The black community, populated mainly by soldiers from the fort, is a small-but-important force. Sayles explores the bipolar issues of racial divisiveness and tolerance, both as they exist today and as they were nearly forty years ago. But at the end of Lone Star, we are left with an image of hope. .
Public officials saw school as a way to control intended to maintain the status quo dominant over subordinate. Because of the subordinate status Mexican American students received an inferior quality of education and subtractive curriculum . As a result even today there is a pattern disproportionate academic performance among Mexican American. .
San Miguel begins tracing the story of Houston's Mexican community and schooling of Mexican children. Students not only encountered an unequal and segregated education, but they also received a subtractive curriculum, which prohibited the use of Spanish and were discouraged from maintaining their cultural heritage. Besides, many of the textbooks used were biased toward Protestant Anglo culture and some of the history books used in the schools contained withering remarks about the Mexican presence in the Southwest. .
Central to this discussion was the political involvement of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in protesting school segregation. As part of its legal strategy in state courts, LULAC argued that because Mexican school children were legally recognized as white- they could not be constitutionally segregated. By insisting on their "whiteness- LULAC succeeded only temporarily. By 1970 when a federal court ordered to integrate Houston's public schools, school board members circumvented the court order by combining predominantly black and children were recognized by the court order as "white,"" school authorities argued that racial desegregation had occurred. Calling this an unjust integration plan, community activists, parents, and students came together under a newly formed, grassroots organization, the Mexican American Educational Council.