The March 1968 East Los Angeles High School
Walkouts or “Blow Outs” in which ten thousand students at five schools walked out of their classes protest the inferior quality of their education, was first mobilization of the Chicano uprising in Los
Angeles and perhaps in the nation as a whole.
Though Chicano activists had been organizing and growing conscious of their unjust social and to the economic conditions for at least five years before this walkout, the blow outs were a mass protest that made ordinary students, parents, the Mexican American community, school officials, and law enforcement authorities aware that a new, more militant phase in the struggle for Chicano civil rights had emerged.
The walkouts or “blow outs” arose as a reaction to the substandard educational conditions that existed in East Los Angeles schools in the 1960s. During that time period, these schools had a terrible record of educating Mexican Americans, who in the adult culture of the schools were sometimes referred to as “dirty Mexicans.” Well over 50 percent of Chicano and
Chicana high school students were pushed out of schools, primarily because they had not been taught to read and write and therefore failed their courses. These schools had the lowest reading scores in the district. There were also high numbers of
Mexican American students in special education courses, which were designed primarily for the mentally retarded and the emotionally disturbed. Racist beliefs led to lower expectations for Chicano and Chicana students. In addition, classrooms were overcrowded, and insensitive teachers who had little understanding of the socioeconomic conditions of working-class
Mexican Americans were everywhere. Few Chicano or Chicana teachers were hired and students even found less access to extra curricular activities.
School officials' indifference to these conditions and failure to respond to concerns voiced by the community drove some activist students to consider walking out of classes in the spring of 1968. With the help of Sal Castro, a teacher at Lincoln High School, the students began planning their protest, seeking the assistance of United Mexican American Students (UMAS) chapters throughout Los Angeles, college professors, professionals, activist clergy, and the Brown Berets, a paramilitary group. The activist students, including Mita Cuaron, Harry Gamboa, Rosalinda Méndez González, and
Cassandra Zacarías, also formed strike committees at Garfield, Roosevelt,
Sol Castro and Lincoln High Schools and established a central committee that would draft demands and oversee any actual student strikes. They soon formulated thirty-six demands, including reduced class size, more teachers and counselors, extended library facilities, and an end to requiring students to serve as janitors. They also called for community control of schools, bilingual education, increasing the number of Mexican teachers and the formation of a citizens' review board. If their demands were not met, they threatened to walkout.
However, before the activists could state their demands, on Friday, March 1, 1968, the students at Wilson High walked out of their school to protest the principal's cancellation of the play Barefoot in the Park . The central committee quickly met to decide if they would stage walkouts at Garfield, Roosevelt, and Lincoln High Schools; two thousand students at Garfield decided to strike alone and walked out on Tuesday, March 5.

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In an effort at solidarity, the central committee swiftly called for walkouts at the remaining schools. On March 6, the number of students walking out at Garfield had jumped to 2,700. That same day Vickie Castro, a college student and
Roosevelt alumna, used her car to pull down the locked chain-link fence and allow five hundred students to storm out of Roosevelt High despite the presence police, who soon struck at the protesters. On the last day of the blow outs,
Friday, March 8, students at Roosevelt, Garfield, Lincoln, and Wilson simultaneously walked out of their schools and gathered at Hazard Park for a 9
A.M. rally.
In reaction to the blow outs, parents and concerned community members formed
Educational Issues Coordinating Committee (EICC). The EICC pressed school officials to be more responsive to Mexican American students' needs, and as a response two special board of education meetings were held that allowed students, parents, the EICC, and supporters to voice their concerns. At the second meeting the board of education announced plans for another meeting to held at Lincoln High School on March 11. After meeting for four hours at
Lincoln High the board of education made no commitments, despite the attendance of nearly 1,200 people. The board's inaction prompted students to walk out of the meeting. Perhaps a minimal gain was that the board decided not discipline the students and teachers involved in the strikes. of the be to
Despite the school board opposition to disciplinary actions against walkout participants, on Friday night, May 31, 1968, the police swept through the city and arrested thirteen activists involved in the protest and jailed them on felony charges of conspiracy. Those arrested were indicted by the Los Angeles grand jury on June 2, 1968, and subsequently became known as the “East L.A. Thirteen.” Among them were Castro, the Brown
Beret Prime Minister David Sánchez, a UCLA student Moctezuma Esparza, and the La Raza newspaper editor Eliezar Risco.
The late-night arrests, a high bail of $10,000, and the trumped-up charges angered the community and prompted it to hold a demonstration in front of Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. Some of the jailed defendants saw themselves as political prisoners and went on a hunger strike. After two years of appeals, the charges against the East L.A. Thirteen were declared unconstitutional.
