Marching Students

Chicana and Chicano Activism in Education, 1968 to the Present

Margarita Berta-Avila, Anita Tijerina-Revilla, Julie Figueroa

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780874178616
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1968 over 10, 000 Chicana/o high school students in East Los Angeles walked out of their schools in the first major protest against racism and educational inequality staged by Mexican Americans in the United States. They ignited the Mexican-American civil rights movement, which opened the doors to higher education and equal opportunity in employment for Mexican Americans and other Latinos previously excluded. Marching Students is a collaborative effort by Chicana/o scholars in several fields to place the 1968 walkouts and Chicana and Chicano Civil Rights Movement in historical context, highlighting the contribution of Chicana/o educators, students, and community activists to minority education.
Contributors: Alejandro Covarrubias, Xico González, Eracleo Guevara, Adriana Katzew, Lilia R. De Katzew, Rita Kohli, Edward M. Olivos, Alejo Padilla, Carmen E. Quintana, Evelyn M. Rangel-Medina, Marianna Rivera, Daniel G. Solórzano, Carlos Tejeda

CHAPTER 1

Genealogies of the Student “Blowouts” of 1968

CARLOS TEJEDA

I wrote the following passage in a doctoral dissertation that focused on the production and workings of social space in an elementary classroom:

I read the passage and I could see myself sitting in the classroom as a child. It was me who didn’t care if they thought I was a Carlos or a Juan, as long as I could avoid being singled out. It was I who had been afraid to occupy the very space of my existence in the classrooms of my childhood. For years, school was the place where I sat in fear that I’d be called on to read aloud or give an answer. It was I who wanted to be a nobody because a nobody could avoid being singled out, exposed as an unintelligent boy who couldn’t read and didn’t speak correctly. I was the Mexican reduced to the occupation of an inexistence: the loudness of my accent, Indian features, and dark skin compelled me to inhabit the silence of the classroom. (Tejeda 2000, 13–14).

This passage was written because I found it impossible to explain my interest in social space—that space that is a product of social practice and socially constructed meaning, which people act upon as it simultaneously acts on them—without referencing my past. It is part of a chapter where I narrate memories and feelings that were conjured while reading a text when I was a freshman in college. That text, written by Mexican author Elena Poniatowska, chronicled the lives of the poor who migrated from Mexico’s countryside to Mexico City—people Poniatowska described as “voiceless nobodies” who avoided giving their names because they feared “to be a bother, to occupy a space and time that didn’t belong to them.” It described people who when interviewed and asked to give their names would respond that she could “just put Juan,” or “whatever name she wished,” that they could “answer to any name she wanted,” because “any name would be okay” (1995, 11). The text was a mirror in which, as a young man lost in college, I began to find myself within a reflection of thoughts and feelings that had marked my life—a life, I was learning, that indexed an experience shared by countless others.

To begin to understand my life and what it indexes, it is necessary to focus on the larger historical contexts and social spaces of my being-in-the-world, on the time-spaces of my lived experience. The concept of a time-space is informed by the work of Lefebvre (1991) and Bakhtin (1981). Lefebvre argues that our being in the world is simultaneously social, historical, and spatial, and that these dimensions of our existence can neither exist nor be understood independently of one another. Bakhtin argues that there is an intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships, and he uses the term “chronotope” to refer to what he sees as the inseparability of time and space. Hence, when I use the term “time-space,” I am referring to a being-in-the-world in which the social, historical, and spatial are ontologically equivalent and in which time and space are inseparable and thoroughly interrelated. From this concept of a time-space, to contextualize a person’s life, one must look not only at social indicators (such as gender, race, and class) and historical periods (for example, colonial times, the era of de jure segregation, the 1960s) but also at geographical locations (a slave state, the Southwest, East Los Angeles).

