Exceptions to the Rule: Upwardly Mobile White and Mexican American High School Girls
Abstract
While most high school students will obtain future social class positions consistent with their class backgrounds, a handful of students are exceptions to this rule, being either upwardly mobile working-class students (on the college preparatory track) or downwardly mobile middle-class students (on the vocational track). Highlighting predominant patterns, research typically ignores such students precisely because they are exceptions to the rule. This article, based on ethnographic research among white and Mexican American high school girls in California's Central Valley, foregrounds the experience of upwardly mobile working-class students showing how race/ethnicity, class, and gender intersect in the lives of these young women, shaping their educational mobility. Using a comparative approach, this article examines the similarities and differences between white and Mexican American working-class girls' experiences of mobility. The article first describes the various contingencies leading to the girls' mobility, then explores their subjective experience of mobility, in both cases noting the girls' different experiences according to their race/ethnicity.
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1.
1. Cultural capital refers to class-based knowledge, skills, linguistic and cultural competencies, and a worldview that is passed on via family and is related more to educational attainment than to occupation (Bourdieu 1984).
2.
2. Social capital refers to middle-class forms of social support in a person's interpersonal network (Bourdieu 1984).
3.
3. Mehan, Hubbard, and Villanueva (1994) found that students who participated in an Advancement via Individual Determination program, in particular, had higher rates of school success.
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