Although they did little to change the status quo—in fact, two years later students at Roosevelt walked out again—the East Los Angeles
High School walkouts prompted Chicano and Chicana activists in the city and in the nation to wage mass demonstrations to protest their social and economic conditions. Although the blowouts didn't result in anything like new buildings or improved cafeteria food, they did show Chicanos that they could be an example for action and change in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and the nation. The walkout methods spread across the nation, as the Mexican American Youth Organization used them in places like Crystal
City in Texas Additionally, some demands were met--more Hispanic teachers were hired and more academic programs were added. The blowouts did have the positive result of focusing attention on educational inadequacies.
With national attention focused on Chicano and Chicana education, the federal government became involved. Federal officials from the United States Department of Justice responded to the student’s demands by compelling the school board to provide bilingual, bicultural education, improved testing programs, and additional cultural celebrations.

By Luís Torres March 8, 2008
It's a bit startling to realize that it has been 40 years this week since I participated in a watershed event in the political life of
East Los Angeles. The 1968 Chicano student walkouts took a stand against discrimination against Mexican Americans. They gave a community hope for promised change -- change that, regrettably, hasn't fully come about.
The walkouts exploded after weeks of clandestine planning by high school students and some college students who had come back to their neighborhoods as activists. Some teachers called those college students "outside agitators" and even "dupes of the communists." We high school students may have been naive, but we were nobody's dupes. We had long been coerced by the school system into "knowing our place," so it took courage to do what we did.
I remember that March morning clearly. It was gray and cloudy. All week long there had been whispered hints that there was going to be a walkout -- a kind of student strike to protest conditions that were plain enough for everyone to see: poorly maintained buildings with peeling paint and crumbling foundations; dilapidated classrooms with too many students and not enough desks.
"They don't have to put up with this at schools on the Westside," a friend of mine grumbled. Other problems were just as obvious -- to the careful observer -- and just as pernicious, such as teachers who referred to us as "lazy Mexicans" and "stupid wetbacks."
We also wanted to protest the conditions that led to a dropout rate hovering around 45%. Barely half of us were making it out of high school. Something was desperately wrong, and we wanted to do something about it. And so, before the clock struck
10 that morning, many students stood up to affirm their dignity and walked out of school. I was the editor of the student newspaper, "The Railsplitter," at Lincoln High. Walking out and covering the event was my first Big Story. I marched alongside my fellow students with tape recorder and notebook in hand.
But walking out was also a personal decision, one I made after much thought. I didn't see myself as a lawbreaker. But I also felt the cause was important, so I disobeyed the teachers who urged me to stay put, to stay on campus. Nearly all the protesters were Chicano -- brainiacs, jocks, cheerleaders, nerds and gangbangers, all marching together. I remember the bell bottoms and the wildly colorful paisley shirts, alongside the skintight polyester A-1 Racers and madras shirts. There were starched khakis topped by straight-cut Sir Guy shirts -- shirts that looked like dark dentist's smocks, only less fashionable. I remember beehive hairdos next to hippie straight tresses, next to is-that-a-girl-or-a-boy shaggy hairstyles. There were a few diehard, slicked-back cabezas on guys who seemed determined to look like their ducktail-sporting older brothers of the late
1950s and early '60s.
Beyond the visual memories, I think it was a transformative experience for everyone who participated -- although we didn't necessarily know it at the time. On a personal level, I went from being someone who always wanted to play by the rules, get good grades and not make waves to someone who realized it was necessary, even noble, to challenge authority sometimes. I gained a pride in my heritage that made me more comfortable with who I was -- a young man whose parents were from
Mexico. I overcame the shame that I used to feel as a kid when my mother "spoke funny" in public.
For the Mexican American community, emboldened by the stand the students took, the walkouts were a catalyst for future activism on all fronts -- from education to cultural expression to electoral politics. In 1968, there were four Mexican
American members in Congress, and you could count the number in California's Legislature on one hand. Today, according to the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials, there are 5,129 Latinos in elected office, including, of course, the mayor of
Los Angeles.
The protests in 1968 didn't happen in a vacuum. They erupted within the turbulent caldron of activism that called for civil rights and an end to an unpopular war. In those times, I remember reading that "the best way to get the Man off your back is to stand up." We stood up on that day.
Forty years ago, the Los Angeles school board was the Man. Today, it is an ally with the community in the effort to improve education. We have come very far in many ways, but we have a long way to go.
