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Con Respeto: Bridging the Distances Between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools: An Ethnographic Portrait, by Guadalupe Valdes. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. 237 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8077-3526-4.
MARJORIE FAULSTICH ORELLANA
University of California, Berkeley orellana@gseis. ucla. edu
In Con Respeto: Bridging the Distances Between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools, Guadalupe Valdes seeks to make understandable the experiences of 10 Mexican immigrant families to representatives of "mainstream" U.S. culture, and to do so with deep respect for the families' traditions, practices, and worldviews. Educational researchers are interested in the experiences of immigrant children, but there are still relatively few ethnographic portraits of particular communities. Valdes helps to fill the gap.
An educational researcher with an interest in language issues-not addressed in this book, but the central focus of the three-year study that led to it-Valdes places her ethnography within the frame of the literature on Latino students' school "failure." She acknowledges problems with "cultural mismatch" theories, noting that "differences" are too often interpreted as "deficits." Yet because her goal is to communicate "minority" values to the "majority" world, she ends up riding the same, perhaps inescapable, deficit/difference tension:...