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March 1968 Sal Castro with walkout students at Lincoln High School

1 Image courtesy of LA Times Photographic Archive, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Set the Night on Fire: "Castro, a high school teacher long active in liberal and Mexican-American causes, was a key force in organizing student walkouts to protest school conditions in East L.A. The "Blowouts", as they were soon called, were genesis events in the emergence of a new, militant "Chicano" identity.

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East L.A Student Walkouts Gina Leon
Contents of this path:
1. Mural Memoir Carlos Montes
2. Walkout covered in La Raza Newspaper 1968
3. Students protest Roosevelt High School (1968)
4. 1970 East L.A. picketing to protest conditions at the school
5. The 1968 East LA Walkouts and the Sorry State of US Education
6. 1968 Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting. Photo by Los Angeles Public Library. In 1967, Mexican American students throughout the Southwest held a 60% high school dropout rate. If they did graduate, they averaged an 8th-grade reading level. Due to Anglo-centric internal school policies many Chicano students were fielded to vocational training or classes for the mentally disabled. Prejudice from teachers and administrators instigated stereotypes of Mexican Americans that discouraged the students from higher learning. These inequalities in education led to the 1968 East Los Angeles Walkouts, also known as the "Blowouts," which displayed the largest mobilization of Chicano youth leaders in Los Angeles history.
7. 1968 East Los Angeles - Walk Outs
8. East Los Angeles Walk Outs
9. March 1968 Sal Castro with walkout students at Lincoln High School Image courtesy of LA Times Photographic Archive, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Set the Night on Fire: "Castro, a high school teacher long active in liberal and Mexican-American causes, was a key force in organizing student walkouts to protest school conditions in East L.A. The "Blowouts", as they were soon called, were genesis events in the emergence of a new, militant "Chicano" identity.
10. East L.A. Blowouts: Walking Out for Justice in the Classrooms

This page has tags:

Latinx / Indigenous Organizing Gina Leon
Contents of this tag:
1. Chicano Movement
2. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Protestors in the rain
3. Maria Elena Durazo Brief Childhood Summary
4. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Woman with sign and umbrella
5. 1968 The United Farm Workers /Hunger Strike
6. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Brown Berets make an appearance
7. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Men carrying a coffin
8. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Young protester holding a sign
9. 1990 Justice for Janitors Article: https://www.kcet.org/shows/departures/justice-for-janitors-day-marks-25th-anniversary-in-l-a -A critical chapter in U.S. labor history - On this day, back in 1990, over 400 striking janitors, primarily Central American immigrants, members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 399, demonstrated peacefully in an effort to improve the living standards for their families by unionizing their employer International Service System (ISS), the contractor responsible for servicing most of L.A.'s office buildings at the time. The demonstration followed two weeks of intense organizing efforts by janitors and took place in Century City, a region in west Los Angeles that houses corporate office towers of the wealthiest businesses in the country. At first, the rally appeared to be another event in line with the organizing efforts of the strike, yet, this particular rally propelled the janitors' struggle to the national spotlight when members were confronted and injured by fifty police officers who were equipped with batons. In total, 38 janitors were injured during the incident, and many were arrested during the altercation. The violent images quickly began circulating across media outlets across the country and led to an increased public support for the janitors cause. Rather than back down after the confrontation, janitors remained on the streets and were eventually joined by over 2,500 supporters and prominent leaders, including Jesse Jackson, who publicly decried the meager wages janitors were earning at the time -- some as little at $4.50 per hour. The janitors' dedicated efforts, coupled with the widespread community support and the public outrage over the police brutality, resulted in janitors receiving an increase of wages over $2 per hour, full family health coverage, and the ratification of a union contract with ISS. "Our efforts that day and all of the efforts leading up to that action, represented a fight for dignity and respect," explained Jose Garcia, a janitor who was present at the march on June 15, 1990, and still services the industry today. "On this day we finally had a voice on the job and we were able to show the nation and the world that we were on the side of justice." Garcia further explained that prior to this victory, janitors in Los Angeles did not have any control over working conditions, low wages, and were subjected to numerous abuses by employers. Since then, unionized L.A. janitors earn between $12-$14 per hour, and form part of SEIU-United Service Workers West (USWW).
10. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Large group of protestors
11. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Protestor with fist raised
12. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Las Adelitas de Aztlán join protest “After leaving the Brown Berets, Arellanes — along with Jensen and her sister, Grace; Andrea and Esther Sánchez; Lorraine Escalante; Yolanda Solis; and Arlene Sánchez — founded Las Adelitas de Aztlán. The name referred to the soldaderas who fought alongside the men during the Mexican Revolution. They invited members of the community to join them and on Feb. 28, 1970, they made their public debut at the second anti-war moratorium in East Los Angeles.” Members of Las Adelitas de Aztlán at the second Chicano Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War on Feb. 28, 1970. At right is Hilda Reyes. They marched in the rain under a banner made by Gloria Arellanes and other members of the group. Las Adelitas dissolved later that year.
13. Students protest Roosevelt High School (1968)
14. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Woman and man hold up posters
15. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Woman with umbrella
16. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Las Adelitas de Aztlán protesting
17. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Group of protestors
18. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Policemen charge towards Laguna Park
19. 1960s Brown Beret Newspaper; La Causa
20. 1978 The Bakke Decision In Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court ruled that a university's use of racial "quotas". Bakke decision, formally Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, ruling in which, on June 28, 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court declared affirmative action constitutional but invalidated the use of racial quotas. The medical school at the University of California, Davis, as part of the university’s affirmative action program, had reserved 16 percent of its admission places for minority applicants. Allan Bakke, a white California man who had twice unsuccessfully applied for admission to the medical school, filed suit against the university. Citing evidence that his grades and test scores surpassed those of many minority students who had been accepted for admission, Bakke charged that he had suffered unfair “reverse discrimination” on the basis of race, which he argued was contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court, in a highly fractured ruling (six separate opinions were issued), agreed that the university’s use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and ordered that the medical school admit Bakke, but it also contended that race could be used as one criterion in the admissions decisions of institutions of higher education. Although the ruling legalized the use of affirmative action, in subsequent decisions during the next several decades the court limited the scope of such programs, and several U.S. states prohibited affirmative action programs based on race. in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school's use of "affirmative action" to accept more minority applicants was constitutional in some circumstances. The case involved the admissions practices of the Medical School of the University of California at Davis. The medical school reserved 16 out of 100 seats in its entering class for minorities, including "Blacks," "Chicanos," "Asians," and "American Indians." The rigid admissions quota was administered by a special school committee. Allan Bakke, a white applicant, was twice denied admission to the medical school even though his MCAT scores, GPA, and benchmark scores were "significantly higher" than those of some minority applicants recently admitted. Bakke sued the University of California in a state court, alleging that the medical school's admission policy violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The California Supreme Court agreed, finding that the quota system explicitly discriminated against racial groups and holding that "no applicant may be rejected because of his race, in favor of another who is less qualified, as measured by standards applied without regard to race." The medical school, ordered to shut down its quota system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviewed the case in 1978.
21. 1989 Maria Elena became elected President of Local 11 In the 1970s and 1980s, the predominantly Spanish-speaking membership of Local 11 fought for fuller participation in their union against a largely Anglo leadership. In 1989, María Elena Durazo became the first Latina to lead a major Los Angeles union. She began reorienting the local towards greater membership participation and a more assertive stance with employers. Since then, Local 11 merged with locals in Santa Monica, Long Beach, and Orange County, and in 2016, with Local 631 in Arizona.
22. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Two young protestors hold up a large banner
23. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Group of protestors move down Whittier Blvd. “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.”
24. 1970 Later Chicano Moratoriums: Raul Ruiz and the corpse of Gustav Montag Raul Ruiz lays a Mexican flag atop the corpse of Gustav Montag, during a 1971 protest in East Los Angeles. Three people died on Aug. 29, 1970 Moratorium. They included: LA Times journalist and KMEX (Ch. 34) news director Rubén Salazar, Gilberto Diaz (Angel Gilbert Diaz) and Lyn Ward. During a 1971 protest, Gustav Montag was murdered by police. Identified as Jewish, Montag was the fourth casualty in East LA of the organized moratoriums. This moratorium was held on February 2, 1971.
25. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Protestors hold anti Vietnam War posters
26. 1960s A group of men reading La Raza newspaper
27. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Rosalio Munoz speaks at Laguna Park
28. 1966 Breaking Bread Ending his 23-day fast in support of the Union’s strike against grape growers, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez (R) breaks bread with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in this 1966 photo. Chavez said that Kennedy legitimized his union’s cause by lending his support. On 19th February, 1968, Cesar Chavez, the trade union leader, began a hunger strike in protest against the violence being used against his members in California. Robert F. Kennedy went to the San Joaquin Valley to give Chavez his support and told waiting reporters: “I am here out of respect for one of the heroic figures of our time – Cesar Chavez. I congratulate all of you who are locked with Cesar in the struggle for justice for the farm worker and in the struggle for justice for Spanish-speaking Americans.” On March 10 Robert F. Kennedy flew to California to help Chavez end a 25-day fast, offered as public penance for the violence that had resulted from his union's strike tactics. Chavez, who had lost 35 pounds in 25 days, was too weak to speak at the Mass of Thanksgiving in his honor. But someone read his speech, which included the following words: "It is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are... I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally
29. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Consuelo Flores recounts as violence broke out Consuelo Flores Remembers, age 9 in 1970. She remembered smoke — tear gas, shot into the crowds. Untold numbers of protesters were injured by deputies or while fleeing. ‘I’m 9 years old, and I’m seeing the cop who’s supposed to protect me, whacking” a young man, she recalled. ‘My [red] shoes just fall off, and I just keep running, I’m running with my bare feet, so now my feet are burning too, and ... I’m just trying to get home.’
30. 1965 Delano Grape Strike/Boycott is started by Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOL)
31. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Policeman with shotgun
32. 1960s Brown Berets members When he 15, Dr. Sanchez started the Young Chicanos for Community Action in Monterey Park, California. He later changed the name to the Brown Berets, because he had actually purchased one, by chance, and wore it often. From then on, the grassroots group met at various locations, including the Boy’s and Girl’s Club and coffee shops, because they didn’t want police to know their whereabouts. Dr. Sanchez, along with Carlos Montes, another organizer with the Brown Berets, began to take up causes such as police brutality, better education, and discrimination against the Latinx community. Their first protest was in 1967, when they picketed the sheriff's office in East L.A. to protest the killing of Latino men.
33. 1960s Brown Beret member Gloria Arellenas and others Undated photo strips show Gloria Arellanes, at left, and at center, with fellow Brown Beret members including, from clockwise: Lorraine Escalante, Hilda Reyes and Arlene Sánchez. (Special Collections & Archives, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, Cal State LA, Gloria Arellanes Papers) Arrellanes became the minister of Finance & Correspondence after being apoitned by David Sánchez, the group’s founder. She was the only woman on the leadership team.
34. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Injured policeman dragged out of Laguna Park
35. 2000 - Immigrants Rights Rally at LA Sports Arena
36. 1960 JFK Campaign in San Jose Sen. John Kennedy gestures as he emphasizes a point during his address to more than 12,000 people in San Jose, California, November 2, 1960. Big signs greeted the Democratic standard bearer. “While Kennedy acknowledged that Mexican-American votes in Texas were critical to his win over Nixon, he largely neglected the promises made to Viva Kennedy campaigners—particularly Mexican Americans—once in the White House. Without the unifying force of the campaign and its celebrity candidate, the alliance of Latinos that Viva Kennedy represented collapsed. Nevertheless, the Kennedy campaign of 1960 established the broad outlines of Latino politics in the years to come. It encouraged leaders in various Latino communities to see the presidential election as the foundation of a nationwide Latino political community, even as it appealed to members of those communities in different ways.”
37. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Ruben Salazar 2 “Anyone who has worked a police beat as a reporter, as I have, knows that policemen tend to have difference attitudes toward enforcing the law depending on the social, financial and racial makeup of the people they deal with.” -Ruben Salazar Journalist Rubén Salazar and camera operator Guillermo Restrepo trailed after police who were chasing people east down Whittier Blvd. They eventually stopped at the Silver Dollar Bar and Café. That was where Los Angeles County deputy sheriff Tom Wilson said he fired the tear gas canister that struck Salazar in the head. Rubén Salazar was both the news director at Spanish language TV station KMEX and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
38. 1971 Student and barrio youth lead protest march in Belvedere Park.
