This article examines a rural public school with an increasingly racially diverse and working‐class student body as a site where inclusion and exclusion were negotiated based on popular beliefs about culture. I look at how the interpretation of particular behaviors as indicative of a cultural regard for the value of formal education created divergent understandings of the school as welcoming or exclusive. Although the school's mission statement explicitly positioned the school as inclusive, many Latinos understood the acceptance of their presence and their culture in the institution as conditional on their assimilation.