It is impossible, then, to begin to account for how phenotype and language could have had so much to do with what I thought and felt as a boy in school without accounting for the racialization of social relations and the forms of deculturalization that characterized the southwestern United States of the early 1970s, without accounting for the inferiorization and subordination that characterized the positionality of Spanish-speaking Mexicans in states like California and cities like Los Angeles. What’s more, it is not possible to explain the types of racialization and forms of cultural domination that were commonplace in the time-space of the southwestern United States of the early 1970s without an understanding of their origins and development throughout the larger time-spaces of what today is known as the United States. What I experienced in 1971 as a dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking boy in an Anglo-American school in East Los Angeles had a lot to do with ideologies, social practices, and institutional arrangements whose origins can be traced to the enslavement of Africans, the genocide and forced removal of indigenous people, and the imperialist expansion of the United States into what was then the northern half of the nation-state of Mexico. Similarly, to begin to understand how a boy who was afraid to inhabit his existence in a classroom could grow to occupy the academic spaces that afforded him the opportunity to theorize that space, it is necessary to consider the larger social and historical context—the time-space—in which occupying those academic spaces was made possible. It is impossible to begin to account for my access to the social spaces of an undergraduate and graduate education without locating that access in the larger time-space born of the struggle for civil rights and educational equality in American society. The opportunities I enjoyed as a young adult were made possible by a long-fought struggle that forced rearrangements in “American” society that included the restructuring of educational opportunity. In other words, what we commonly refer to as the present is unintelligible, a reality that can be neither decoded nor discursively constructed without a reading of what we commonly refer to as the past.

It is not possible to begin to understand the recent past or immediate present of specific lives and the larger time-space in which those lives transpire without being firmly grounded in a critical understanding of the present that interpretively gazes toward the past—which must also be understood as social, historical, and spatial. To understand the present, it is necessary to map the paths of ideologies and practices through which the past extends into the present. What’s more, I contend that without a critical understanding of the present terrain and an interpretive mapping of what we commonly refer to as the past, we are ontologically lost, readily constructed as this or that, and easily positioned in this or that social location: we can be their “Mexicans,” “Hispanics,” “Latinos,” “beaners,” “illegals,” or the “nobodies” that will answer to any name they give us because any that they choose for us will be okay. The lack of a critical understanding of our present and an interpretive mapping of our past reduces us to ontological orphans who are unfamiliar with and disconnected from the genealogy of our being in the social world, to people who may be afraid to occupy the very space of our existence because, not knowing who we are or where we come from, we can easily be told what does and does not belong to us, where we are from, and where we do not belong.

Gazing down the paths of conquest, colonization, and capitalist expansion to map the ideologies and practices through which the past has trekked into the present, we can locate strands of ideological and material practices that weigh us down with what has been while compelling us to move from that which is. We can see that ideological and material practices from the past simultaneously enable and constrain us, and that they do so in a manner that calls for us to both commemorate and condemn the past. Those ideological and material practices can be mapped from moments and locations in time and space when and where the actions of social subjects disrupt the larger time-space of their occurrence. The 1968 East Los Angeles High School Walkouts (commonly referred to as the “Blowouts”) constitute one of those moments and locations in time and space that allow for a mapping of the strands of ideologies and practices through which the past extends into the present.

In this chapter, I contend that the “Blowouts” must be commemorated for vividly exposing and valiantly opposing the condemnable ideologies and practices of a schooling for subservience and educational exclusion that constrained Chicanas/os in American society. I use the term “schooling for subservience” to refer to schooling whose curricular contents (both hidden and overt) and pedagogical practices aim to socialize groups of students to and through norms, values, and worldviews that facilitate their social and cultural domination. It refers to forms of schooling that operate to construct in students identities and subjectivities that compel them to participate in, acquiesce to, or ignore their social and cultural subordination by dominant groups. As a decolonizing pedagogue (see Tejeda, Espinoza, and Gutierrez 2003), I work from the following premises: that forms of schooling from our colonial and capitalist anterior, which find both direct and mutated manifestations in the present, are inextricably tied to the workings of contemporary forms of domination and exploitation in American society; that the forms of schooling for subservience practiced and perfected throughout the history of racial domination and capitalist exploitation in Anglo-American society function at the service of today’s social and cultural domination; and that without the effective workings of a schooling for subservience, the type of social, political, cultural, and economic hegemony enjoyed by the dominant classes in American society would not be possible. In what follows, I use the work of various scholars to trace a genealogy of the ideological and material practices that produced the educational experience Chicana/o students protested by walking out of their high schools in 1968. I then use the work of scholars to highlight that the Blowouts were made possible by a set of ideological and material practices with a genealogy of their own.