39. 1968 RFK and Cesar Chavez Ending his 23-day fast in support of the Union’s strike against grape growers, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez (R) breaks bread with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in this 1966 photo. Chavez said that Kennedy legitimized his union’s cause by lending his support. On 19th February, 1968, Cesar Chavez, the trade union leader, began a hunger strike in protest against the violence being used against his members in California. Robert F. Kennedy went to the San Joaquin Valley to give Chavez his support and told waiting reporters: “I am here out of respect for one of the heroic figures of our time – Cesar Chavez. I congratulate all of you who are locked with Cesar in the struggle for justice for the farm worker and in the struggle for justice for Spanish-speaking Americans.” On March 10 Robert F. Kennedy flew to California to help Chavez end a 25-day fast, offered as public penance for the violence that had resulted from his union's strike tactics. Chavez, who had lost 35 pounds in 25 days, was too weak to speak at the Mass of Thanksgiving in his honor. But someone read his speech, which included the following words: "It is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are... I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us be men." Note: sources have conflicting start and ending dates of this either 25 or 27 day fast on water only. (UPI Photo/Files)
40. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: After moratorium demonstration Chicano Moratorium Committee anti-war demonstrators gather in East L.A. "The biggest, bloodiest disturbance in Los Angeles since Watts five years earlier lasted several hours. When it was over, Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar was dead and two others mortally wounded, about 200 people were under arrest, 75 law enforcement officers and untold numbers of demonstrators were injured, 95 county vehicles were destroyed or damaged, 44 buildings were pillaged and eight major fires had been set.” “After the Chicano Moratorium, I said no way am I going to put myself in jeopardy ever again,” Jensen says. “Because that’s how scared I was.” Jensen stopped organizing
41. Walkout covered in La Raza Newspaper 1968
42. 1969 1st Chicano Moratorium: Outside recruiting center
43. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1974 ASCO First Supper After a Major Riot Harry Gamboa Jr.: LA County sheriffs open fired on innocent students and protestors, and wounded and killed many people who were protesting against the war in Vietnam, and were also protesting against police violence, which was followed by a two to three-and-a-half year crackdown on young people gathering on the streets of East Los Angeles. At the time that we shot [First Supper After a Major Riot], we felt that it had been long enough. It was time for it to be extinguished. And so, we declared it to be a celebration. Willie Herrón: At the time of the Moratorium, I was in high school. I remember the procession originating at Belvedere Park, protesting the Vietnam War and all the Chicanos that lost their lives. The police brutality was incredible. It affected me quite a bit and I think it affected all of us. So that's why Whittier Boulevard became such an important street, and a place for us to conduct our performances and connect them to our community and the way society viewed us at the time.
44. 1975 UFW grape boycott poster
45. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1971 ASCO Stations of the Cross Stations of the Cross was a walking “ritual of resistance” against what the performance group Asco considered the “useless deaths” taking place in Vietnam. The male members of the group (which originally comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez) paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, with Herrón as a Christ/death figure bearing a large cardboard cross. The quasi-Passion Play ended with the trio blocking a U.S. Marines recruiting office with the cross, symbolically halting military recruitment from their Mexican American neighborhood.
46. 1970 Anti War Protest
47. 1966 March from to Sacramento organized by the National Farmworkers Association (NFWA)
48. Las Patronas’ Kitchen: A documentary about the women who give food – and hope- to migrants travelling northbound on “La Bestia”
49. 1968 Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting. Photo by Los Angeles Public Library. In 1967, Mexican American students throughout the Southwest held a 60% high school dropout rate. If they did graduate, they averaged an 8th-grade reading level. Due to Anglo-centric internal school policies many Chicano students were fielded to vocational training or classes for the mentally disabled. Prejudice from teachers and administrators instigated stereotypes of Mexican Americans that discouraged the students from higher learning. These inequalities in education led to the 1968 East Los Angeles Walkouts, also known as the "Blowouts," which displayed the largest mobilization of Chicano youth leaders in Los Angeles history.