The dropout rate at my alma mater, Lincoln High School, and the other Eastside high schools is still about 45%.

Thirty-five years ago, on March 3, 1968, as a college student activist, I joined more than 1,000 Mexican-American students who walked out of Abraham Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles. We were later joined by several thousand more students who walked out of three other predominantly Mexican-American high schools. By the end of the week, more than 10,000 had participated in the walkouts.
Our purpose was to peacefully protest the racism and educational inequality Mexican-American youth faced in public schools. Students marched through the streets of Los Angeles for a week and a half and used civil disobedience to disrupt the nation's largest public-school system. We were delighted when students from the predominantly African-American Thomas Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles also walked out in solidarity with us.
We did not know it at the time, but in terms of numbers, the walkouts were the first major dramatic protest against racism ever staged by Mexican Americans in the history of the United States. It was carried out in the nonviolent protest tradition of the Southern civil-rights movement. Its historical significance was similar to the 1960 black student sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C.
Whereas the Greensboro student protest fueled the flames of the civil-rights struggle in the South, the Los Angeles walkouts signaled the beginnings of the Mexican-American civil-rights movement -- which came to be known as the Chicano movement -- throughout the Southwestern United States.
Three months after the high-school walkouts, 13 organizers of the walkouts were indicted for conspiracy to
"willfully disturb the peace and quiet" of the city of Los Angeles.
The imprisonment I experienced after my arrest was equally traumatic. When I was in jail, my attorney told me that each of us faced 66 years in prison if convicted of the conspiracy charges. It took two years for our conspiracy case to be decided by the California State Appellate Court. The court finally ruled that the 13 of us were innocent of the conspiracy charges by virtue of the First Amendment. I remain eternally grateful that we have an amendment granting us the right of freedom of speech. If that amendment did not exist, I could still be in prison today instead of teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Chicano movement opened doors for equal opportunity in higher education to youth previously systematically excluded from those institutions. Chicano Studies, for example, produced a generation of activist intellectuals and professionals deeply committed to playing a role in the struggle against racism in our society. But the walkouts -- and the Chicano movement they ignited -- did not eliminate Latino educational inequality.
According to the recent Census report, 30 percent of Latino youth drop out of high school -- compared to 8 percent of white students and 12 percent of blacks. In some inner-city school districts, the drop-out rates for
Latinos were even higher. And the majority of Latino students who are fortunate to graduate from high school are not eligible for college admission because they have been academically ill equipped. In California, Gov. Gray
Davis has cut the education budget by millions of dollars. His priority has been to build more prisons instead of more and better schools.

Interview
On March 3, 1968, Mr. Esparza was a key figure in the organization of the historic and highly visible Los Angeles high school walkouts.
Victor Payan: Tell me about your background and how you came to be involved in the L.A. high school walkouts.
Moctesuma Esparza: I'm a first generation Chicano and my dad came to the United States in 1918, basically out of the mass migration of Mexicanos coming out of the Mexican Revolution. I grew up with a strong sense of social justice and the reasons for the Revolution, along with a history of the
United States and of Mexico. During the period that
Pershing was invading Mexico, my father experienced the occupation of Veracruz by U.S. Marines, and the hunger dislocation this caused. So that was a background to my social formation. As I was going to school here in the
United States, the contradictions of what I learned at school what I learned at home, created tremendous tension in my
I was blessed with a father who engaged me in political conversations, and because of my father's acute political and and life. education and understanding of historical forces, I understood very early of the contradictions that existed in country. At the same time, I was an admirer of the Bill of this
Rights and what this country's Constitution represented. It created a tremendous conflict in me, and I grew to be a very angry young man; angry at the injustices that existed for our people here in this country.
Victor Payan: And I'm sure you saw this anger brewing in your peers.
Moctesuma Esparza: There was a very small group of people who organized the walkouts and created the Chicano Civil Rights
Movement. But we ignited a firestorm that was ready, because that anger was below the surface of thousands and thousands of students.
Victor Payan: What were some injustices you remember from going to school in the late sixties as a young Chicano.
Moctesuma Esparza: The contradictions, hypocrisies and lies of the history of the nation provoked a certain anger. There was the obvious social injustice of living in the country as Chicanos and Mexicanos, all being programmed to become laborers. None of us were being programmed to enter college. There was a realization that the drop-out rate was not our own failure, but that of the system, which preprogrammed us. The failure on our part was we bought into it, and we accepted that was all we could do.
Victor Payan: At this time there were student conferences being organized to address these issues in which you played a role.
