González, Josué M. (1941-)

Josué M. González was born in a small town in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where his family had been established for several generations. As he put it:

There are interesting parallels between the professional career of Josué M. González and bilingual education. He earned his BA degree from Texas A&I [Page 329](now A&M) University in 1963, just about the time the first bilingual education program was starting in Dade County, Florida. In 1967, he was being awarded his master's degree from the same institution at about the time the Senate hearings leading to the Bilingual Education Act were being held. In May 1974, shortly after the Lau v. Nichols decision was announced, he received his EdD in educational leadership from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Today, after more than 40 years in education, González is the general editor of this encyclopedia and professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Arizona State University.

Bilingual education has figured prominently in Gonzalez's life and career, as described in this entry. Born and raised within walking distance of the Mexican border, he claims that as a child he always assumed bilingualism was the norm, rather than the exception. He learned to read in Spanish before he entered first grade. As a consequence, he was allowed to skip “Primary,” an extra year that was automatically added to the school career of most Latinos in Texas at the time. Long before bilingual education became the core content for his career in education, he had the privilege of having Spanish-speaking teachers and principals in his nearly all-Hispanic hometown in South Texas.

González started his formal career as a high school teacher of French, English, and Spanish, but he taught only a few years before heading off to help develop and promote bilingual education. “Every program was a new battle,” he recalls, “but the continuing litany of obstacles we faced only helped to cement ever more firmly the sense that we were doing the right thing.” In 1969, when most of the Mexican American high school students in Crystal City, Texas, walked out of school in early December because of discriminatory practices by teachers, González mobilized friends and colleagues in San Antonio to spend their holidays in Crystal City tutoring youngsters who were concerned about missing school. “We taught classes that the high school didn't even have,” he remembers, “like using the slide rule, which is now a museum piece, but at that time a slide rule swinging from your belt and a trigonometry book under your arm meant you were on your way to becoming an engineer, and many Chicano youngsters wanted to do that. I think we helped them see that this was possible even though their school had no trigonometry teacher at the time.”

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