By snoadmin
When Mexican-American teacher Sal Castro and organized college students declared “Blowout” at East Los Angele’s Lincoln High School in March 1968, students from Lincoln and five other East L.A. high schools responded by hitting the streets in peaceful protest.
They were fighting for civil and human rights in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which treated Mexican-American children as barely an afterthought.
This weekend throughout L.A. County, the 40th anniversary of the walkouts is being celebrated. A march this Saturday will begin at Lincoln High and wind up at Hazard Park in Lincoln Heights for the unveiling of a monument to the “Chicano Blowouts.”
Among the racial issues the Chicano Civil Rights Movement decried were a lack of bilingual education, institutional corporal punishment, too few Mexican-American teachers and counselors and no Mexican-American history classes.
Students from 20 area high schools joined the boycott, which had rippling effects throughout the L.A. school system. Students battling with educational inequalities and racism were inspired by Castro’s passion.
The protestors demanded reforms that included better schools, more college prep classes and the cessation of the practice of tracking of Mexican-American students into trade schools.
The demonstrations were peaceful, but police response was not. In the end, Castro and 12 students were charged with felony conspiracy to disrupt the peace and school system. The “East L.A. Thirteen” eventually beat the charges and Castro was reinstated.
In the end, not all of the demands were met. Mexican-American history classes are still not offered in LAUSD schools and California bilingual education was ended abruptly in 1998 with Proposition 227.
Prior to the walkouts the California State University system implemented a state-funded program to recruit and open higher education opportunities for minority students. The Educational Opportunity Program was initiated at Cal State Long Beach in the fall of 1967.
With the anniversary comes a reevaluation of what the walkouts accomplished. Socially, it was a catalyst for the Chicano Movement. Organizations like MEChA and United Mexican-American Students had already developed but their causes became strengthened.
The walkouts and the Chicano Movement distilled a sense of pride in the community. The bonds developed through struggle are often impossible to break.
But 40 years goes by fast.
While the demonstrations created awareness locally and nationally, there is still great inequity in education. It would be wrong at best and an outright lie if we said segregation fluttered off and disappeared. It hasn’t. Racism and racial divisions have simply taken new forms.
Take a fence, for example. There is no racist connotation with a fence, right? But what if that fence extends 15 feet high, is lined with security cameras and creates cultural, sociological and economic barriers between two countries? Yeah, that’s probably not racism, either.
In the passing years, the only things that change are the words. We have swapped ignorance for tolerance.
We have a responsibility as students to teach the ones who have come before and after us. It is not enough to stand for things that affect us only. There is no strength in an army of one, as Castro and students showed 40 years ago.
We can still find solidarity in activism like the “Chicano Blowouts” of 1968.