Moctesuma Esparza: Our goals were to reform the schools so they would no longer push out our classmates, and would provide us an equal education and true history of our contributions to the country. That led to an effort in communicating with the school districts which proved futile. They just patted us on the head and told us to go on our way. So we needed to take a radical step and decided, a very small group of us, to organize the walkouts of March 1968, which were in the planning stage for about a year. Those walkouts resulted in
20,000 students going out on strike for a week in Los Angeles, and had echoes in the Southwest and throughout the United States. The outgrowth of course was repressive reaction from the school authorities and the government. Thirteen of us were indicted and I faced forty-five years to life in jail, on charges of conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor. Charging us with a conspiracy, made it a felony. I was eighteen at the time.
Victor Payan: So you knew the issue was not the fact you had walked out. There was something bigger at stake. Given the paranoia in the country during this period, how were issues like the walkouts, the death of Rubén Salazar and Oscar Acosta's run for Sheriff viewed by the press?
Moctesuma Esparza: Well, of course, that we were un-American. That we were outsiders in our own community. That we were ungrateful, and that "they" were doing the best they could for a population that really didn't have (what it took) to succeed. My actual role in the walkouts was as a liaison to the press, calling press conferences, organizing them and giving interviews. That led me to become much more involved in media.
Victor Payan: What was your career goal at the time?
Moctesuma Esparza: My career goal was to become a community organizer and a political activist.

Victor Payan: Well, I think you kind of are, in a different setting you're organizing films.
Moctesuma Esparza: Yes, that's what I later realized. In college I was asked to organize a conference on the role of media in the lives of minority communities. We organized the Media Urban Crisis Committee, and made the recommendation that there should be minorities in film school, third world people in film school. From a history major I went into film school, deciding it was an expedient way to get my degree. I really had no intentions of being involved in the film industry. Once there, however, I was convinced that I could become a film producer because that's what I did in life was organize. I organized the filming of a speech by Reyes Lopez Tijerina at UCLA, and a symposium where he, "Corky" Gonzalez, Luis Valdez and Dolores Huerta were brought in. Then I organized a student cooperative to film the Moratorium March of August 29th, 1970. That of course became a police riot in which Rubén Salazar was killed, and that became my first documentary which I produced, Requiem 29 .
Victor Payan: Those must have been very exciting years.
Moctesuma Esparza: Well, they were truly a gift in many ways because they allowed us something to struggle against, and when you struggle against something, you grow. You define and know who you are, and you know what your goals in life are. The life of luxury, although certainly very attractive, does not generally provide one a context for struggle or growth. I believe today we have many parallels to thirty years ago with the xenophobia surrounding (propositions) 187 and 209 here in California, and the anti-immigrant bashing going on all the time. There is a new generation of first generation Chicanos and Latinos here in the country experiencing pretty much the same sort of things we did thirty years ago, that our parents and grandparents experienced before us.
Victor Payan: And that includes struggling against an industry which demeans and keeps us invisible.
Moctesuma Esparza: When I finally decided this was going to be my career, I chose to take on the role to transform our image, not just in the United States, but in the world; to transform an image Hollywood had created which was stereotypical and demeaning, into an image of us as a people, as human beings of this land, who have something special to offer this country and the world, along with the rest of the native people of this continent.
Victor Payan: After UCLA, you worked on Sesame Street.
Moctesuma Esparza: I was very fortunate. Sesame Street wanted to include some bilingual segments in their programming, and I was asked to consult and help design that. I made some short films and that led to my having some experience in early childhood and bilingual education. Upon graduating from film school, I was fortunate to become the producer for the very first pilot and season of Villa Alegre .
That set the pace and tone for what it was going to be. The series was nominated and won many awards, including the Peabody. I went on as an independent film producer of documentaries for about ten years.
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Victor Payan: You produced a documentary ( Agueda Martinez ) which was nominated for an Academy Award.
Moctesuma Esparza: Yes, I knew that to get into the feature film business I would have to penetrate Hollywood. Since I had no role model and there was no such thing as a "Chicano producer" in Hollywood, I had to establish a track record of quality. The fields I was able to get into were children's programming and later documentaries. So I knew these had to be of a standard and quality that would win awards. I also learned that a movie has to be made for a market, and film is truly the marriage of art and commerce. There has to be a recognition and nod to both sides in order to succeed, to have people see your film and to have any impact on consciousness. I chose to make a movie with a genre that could support that, a western, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez . It took me three, four years to recover from the first film and be able to do it. I got a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the sale to American Playhouse.