50. 1968: The Young Lord's Organization/Party In 1968, José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez established the Young Lords Organization (YLO) at Lincoln Park, one of the most impoverished barrios of Chicago, Illinois. Modeled and inspired after the Black Panther Party (BPP), the YLO emerged from a Puerto Rican street gang to a community-based organization involved in advocating for minority access to healthcare, education, housing, and employment. The YLO was multiethnic and inclusive to African American, Latino/x, women, and LGBTQ membership, self-identified as “revolutionist nationalists” who rallied for Puerto Rico’s independence and power to the people, and adopted a 13 Point Program and Platform—a set of policies, responsibilities, and principles the organization lived by. The YLO expanded to other cities, including New York City, where a group of college students established a YLO chapter and renamed it the Young Lords Party (YLP). After World War II ended, thousands of Puerto Ricans migrated from the island to the U.S. mainland, particularly to New York and Chicago, where they established neighborhoods at Lincoln Park and East Harlem. Within these barrios, Puerto Ricans became vulnerable to discrimination, police brutality, lack of employment and education, and gentrification. Throughout the late 60s and early 70s, the Young Lords of Chicago rebranded from a street gang into a community-based organization. Similar to the BPP, the YLO’s structure of leadership consisted of various ministers who were responsible for specific committees, including education, health, and finance. The YLO of Chicago became more active after James Lamb, an off-duty officer, received no repercussions for killing Manuel Ramos, a YLO member, during a party. Under Jiménez, the YLO formed coalitions with other groups and expanded to New York’s East Harlem, where a group of first generation college students headed an independent chapter. The New York City chapter aroused national headlines during their Garbage Offensive. In retaliation to the city’s poor sanitation services, YLO members led a week-long neighborhood cleanup and burned a garbage pile in the middle of a street intersection, causing the arrival of the police and fire department at the scene. In New York and in Chicago, YLO members led a series of protests and building occupations, held free breakfast programs for children, which helped standardize the current federal children’s nutrition program, established free medical clinics, and created Puerto Rican cultural centers, celebrating the history and heritage of all Puertorriqueño/as. In addition, both chapters published a monthly newspaper to promote community services and events. By the late 1970s, the Young Lords Organization and Party retreated from their activities. In 1995, Cha-Cha Jiménez collaborated with DePaul University’s Center for Latino Research to create the Lincoln Park Project, which archives and documents the legacy of the YLO.
51. 1960s Brown Beret belonging to Gloria Arellanes
52. 1966 Candid Photograph of Cesar Chavez and Robert Kennedy
53. March 1968 Sal Castro with walkout students at Lincoln High School Image courtesy of LA Times Photographic Archive, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Set the Night on Fire: "Castro, a high school teacher long active in liberal and Mexican-American causes, was a key force in organizing student walkouts to protest school conditions in East L.A. The "Blowouts", as they were soon called, were genesis events in the emergence of a new, militant "Chicano" identity.
54. 1968 Walkouts in Boyle Heights
55. 1960 Kennedy v. Nixon Latin opinion piece
56. 1969 Portrait of Brown Beret member Hilda Jensen Rodriguez took this portrait of a Chicana demonstrator in the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights in 1969 Hilda’s Jenson’s photos has graced the covers of books, films etc, but often the names of her and her fellow women organizers have often gone unrecognized. In 2003 she wrote to filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño who had included her image in his memoir to identify her by name and include her maiden name: Hilda Reyes.
57. 1966 A.W.O.C. & N.F.W.A. lapel pin
58. 1968 Walkouts make it into LAUSD Board of Education
59. 1960 “Democratic Representative Adam Clayton Powell introducing Democratic Party presidential candidate JFK in front of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem during campaign
60. 1970 Official Resignation of all women in the Brown Berets LA chapter
61. 1967 A migratory farm worker speaks out
62. 1968 Walkouts at Venice High School
63. 1969 1st Chicano Moratorium protester Rosalio Muñoz
64. 2010 Judy Baca, “Seeing Through Others’ Eyes” Each petal represents one of the issues facing society that Robert F. Kennedy deemed most important: Environment, Intolerance, Poverty, Education, Health, and War. We see these things through different eyes; the eyes of a soldier, a woman and her ailing mother, a poverty stricken child. At the center of the blossom sit two enlightened men: Kennedy breaking bread with César Chávez after Chávez’s 26-Day Fast for Life. Juan Romero, the busboy who cradled Kennedy after he was shot, is depicted to the left of Kennedy. While one million people march in the background lead by Dolores Huertas, a legendary figure in the labor movement in this country. She co-founded the United Farmworkers of America, which plays a major role in organizing opposition to proposed immigration reform legislation.
