helped shape me in such a very real way."
That community shaped the book's questions. The son of parents who "migrated from the Central Valleys of Oaxaca in the 1970s and settled in Santa Monica," Vásquez said he grew up "within the Tlacolula community here — a community of Indigenous Oaxacan families with roots in the region."
School taught him early that his identity was more complicated than others assumed. "My experiences in school made me aware very early that being Mexican was not the whole story," Vásquez said. "I experienced stigma associated with being from Oaxaca and being Indigenous. At one point, I even avoided saying that I was from Oaxaca at school because I had learned that identifying that way could change how people treated me."
Those memories became the book's driving questions. "What happens when schools see Indigenous Mexican students only as 'Mexican' or 'Latino'?" Vásquez said. "What happens to their languages, communities, histories, and identities when those differences are invisible within the educational system?"
Indigenous Mexican students, he said, "are students whose families come from one of the many Indigenous peoples of Mexico, such as Mixtec, Nahua, P'urhépecha, or Zapotec communities." Many are born in the United States, he added, and "may identify as Mexican, Mexican American, Latino, or Indigenous — or as several of these at the same time."
The trouble comes, he said, when schools "automatically place these students into a broad 'Mexican' or 'Latino' category," so that "important differences can disappear." Such students, he noted, "may speak an Indigenous language at home, have cultural traditions and community ties that differ from those of other Mexican or Latino students, and sometimes face backlash because of their Indigenous identity or language."
"If schools don't recognize these differences, they may not have the information, language support, or cultural understanding needed to serve these students well," Vásquez said. "Recognizing Indigenous identity allows schools to see students more fully and provide support that reflects who they actually are."
For Pérez, the most important reform begins with better data. "When students are not accurately identified, it becomes much harder for schools to understand their experiences, identify inequities, provide appropriate language support, or develop culturally responsive programs," he said.
"Accurate data would not solve every challenge these students face, but it would provide an essential foundation for addressing them," Pérez said. "Schools cannot effectively respond to disparities they cannot see or measure."
Data alone, he cautioned, is not enough. "Policy change should be accompanied by meaningful engagement with students, families, and communities," Pérez said. "Recognition means making Indigenous students visible." He warned that "if Indigenous Mexican students remain invisible in school data and institutional policies, their needs and strengths can continue to be overlooked."
The book grew out of a three-year, mixed-methods study in semi-urban, urban and rural settings, using student interviews, teacher interviews and survey data. It focuses on multilingual students who speak Zapotec, Mixtec or P'urhépecha.
Pérez described the partnership as one of complementary strengths. "Working with Rafael was a natural progression of my scholarship and a collaboration in which our perspectives reinforced one another," he said. Vásquez, he added, "brought deep and focused expertise on Indigenous Mexican students, particularly their linguistic and cultural experiences and the ways their identities can be overlooked in educational settings."
"I would not characterize our perspectives primarily in terms of difference," Pérez said. "I would characterize them as complementary." Together, he said, they set out to ask "what happens when schools fail to recognize an important dimension of a student's identity, and what can institutions do differently?"
You can learn more about the book, including photographs and academic reviews, at heyzine.com/flip-book/782c258cf5.html.