THE EAST LOS ANGELES HIGH SCHOOL BLOWOUTS OF 1968

I am the boy who was afraid to occupy the space of my existence in the classrooms of my childhood and the young man in college who was haunted by the memories of that boy. But I am also a professor in the field of education with a doctorate degree from one of the leading graduate schools of education in the United States. In either case, and they are both my case, I find it impossible to begin to explain who I am or what I have lived, to narrate the identity I want to assume, or to define the educational politics I want to practice without looking back into what is commonly referred to as the past to interpret what is understood to be the present. But in looking at the past, I see neither landscapes of absolute certitude about that which has “passed” nor transcendental “truths” to make sense of the present. The past is not a set of fixed phenomena with inherent meanings that is out there waiting to be seen, nor are there global positioning devices to be had when attempting to map the past’s paths into the present. I understand that while mapping the past it is important to survey the terrain with both conceptual caution and epistemological humility. It is one thing to know that there is a past to which we are directly connected, but it is quite another to believe that we can know that past with absolute certainty. Scholars like Trouillot insistently remind us that there is a real difference “between what happened and that which is said to have happened” (1995, 3; emphasis added). Others like White (1999) argue that historical discourse is incapable of producing “truths” about the past—that it yields only interpretations. The work of these scholars warns that attempts to construct understandings of the past will have to unfold without access to a “god’s-eye view” or a transcendental vantage from whence to gaze at what happened. I understand that in using the historical narratives of the various scholars cited below I am building on interpretations of what happened, and not what actually happened. Despite these understandings, I do not believe that the past is entirely unknowable, or that we are completely lost in the present. Although I agree that there is neither an epistemologically pristine position from which to view the past nor a correct historical interpretation to be had, I also agree with Somekawa and Smith (1988) that rather than looking for or believing in the absolute truth or complete objectivity of the historical narratives we construct, we should believe in the moral or political positions we are taking with our narratives. Hence, this chapter’s mapping of the past into the present, while striving toward the ideal of objectivity and attempting to be as approximate as possible to what happened, is more concerned with the moral and political value of constructing a counternarrative that contextualizes and highlights the importance of commemorating and condemning that which constituted the 1968 Blowouts—a counternarrative from whence we can move from what has been to what should be. With this in mind, and the understanding that my vision can be neither perfectly focused nor impartial, I briefly map genealogical strands of ideologies and practices that marked the time-space of the 1968 Blowouts.

When I gaze into past, into the immediate time-space of my life and the larger time-space I have shared with others, I see strands of ideologies and practices that ought to be condemned aloud. But I see also, with no less clarity, ideologies and practices that ought to be commemorated with conviction. I see the sacrifice my parents practiced to ensure their children survived as exiles from equality in a society that openly ostracized the “other.” I see ideologies and practices that led to the 1968 Blowouts, when thousands of high school students in East Los Angeles and surrounding areas walked out of schools protesting against their education. Those actions and events should be commemorated because they constitute an integral part of a struggle that opened doors for people to enter spaces that had been systematically denied to them and because they serve as a clear example of the past’s constraining and enabling force upon the present. They are a vivid example of the need to both commemorate and condemn an inheritance of ideologies and practices that have shaped who and where we are and can serve as a road map for where we need to move and who we want to be.

