The Chicano Movement: The Los Angeles School Walkouts Of 1968

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This brings us to an important and, one would say pivot, event in the Chicano movement, the Los Angeles school walkouts of 1968. For historian Michael Soldatenko, “Students and the East Los Angeles community transformed the immediate struggle for educational rights into practices that disrupted the institutional imaginary and postulated a second order based on self-determination and participatory democracy.” Although “Mexican Schools” were unconstitutional under the Mendez v. Westminster case, the superintendent and Board of Education were determined in defending the districts ' policies. According to their school board meeting minutes from September 12, 1946, they made no promises to desegregate, but focused most of their attention on Fred …show more content…

In March 1968, Chicano students decided to take a stand against the growing injustices that their community were still being subjected to and staged school walkouts across Los Angeles area. Some 20,000 students, both at the high school and college level, took to the streets to not just to walk out, but to organize and fight for what they believed they deserved as a community. For one, students wanted to address the fact that schools teaching a Eurocentric curriculum that largely ignored or denied Mexican-American history and bilingual classes. The school board believed that since they lived in the US, Mexican-Americans needed to adapt to their system instead of the system catering to them. According to the screenplay, Eastside High by Jason Johansen, a former teacher and professor of Latino film and media, the dropout rate among this school district was as high as fifty percent. That did not farewell, statistically, for the number of Chicanos who attended a university, as UCLA 's Mexican student body was less than 100 out of more than 20,000 …show more content…

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By the next decade, both the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unlawful to keep students who couldn’t speak English from getting an education. Later, Congress passed the Equal Opportunity Act of 1974, which resulted in the implementation of more bilingual education programs in public schools. The National Chicano Moratorium march was held in Los Angeles in 1970 to protest the war in Vietnam. It was one of the largest political demonstrations ever staged by Mexican-Americans; it included diverse groups who had different political agendas, but who all opposed the war. In the 1960s and ‘70s, as Chicanos not only pressed for equal rights and better educational reforms to better their communities lives, some began to question and seek out more ways they could take back their communities. Many Chicano activists began looking at the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a 1848 agreement between the United States and Mexico that ended the Mexican-American War and resulted in the US acquiring territory from Mexico that currently comprises the much of the Southwestern US. in the

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