Education, Politics, and a Hunger Strike: A Popular Movement's Struggle for Education in Chicago's Little Village Community

This research is an historical analysis of a social movement that took place in Chicago's Little Village community. The movement was inspired when the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) failed to construct a new high school promised three years earlier to alleviate overcrowding in the community's only public high school at the time. The movement reached a climax when a group of residents held a hunger strike to bring attention to CPS' negligence on the issue. The methods used for gathering data is a combination of a group interview with five hunger strikers, archival research, periodicals, internal document analysis, journal entries, internet sources, and peer feedback. The researcher searched for common themes that connect the varied sources and provided an interpretation on how key individuals, events, and decisions influenced the movement. The social movement's persistence to pressure public officials received an insurmountable amount of support and garnered them enough political leverage to negotiate with the CPS and commit to the construction of the high school.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Policy Studies

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Cortez, Gabriel A.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Anderson, James D.

• History, United States

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3314751

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/80024