According to various scholars, the East Los Angeles Student Walkouts (Blowouts) of 1968 began during the first week of March and continued for more than a week and a half (Bernal 1998; Inda 1990; Muñoz 1989; Rosales 1997). At least two scholars pinpoint the first walkout to the Friday morning of March 1, when a few hundred students walked out of Wilson High School in protest against their principal’s decision to cancel a school play (Inda 1990; Rosales 1997). But these same scholars emphasize that the cancellation of the play was not the real cause behind the walkout; they attribute it to people’s feelings regarding fundamental issues, and they point out that students “would not return to classes unless they got smaller class sizes, more emphasis on Chicana/o history and culture, and expanded student rights” (Inda 1990, 14). The walkout at Wilson High School, like the walkouts that followed, was essentially a protest against an inferior education. The students at Wilson were followed by more than a thousand students at Lincoln High School who walked out on the morning of March 4. On Tuesday, March 5, more than two thousand students walked out of Garfield High School. Students at Roosevelt High School walked out on Wednesday, and by Friday March 8 the walkouts had extended beyond the east side and were occurring throughout Los Angeles, including Belmont, Jefferson, and Venice high schools. They continued for more than a week and a half, with as many as ten to fifteen thousand students walking out in protest (see Acuña 1981; Bernal 1998; Inda 1990; Muñoz 1989; and Rosales 1997).

As mentioned above, the Blowouts were a protest against profound issues affecting large sectors of the Mexican American population, the most significant and concrete of these being an inferior education. Rosales explains that the call for educational reform was a major element of the 1960s Chicana/o movement and that Chicana/o students used the walkouts “to dramatize what they considered the abysmally poor educational conditions affecting their schools” (1997, 185). Scholars who have examined the Blowouts highlight the following about the educational practices and circumstances faced by Chicana/o students: high school dropout or push-out rates of more than 50 percent, which could be contrasted to dropout rates of 3.1 percent and 2.6 percent for Palisades and Monroe high schools in West Los Angeles (Acuña 1981; Bernal 1998; Inda 1990); an average of only 7.1 years of schooling, which could be contrasted with 9 years of schooling for African Americans and 12 years of schooling for Anglos (Inda 1990); the lowest reading scores in the Los Angeles school district; a highly disproportionate placement of students in special education classes and classes for the mentally retarded and the emotionally disturbed; schools that were overcrowded and undermaintained in comparison to schools that served Anglos and African Americans; curricular contents and practices that ignored Chicana/o culture and functioned to prepare students for low-skilled jobs; and teachers and administrators who lacked an understanding of working-class communities or were openly racist against Chicana/o students or both (Acuña 1981; Bernal 1998). Inda summarizes the practices and circumstances students protested against in the following terms:

From the moment Chicano children entered school, they were made to feel ashamed of their culture. Five out of ten barrio schools did not allow students to speak Spanish. Not only was their language demeaned, but also their style of dress. They were often told, “stop looking like pachucos,” and forbidden to wear certain clothes, which were a source of pride for students. Thomas Carter in Mexican Americans in Schools: A History of Neglect, documented racist teacher attitudes that contributed to the negative self-image of Chicanos. Most teachers believed that Mexican culture produced a lack of motivation in students. They were pessimistic about the Mexican’s ability to learn. Teachers saw the Chicano child as inferior to the white child, an inferiority which the overt racists attributed to innate stupidity and which more “open-minded” racists attributed to laziness or apathy in the culture. (1990, 2–3)

CONDEMNING GENEALOGIES OF SCHOOLING FOR SUBSERVIENCE AND EDUCATIONAL EXCLUSION

The practices and circumstances students protested in 1968 were far from a temporary aberration in an otherwise egalitarian society with equality of social and educational opportunity. Inda (1990) argues that it was years of unsuccessful attempts by Chicanas/os to improve the schooling they received that led to the walkouts. Bernal reminds us that the struggle for a quality education predated the walkouts by a number of decades and that many of the issues and concerns of participants and supporters “were very similar to those voiced in Mexican communities in the United States since before the turn of the century” (1998, 117). Referring to schooling conditions and outcomes for Chicana/o students decades after the Blowouts, in the 1990s, Valencia writes: “School failure amon...