Con Respeto: Bridging the Distances Between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools: An Ethnographic Portrait

Con Respeto will be a valuable resource in graduate courses in foundations, ethnographic research, sociology and anthropology of education, multicultural education, and child development; and will be of particular interest to professors and researchers of multicultural education, bilingual education, ethnographic research methods, and sociology and anthropology of education.

“This rich and absorbing study of Mexican parents in border communities leads to more complex, rather than single-minded, solutions to school success. Valdés sees to the center of things and deftly questions the merit of typical educational interventions aimed at promoting school success . . . these interventions, grounded in mainstream values, do more harm than good. They do not show respect for deeply ingrained familistic values—the cultural capital that immigrant parents bring with them on their backs and in their hearts from their homeland; and they devalue the social and linguistic competence of immigrant parents and their children. . . . Valdés does not provide solutions. She does, however, lead the search with her strong but cautious narrative voice for a sufficiently complex and multi-leveled understanding of the challenges facing families who move across borders as immigrants.”
—From the Foreword by Carol Stack