Info: 1970 Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War
https://www.latimes.com/projects/chicano-moratorium/chicano-moratorium-participants-discuss-movement/
It started as a peace march. But for the Moratorium generation, the day left protesters dismayed, disappointed and angry.
The National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War in East Los Angeles would become the biggest gathering of Mexican American demonstrators in U.S. history to that point, with about 20,000 people parading down Whittier Boulevard to what was then called Laguna Park — before widespread violence erupted when sheriff’s deputies stormed the park and skirmishes followed. Patrol cars and buildings were set on fire.
The chaos would lead to three deaths, including that of Times journalist Ruben Salazar.
For many in Los Angeles, the march and its chaotic aftermath marked both the peak and the beginning-of-the-end of the Chicano movement.
It was a “moratorium” because it was a call to suspend, so to speak, the loss of brown lives in the slog of the Vietnam War, half a planet away. Two times as many people with Spanish surnames were dying at its peak in proportion to their population in the Southwest, according to studies by academic Ralph C. Guzman, a future deputy assistant secretary of State. For a growing and increasingly assertive population of Mexican Americans in California and the U.S. Southwest, those numbers didn’t sit well.