65. 1968 Female student being arrested at Venice High School Walkout LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 12: Image originally published on March 13, 1968--Police struggle to arrest a female student at Venice High School during a clash with 1,000 students. She was accused of using obscene and abusive language. Eight people were arrested. March 1, 1968: Over 15,000 Chicanos, students, faculty, and community members, walk out of seven East L.A. high schools. Those schools included: Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Belmont, Wilson, Venice, and Jefferson High School. Some students from East L.A. junior high schools join the protests, as well
66. 1977 UFW Leadership
67. 1962 United Farm Workers Flag
68. East Los Angeles Walk Outs
69. 1970 Article from July issue of El Malcriado
70. 1968 Brown Berets provide security for Memorial Procession the day after RFK was killed “Gloria Arellanes (left, second row) marches in a Robert Kennedy Requiem Memorial Procession the day after he was killed, from Belvedere Park to East Los Angeles College Stadium for a Catholic Mass. Brown Berets were security. (George Rodriguez)”. “At its peak, the Brown Berets had as many as 55 chapters throughout the country, including the Southwest but also in states such as Kansas and Minnesota. By 1970, however, the founding chapter was tearing at the seams. As the group planned demonstrations against the Vietnam War, female members began to question why they were largely excluded from leadership positions and relegated to behind-the-scenes, menial work.”
71. 1965 Protesting apart of the Delano Grape strike “The Delano Grape Strike began on September 8, 1965, in protest to substandard wages being paid to predominantly Filipino farm workers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. A week later, they were joined by the Mexican-American National Farmworkers Association, led by prominent labor leader Cesar Chavez, his elder brother Richard, and Dolores Huerta. Less than a year later, the two organizations merged to form the United Farm Workers – and more than 2,000 workers had joined the fight. Ultimately, the strike spread across North America and even Western Europe as consumers supported the workers by boycotting non-union grapes”
72. 1968 Brown Beret's El Barrio Free Clinic
73. 1970 Pamphlet for Delano Grape Strike and Boycott
74. Estrada Courts Witnesses to LA History: Estrada Courts Witnesses to Los Angeles History: Estrada Courts came about in 1997 when the Los Angeles Public Housing Authority enlisted SPARC and Professor Baca’s UCLA class for the production of a permanent public art piece for the Estrada Public Housing Project. Estrad Courts, one East Los Angeles’ oldest housing projects, is internationally recognized and respected for its collection of Chicano murals painted in the 1970’s. Students conducted oral history interviews with 25 Estrada Courts families, researched U.S. Public Housing policy and archives, studies of sociological factors affecting the projects including economics, crime, gang warfare, urban planning, demographics and collaborated to define the issues that are represented in the imagery. Photos collected from families’ photo albums were used to depict the complex stories of immigration, teenage pregnancy, poverty, and violence that embody the neighborhood’s collective consciousness. This process resulted in the production of six 8’x 9′ digital murals that were permanently installed within the resident initiated community center by the UCLA students and their community collaborators.
75. 1973 Side with the Farmworker: Boycott Gallo Untitled (Side with the Farmworker), ca. 1973, screenprint on computer tractor paper During the civil rights era, artists often used whatever materials they had at hand to craft public messages about pressing concerns. Here an unidentified artist emblazons a pro-labor message on recycled computer paper, calling for the boycott of Gallo Wines. Activists on college campuses were especially known for using this unconventional paper for their printmaking. The artist depicts a revolting rat, a symbol of nonunion workers who cross the picket line
76. 1968 Brown Berets Poster from La Raza Newspaper
77. 1966 Dolores Huerta and Senator Robert Kennedy at a press conference
78. 1960s-1970s UFW buttons
79. 1962 United Farm Workers For more than a century farmworkers had been denied a decent life in the fields and communities of California’s agricultural valleys. Essential to the state’s biggest industry, but only so long as they remained exploited and submissive farmworkers had tried but failed so many times to organize the giant agribusiness farms that most observers considered it a hopeless task. And yet by the early 1960’s things were beginning to change beneath the surface. Within another fifteen years more than 50,000 farmworkers were protected by union contracts. The Bracero program, an informal arrangement between the United States and Mexican governments, became Public Law 78 in 1951. Started during World War II as a program to provide Mexican agricultural workers to growers, it continued after the war. Public Law 78 stated that no bracero-a temporary worker imported from Mexico-could replace a domestic worker. In reality this provision was rarely enforced. In fact the growers had wanted the Bracero program to continue after the war precisely in order to replace domestic workers. The small but energetic National Farm Labor Union, led by dynamic organizer Ernesto Galarza, found its efforts to create a lasting California farmworkers union in the 1940’s and 50’s stymied again and again by the growers’ manipulation of braceros. Over time, however, farmworkers, led by Cesar Chavez, were able to call upon allies in other unions, in churches and in community groups affiliated with the growing civil rights movement, to put enough pressure on politicians to end the Bracero Program by 1964
