What is the significance of the 1968 East L.A. Walkouts

Introduction

The 1960s and 1970s have been well documented and covered historically by scholars interested in the Black Liberation Movement, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks, amongst other popular African American civil rights activists. What we know about the African American/Black civil rights movements are the obvious events leading up to the political revolutions that ensued. Segregation, Jim Crow laws, and the scars of slavery had all had their violent and discriminatory effects on the African American/Black population, especially in the South. Unfortunately, there has been a silencing of the powerful movement that was comprised of millions of Mexican and Mexican American individuals in the U.S. Southwest that happened during the same time as the African American/Black civil rights movement. These individuals eventually came to claim the political identity, Chicano. Chicano had previously been a derogatory word used by Mexican and Mexican Americans in the U.S. for individuals who were poor and newly immigrated in to the U.S, but was rarely used at all. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicano’s reclaimed the word in order to signify that the indigenous ancestry was important to them and for their culture, as well as to the land they had lost from Spanish and American imperialism.

The Chicano movement, or El Moviemiento, is complex and comes in to being after decades of discrimination, segregation, and other issues arising over decades of war and violence around what we now know as the U.S. – Mexico border. This article focuses on one specific event in history that is extremely important to understand the Chicano Movement. The East L.A. Walkouts would begin in the late 1960s as youth were beginning to become frustrated about how Anglos treated the larger Chicano community inside the classroom and outside of their communities. At this time the United Farm Workers Movement was in full throttle and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were gaining membership and participating in strikes in California for Mexican and Filipino laborers. Although the East L.A. School Walkouts do not necessarily provide information about the complexity of issues surrounding the Chicano Movement, I argue that the walkouts were part of a spark that would ignite the Chicano and Mexican American community to begin the fight for equality alongside their Native American, Asian, and African American brothers and sisters during the Civil Rights Era.

East L.A. Walkouts

On March 3, 1968, Mexican American students enrolled in Abraham Lincoln High School in East L.A. walked out of their classrooms because of the poor education they felt they were receiving as Mexican Americans. The school had tracked most of the student 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.” 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.

COINTELPRO and Infiltration

What these students did not anticipate was the amount of push back they would receive from the federal government and the new COINTELPRO operation that Herbert Hoover initiated in response to the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation movements in order to successfully stop and dismantle and civil rights movement that would arise. Thirteen members that were involved with the planning and organization of the East L.A. walkouts would be targeted and arrested for treason by COINTELPRO and the federal government. Sal Castro, a teacher who supported the students and spoke out against racist and discriminatory practices at Lincoln High in East L.A., would be included in the group of thirteen and would spark uproar in the community in order to reinstate him as a teacher at Lincoln High. Eventually, the federal government would release Sal Castro and the other twelve individuals because of the unconstitutional nature of the arrests and the U.S. public became even more aware of Chicano’s, the school walkouts, and their ability to form their own unique movements amongst the larger political atmosphere of the decade.

What the infiltration by the federal government of the East L.A. walkouts and the various groups that had begun to emerge like MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlan) and MAYO (Mexican American Youth Organization) told the Mexican American and Chicano community was that they were considered dangerous and hostile. This would only fuel the fire that was the movement and begin to confirm that the Anglo community had no intentions of listening or even considering what Chicano’s and their allies had to say. The COINTELPROs existence was enough proof to argue that the federal government supported racial discrimination towards people of color, and in the case of the Chicano movement, the infiltration and the resulting protests and creation of community organizations would only be the beginning of a long fight for social, economic, and political justice for their people.

Conclusion

The East L.A. walkouts is only one of the important markers signifying the beginnings of a political revolution that would span the entire Southwest of the U.S. Non-profit organizations and other community organization rose out of the Chicano movement in order to better serve the local Chicano communities through the arts and of course representation legally and in protest. Another subject that will need it’s own historical article is women within the Chicano movement. Chicanas would come out of this important era with an understanding of how both racism and sexism have resulted in the oppression by the men in their own communities. With influence from both the Chicano movement and the Feminist movement, Chicanas would begin to write their own literature and create their own art that was expressive of their identities. These pieces of literature and art inform today’s Chicano scholars and only improve the understanding of the Mexican American and Chicano culture. The Chicano movement would last up until about the early 1980s and fizzles out as the media focuses its’ attention elsewhere. What is important to understand about the ‘ending’ of this movement is that the people who took part in all of the marches and protests for equality never stopped working with their communidad in order to fight for social, economic, and political justice for the gente.