Gino Pellegrini
Description: Education, Race, Mixed Race, and Multiculturalism
[This piece was originally published in January 2018 by The Parent Voice, an online journal that no longer exists. The layout and some of the photos in this version are different.]
I became aware of the world around me during the Reagan era in a middle-class, conservative, predominantly white suburb of Los Angeles. Growing up Mexican Italian American in this context was difficult and dissonant for me. If I had grown up in a different place or class, my mixed experience might have been very different, but then I would not have this story to tell.
My mother is the youngest daughter of immigrants from Mexico, the first in the Chavez-Rios family to graduate from high school. Her father Philippe Rios crossed the border as a boy with his family in the late 19 th century. They settled in South El Paso, Texas. Phillipe migrated to Los Angeles as a young man and worked his way up in the steam laundry industry. Years later, he married Elvira Chavez whose path to America was far easier than his was. In the 1920s, she simply boarded a train from Parral, Chihua
Gino Pellegrini