80. 1969 Dolores Huerta marching in Coachella
81. 1969 Cesar Chavez
82. 1962 UFW (United Farm Workers) Formed In 1962, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), a predecessor of the United Farm Workers (UFW), was founded in Delano, California. Cesar Chávez, alongside Dolores Huerta and other Chicano activists within this organization, defended the rights of farmworkers by employing nonviolent organizing tactics rooted in Catholic social teaching, Chicano identity, and civil rights rhetoric. Through a series of marches, national consumer boycotts, and fasts, the United Farm Workers union attracted national headlines, gained labor contracts with higher wages and improved working conditions, galvanizing the Chicano movement. California’s agribusiness depended on a corporatized system of farm production supported by political allies that hired low-wage workers from Asian, Native, and/or Mexican populations. Farmworkers worked in dire conditions, including exposure to deadly chemicals, inadequate food and shelter, and sexual harassment, while receiving meager wages. Those who protested were replaced by Mexican braceros under the Bracero Program. The Bracero Program’s termination in 1964 led to labor union mobilization among farmworkers. The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) was formed in 1966 as a collaboration between the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the National Farm Workers Association. The union built partnerships with religious organizations, student and civil rights activists, and politicians, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. From 1966 to 1970, the UFWOC carried out a successful international consumer boycott on grapes by picketing outside of grocery stores across the U.S. and Canada and spreading awareness about the movement in Europe. Subsequent boycotts and strikes against lettuce and strawberry growers occurred during the following years. Strikes often led to law enforcement intervention, where farmworkers were beaten, jailed, or replaced by non-citizen laborers. Dolores Huerta is credited with negotiating thousands of labor contracts providing farmworkers with improved wages and working conditions. In 1972, the UFWOC renamed itself the United Farm Workers. By then, communities of farmworkers had been established across the U.S. In California, the UFW’s newspaper El Malcriado (“The Unruly One”) informed the community and provided them with job openings, and Luis Valdes’ El Teatro Campesino (“The Farmer’s Theatre”) offered short comedic skits performed by farmworkers. The UFW also established a federal credit union and union centers with medical care, pension, and voter registration services to its union members. Although the UFW is still operating, internal union strife, short-term labor contracts, and lack of federal legislation concerning farmworker rights have affected the progress of the union.
83. 1968 Walkout outside Roosevelt High School
84. 1969 Dolores Huerta with farm workers
Student Education Struggle and Youth Counter Culture Movement Gina Leon
Contents of this tag:
1. 1967 The Black Cat Tavern Protest
2. 1967 Riots on Sunset Strip
3. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Las Adelitas de Aztlán protesting
4. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Group of protestors
5. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Young protester holding a sign
6. 1968 East Los Angeles - Walk Outs
7. Students protest Roosevelt High School (1968)
8. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Protestor with fist raised
9. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Las Adelitas de Aztlán join protest “After leaving the Brown Berets, Arellanes — along with Jensen and her sister, Grace; Andrea and Esther Sánchez; Lorraine Escalante; Yolanda Solis; and Arlene Sánchez — founded Las Adelitas de Aztlán. The name referred to the soldaderas who fought alongside the men during the Mexican Revolution. They invited members of the community to join them and on Feb. 28, 1970, they made their public debut at the second anti-war moratorium in East Los Angeles.” Members of Las Adelitas de Aztlán at the second Chicano Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War on Feb. 28, 1970. At right is Hilda Reyes. They marched in the rain under a banner made by Gloria Arellanes and other members of the group. Las Adelitas dissolved later that year.
