Changes

On March 3, 1968, Mexican American students enrolled in Abraham Lincoln High School in East L.A. had successfully organized a walkout and most of the students left their classrooms to protest against the poor education they felt they were receiving as Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The school had tracked most of the Mexican and Mexican American students in to trade and vocational careers, not allowing them to even consider a four-year institution. Additionally, the students felt that the school system had disregarded their culture and history and they called for more ethnic studies and more ethnically diverse faculty. <ref?>Michael Soldatenko, “Mexican Student Movements in Los Angeles and Mexico City,” ''Latino Studies'', 1 (2003): 290-295.</ref> Much like the non-violent Black student sit-ins in Greensboro N.C. that had happened eight years prior, “the Los Angeles strike signaled the beginnings of a powerful Chicano student movement throughout the Southwestern United States.” <ref>Carlos Muñoz, “The Last Word: Making the Chicano Movement Revisited,” ''Black Issues in Higher Education'', 13, no. 3 (Apr. 4, 1996): 72.</ref> By the end of this historical day in Chicano and U.S. history, more than 10,000 students would join in on the strike in states all over the Southwest all the way to South Texas.

The importance of the East L.A. walkouts lies in the growing dissatisfaction of the second and third generations of Mexican American and Chicano students in the high schools and colleges around the Southwest. For these students and young people, they saw their families struggling and being discriminated against just as the African American community had in the Deep South but with different historical contexts. Mexicans and Native Americans had always lived in the Southwest and only through Western Expansionism and multiple advances towards ridding the West of Native American ‘problems’ were Anglos able to successfully move their border across the communities that had been their for centuries. Because of this insertion of a new race and class based hierarchical power, Mexicans and Mexican Americans were considered second class citizens and the youth of the 1960s had seen what the history of the past couple of decades had done to their chances of gaining an equal education. Using the Chicano idea of Aztlan and claiming basic human rights, the students of L.A. and the Southwest began to march and organization around those ideas. What they did not expect was the amount of force they would encounter.<ref>Michael Soldatenko, “Mexican Student Movements in Los Angeles and Mexico City,” ''Latino Studies'', 1 (2003): 294-295.</ref>