In his new book, David Wallace Adams, the eminent historian of American Indian schooling, has crafted a remarkable history of Magdalena, New Mexico through the oral histories of the Alamo Navajo, Hispanic, and Anglo children who grew up there in the last century. In three parts and eight chapters, Adams examines the roles that family, religion, custom, work, play, the school, intercultural encounters, and the town itself played as formative institutions and processes for learning how to live in a part of the country characterized by hardscrabble agriculture and several horizons of colonization. Beginning with cultural traditions, the book proceeds to examine the ways in which Hispanics, Alamo Navajos, and Anglos crossed or remained within their cultural boundaries. It ends with a retrospective of Magdalena as a community with established roots in all three cultures.

With particular attention to how power moved between groups, Adams set out to understand what it was like to grow up with ethnically derived cultural influences in a borderland community. His study yields a history of place-based education that simultaneously exceeds the school and demonstrates how the school was often the entity that provoked deep learning about culture and its paradoxical fluidity and rigidity. Among Anglo and Hispanic children, the school was responsible for dramatically reduced illiteracy rates, the increased use of English within and around Magdalena, a pathway to a life that was not grounded in hard labor, and viscerally felt, racialized ethnic tensions.

For Alamo Navajo children, the school was a hard-core colonizing institution. Before the Bureau of Indian Affairs allowed Alamo Navajo children to attend school in Magdalena, they were taken to Indian boarding schools in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Students’ experiences at these schools followed established protocols—haircutting, uniforms, naming, military-like regimentation, and isolation—to strip away their identities as members of their home communities. Through an emphasis on vocational education, outing experiences, and the sole use of English, Alamo Navajo children were expected to become Euroamericanized versions of their earlier selves. Many students rebelled by running away; others responded with cooperation or with what Adams calls “adaptive accommodation” (p. 255). Conditions did not change much for Alamo Navajo children when a boarding school was created at Crownpoint in 1931 in response to the scathing Meriam Report (1928). Children were still forcibly removed from their homes, and teachers were not trained in or in agreement with the Deweyan pedagogical methods that the school adopted. And when Alamo Navajo students began attending school in Magdalena in the 1960s, living in nearby dormitories, they experienced many of the same things their parents did at boarding schools: regimentation, separation from family, overwork, and the relief that running away promised. These experiences are not surprising, and many historians—including Adams—have documented them in detail over the last thirty years. What may surprise some readers, though, is that many Alamo Navajo parents continued to send their children to school in Magdalena in the 1980s and 1990s instead of the tribally controlled school within their community, which was founded in 1979. Investigating this, Adams cites parents’ desire for their children to attend an ethnically integrated school and to learn English.

Along with a curriculum grounded in English and oriented in the conventions of the day, the school provided opportunities for learning that extended beyond the school. Two examples stand in juxtaposition to one another: a reconfiguration of racial hierarchy in Magdalena and the role of basketball in dissolving such a hierarchy. As Magdalena became an established “tribal-ethno-cultural” community in the mid- through late twentieth century, a rearranged racial pecking order emerged, with Alamo Navajos on one side and Anglos and Hispanics on the other. This arrangement was amplified by the near-exclusive use of English in school and was evident in the high numbers of Hispanic and Anglo students participating in a wide range of extracurricular activities. Yet students from each ethnic group found ways to learn from one another that were mutually humanizing, such as through boys playing basketball together. In his recounting of the 1968 basketball season, when the Magdalena team nearly won the state championship, Adams details how years of playing pickup basketball games together worked to solidify trust and respect among the players. In fact, the boys’ basketball team was so adept and well regarded in Magdalena that residents seemed to turn out and throw their wholehearted support to the team as a means of communion.

Boundary crossings occurred in other ways, too, and are more pronounced toward the end of the twentieth century than the beginning. Institutions within ethnic groups, such as the family and religion, appear to have dictated what would and would not be accepted, especially for girls, who faced double standards around sex, marriage, and schooling imposed upon them. By the 1980s and 1990s, the authority of the family and the church had diminished for Hispanics, while it shifted within the Alamo Navajo community to Pentecostalism. For Anglos, rodeo became the institution that taught the importance of work and the values of independence and self-reliance, demanding that its participants perform the myth of “conquering” the American West as cowboys and cowgirls as they barrel raced and roped calves. As Adams notes, “It comes with the territory” (p. 319).

Three Roads to Magdalena is a nuanced history of childhood and learning, and it is a history of Magdalena as a place in which education happened on multiple fronts. Through the use of oral history and a range of primary and secondary sources, Adams reconstructs what it was like to grow up in a small, tricultural ranching and farming community in the twentieth century. His analysis flouts the White-non-White binary racial construction, underscoring that multifaceted and shifting constructions were, in fact, in play. Even more importantly, Adams illustrates that education in Magdalena was a process bigger than the school and a phenomenon in which the school provoked without always meaning to.