The East Los Angeles Walkouts or Chicano Blowouts were a series of 1968 protests by Chicano students against unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District high schools. The first protest took place on March 1, 1968. The students who organized and carried out the protests were primarily concerned with the quality of their education. This movement (which involved thousands of students in the Los Angeles area) was of the first mass mobilizations by Mexican-Americans in Southern California.
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Background
During the 1950s and 1960s, Mexican Americans took part in the national quest for civil rights, fighting important court battles and building social and political movements. Mexican-American youth in particular became politicized, having taken advantage of many opportunities their parents never had.
In a radio interview, Moctesuma Esparza, one of the original walkout organizers, talked about his experiences as a high school student fighting for Chicano rights. Esparza first became involved in activism in 1965 after attending a youth leadership conference. He helped organize a group of Chicano teenagers, Young Citizens for Community Action. This group eventually evolved into Young Chicanos For Community Action, then later as the Brown Berets, still fighting for Mexican-American equality in California.
Esparza graduated 12th grade in 1967, and enrolled at UCLA. He and fellow Chicano students continued organizing protests. He and eleven friends started a group called UMAS. UMAS traveled around to universities recruiting Chicano students who wanted to help increase Chicano enrollment in colleges. UMAS members decided to split up into smaller groups, with each group to mentor students at particular L.A. high schools with high minority enrollment, as well as high drop out rates. Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Belmont and Wilson high school (all of which were involved in the walkouts) had among the highest dropout rates within the Los Angeles City Schools - Garfield being the school with the highest drop out rates in the city (57.5% of students), with Roosevelt having the second highest dropout rates in Los Angeles City Schools (45% of students). Conditions at these schools also motivated the students to organize and walkout. These conditions were not only related to the high drop out rates of the high schools, but also were related to the fact that classrooms were overcrowded (with about 40 students in a classroom), reading scores for the students were low, school administration were understaffed, leaving, at times, one school counselor to 4,000 students, classroom material not reflecting the realities of the majority Chicano/a students (such as within history classes), as well as the belittling attitude with which the teachers treated students. The attitude staff held towards students was reflected in a letter written by a teacher at Lincoln High School, Richard Davis, which stated,
Most of the Mexican-Americans have never had it so good. Before the Spanish came, he was an Indian grubbing in the soil, and after the Spaniards came he was a slave. It seems to me that America must be a very desirable place, witness the number of "wetbacks" and migrants both legal and illegal from Mexico.
Wanting to do something to improve their school system and the conditions with which they were being faced, the students decided to organize. Esparza and a few other UMAS members, along with teacher Sal Castro, helped organize hundreds of students to walkout of classes in 1968 protests to highlight the conditions that they faced. After a few days, they were joined by numerous additional protesters. Following the large number of students involved with the protest, the attention of the school board was gained, and they agreed to meet with students to listen to their demands.
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Walkouts
The student walkouts began in East Los Angeles High schools on March 1, 1968. The first students to walk out were from Wilson High School, which was among one of the high school in the Los Angeles area with the highest dropout rates (21.8% of students dropped out from Wilson high school). Though students had been organizing for some time and were planning to engage in the widespread protest of walking out to demonstrate against what were deemed less than satisfactory conditions, the first of the walkouts at Wilson were unplanned, having been motivated by the schools principal cancelling a student produced play which was deemed inappropriate for the students to perform. During this walkout at Wilson more than 200 students were involved; it was following this that students across numerous high schools in East Los Angeles also began the blowout process, with reported numbers of those involved in the walkout being between 2,000 and 5,000 students (within Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Garfield high school).
Student Demands
Following the walkouts, students were able to meet with the board of education. At this meeting, student leaders presented a list of demands that addressed what they felt were the most pressing issues within their schools that effected their education.
These demands included (but were not limited to) the following:
Academic Demands
- "No student or teacher will be reprimanded or suspended for participating in any efforts which are executed for the purpose of improving or furthering the educational quality in our schools.
- Bilingual-Bi-cultural education will be compulsory for Mexican-Americans in the Los Angeles City School System where there is a majority of Mexican-American students. This program will be open to all other students on a voluntary basis. A) in-service education programs will be instituted immediately for all staff in order to teach them the Spanish language and increase their understanding of the history, traditions, and contributions of the Mexican culture. B) All administrators in the elementary and secondary schools in these areas will become proficient in the Spanish language Participants are to be compensated during the training period at not less than $8.80 an hour and upon completion of the course will receive in addition to their salary not less than $100.00 a month. The monies for these programs will come from local funds, state funds and matching federal funds.
- Administrators and teachers who show any form of prejudice toward Mexican or Mexican-American students, including failure to recognize, understand, and appreciate Mexican culture and heritage, will be removed from East Los Angeles schools. This will be decided by a Citizens Review Board selected by the Educational Issues Committee.
- Textbooks and curriculum will be developed to show Mexican and Mexican-American contribution to the U.S. society and to show the injustices that Mexicans have suffered as a culture of that society. Textbooks should concentrate on Mexican folklore rather than English folklore.
- All administrators where schools have majority of Mexican-American descent shall be of Mexican-American descent. If necessary, training programs should be instituted to provide a cadre of Mexican-American administrators.
- Every teacher's ratio of failure per students in his classroom shall be made available to community groups and students. Any teacher having a particularly high percentage of the total school dropouts in his classes shall be rated by the Citizens Review Board composed of the Educational Issues Committee.
Administrative Demands
- Schools should have a manager to take care of paper work and maintenance supervision. Administrators will direct the Education standards of the School instead of being head janitors and office clerks as they are today.
- School facilities should be made available for community activities under the supervision of Parents' Councils (not PTA). Recreation programs for children will be developed.
- No teacher will be dismissed or transferred because of his political views and/or philosophical disagreements with administrators.
- Community parents will be engaged as teacher's aides. Orientation similar to in-service training, will be provided, and they will be given status as semi-professionals as in the new careers concept.
Facilities Demands
- The Industrial Arts program must be re-vitalized. Students need proper training to use the machinery of modern-day industry. Up-to-date equipment and new operational techniques must replace the obsolescent machines and outmoded training methods currently being employed in this program. If this high standard cannot be met, the Industrial Arts program will be de-emphasized.
- New high schools in the area must be immediately built. The new schools will be named by the community. At least two Senior High Schools and at least one Junior High School must be built. Marengo Street School must be reactivated to reduce the student-teacher load at Murchison Street School.
- Library facilities will be expanded in all East Los Angeles high schools. At present the libraries in these high schools do not meet the educational needs of the students. Sufficient library materials will be provided in Spanish."
Aftermath
Many of the student organizers became prominent in their fields. Moctesuma Esparza, one of the 13 charged with disrupting the schools, who became known as the East L.A. 13, later became a successful film producer. He helped recruit more Chicanos to Hollywood. Harry Gamboa, Jr. became an artist and writer. Carlos Montes, a Brown Berets minister, was charged with arson at a hotel during the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War. Paula Crisostomo became a school administrator, where she continues to fight for reform. Vicky Castro was elected to the Los Angeles Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education. Carlos Muñoz, Jr., went on to a distinguished teaching and research career at the University of California, Berkeley.
The student actions of 1968 inspired later protests that used similar tactics, including the 1994 student walkouts against California Proposition 187, the 2006 student walkouts against H.R. 4437, the 2009 walkouts against Arizona's SB1070, and 2007 walkouts in support of the proposed Cesar Chavez holiday.
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