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21 Berkeley La Raza L.J. 133 (2011)
Erasing Race, Dismissing Class: San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez

handle is hein.journals/berklarlj21 and id is 135 raw text is: ERASING RACE, DISMISSING CLASS: SAN ANTONIO INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT V. RODRIGUEZ Camille Walsh* This article examines the culmination of strategic tendencies to combine demands for recognition of class-based and race-based discrimination in the early 1970s. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez was a pivotal case during this period. The Rodriguez claimants were low-income children and families of color whose school district was dramatically unequal in every respect when compared to the local, wealthy, white school district at issue in the case. The Court treated, however, the claims of race and class discrimination that the claimants put forward as entirely independent, and ignored the plaintiffs race claim in order to focus on class alone, which the Court dismissed as a category not entitled to constitutional protection. This article argues that the outcome in Rodriguez was directly tied to legal frameworks that negated the possibility of protecting more than one constitutional category at the same time. The Court's decision provided an economic privacy and local fiscal control rationale that solidified the separation of race and class as categories of constitutional analysis, to the detriment of future claims at the intersection of race and class remedies for segregated and unequal schools. INTRODUCTION Demetrio Rodriguez was six years old when his migrant worker family moved from a Rio Grande agricultural town to San Antonio in search of better schools.' Decades later, he continued to seek out better educational opportunities in *Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow Indiana University Maurer School of Law; B.A. New York University 2000; J.D. Harvard Law School, 2004; Ph.D. University of Oregon 2010. 1 am deeply indebted to the insights and suggestions of Ellen Herman, James Mohr, Joe Lowndes, Jennifer Erickson and Veta Schlimgen in reading various drafts of this argument over time. Saru Matambanadzo has commented on this article in many different stages and her intellectual support in developing these ideas has been invaluable. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the History and Theory Conference at the University of California, Irvine and at the University of Oregon Law School, and the comments and questions of participants were extremely helpful. In addition, I am gratefli to have had the support of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation and the Spencer Foundation while performing the early research for this article, and I appreciate the comments and assistance of the members of the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal in the final stages. Finally, my late advisor Peggy Pascoe was instrumental in seeing this project through and I am more thankful than I can express for her consistent mentorship, thorough comments and patient encouragement. 1. Michael Heise, The Story of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez: School Finance, Local Control, and Constitutional Limits, in EDUCATION LAW STORIES 52 (Michael A. Olivas & Ronna Greff Schneider eds., Foundation Press 2008).

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