10. 1967 Century City Protestor removed by Police In retrospect, the Century Plaza demonstration was one of the earliest battlegrounds. The original idea was to stage a march from Rancho Park, up Pico Boulevard and past the hotel on Avenue of the Stars, then turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard and go home. But as the marchers reached the hotel, a vanguard of radicals ignored the terms of the police permit and sat down in the street. The march halted. Police said they issued a dispersal order several times on a powerful loudspeaker, but many demonstrators said that in all the noise and chants they failed to hear it. Then hundreds of officers moved in, their nightsticks held in front of them, pushing the demonstrators away. Some of the people fought back. Some photographs show police swinging their nightsticks at marchers who were not resisting. A particularly bitter clash took place under the Olympic Boulevard bridge. …June 23, 1967: A protester is removed from Century Plaza during a speech by President Lyndon Johnson.(Frank Q. Brown / Los Angeles Times Archive/UCLA)
11. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Woman and man hold up posters
12. 1967 The Bloody March - America at War with Itself
13. 1960s Brown Beret Newspaper; La Causa
14. 1968 Oakland High School at funeral for Black Panther Bobby Hutton PHOTO BY NIKKI ARAI - Oakland High School students participated in the funeral for Black Panther Bobby Hutton, killed by Oakland Police in 1968. The Black Power movement, led by various groups including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party, emerged in the latter half of the sixties. Coined by Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power movement inspired racial pride and advocated for local community control, self-determination and economic development. At the same time, other social movements challenged the existing social order. At UC Berkeley, students engaged in civil disobedience over a university ban on political activity and initiated the Free Speech movement. The women’s liberation movement emerged in the late ‘60s as organizations formed to confront society’s sexism and to promote women’s equality. Likewise, activists organized the environmental movement to protect the earth, stop pollution, and clean-up toxic environmental hazards in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Each of these movements, as well as their militancy, informed the Asian American movement.
15. 2012 California voters approved a ballot measure that would amend the state’s highly controversial Three Strikes law. https://blackyouthproject.com/ca-voters-approve-ballot-measure-reforming-three-strikes-law/ The revised law would require that the third offense be of a serious or violent nature–not something as minor as writing a bad check or, in a much-cited example, stealing a pair of socks. “Tonight’s vote on Proposition 36 sends a powerful message to policymakers in California and across the country that taxpayers are ready for a new direction in criminal justice,” Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, told the San Jose Mercury News. “States that have already made some changes to their sentencing laws may be inspired to take a second look, and states that haven’t made significant changes yet may start.” In addition to altering the sentencing guidelines for future convicts, Prop 36 also creates a pathway for nearly 3,000 inmates currently serving life sentences under the Three Strikes Law to petition for a reduced term.
16. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Two young protestors hold up a large banner
17. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Protestors hold anti Vietnam War posters
18. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Rosalio Munoz speaks at Laguna Park
19. 1994 Protesting Prop 187
20. 2017 Why communities fighting for fair policing also demand environmental justice
21. 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’S artistic director and founder Judy Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over five summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
22. 1960s Brown Berets members When he 15, Dr. Sanchez started the Young Chicanos for Community Action in Monterey Park, California. He later changed the name to the Brown Berets, because he had actually purchased one, by chance, and wore it often. From then on, the grassroots group met at various locations, including the Boy’s and Girl’s Club and coffee shops, because they didn’t want police to know their whereabouts. Dr. Sanchez, along with Carlos Montes, another organizer with the Brown Berets, began to take up causes such as police brutality, better education, and discrimination against the Latinx community. Their first protest was in 1967, when they picketed the sheriff's office in East L.A. to protest the killing of Latino men.
23. 1960s Brown Beret member Gloria Arellenas and others Undated photo strips show Gloria Arellanes, at left, and at center, with fellow Brown Beret members including, from clockwise: Lorraine Escalante, Hilda Reyes and Arlene Sánchez. (Special Collections & Archives, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, Cal State LA, Gloria Arellanes Papers) Arrellanes became the minister of Finance & Correspondence after being apoitned by David Sánchez, the group’s founder. She was the only woman on the leadership team.
24. 1967 Century City Antiwar Protest (Draft Post)
25. 1960s/1970s GIDRA Staff photo Murase, who completed his undergraduate degree in 1970, said he had few opportunities to learn about Asian Americans in the classroom. In response, he and five other UCLA students established Gidra in 1969, a monthly newspaper that highlighted and commented on Asian American issues while also enabling local artists and writers to share their work. Gidra was initially established at Campbell Hall as an Asian American student publication, Murase said. As Gidra’s influence began to extend beyond UCLA following its early publications, Murase said he and his peers moved their operations to a rented office on Jefferson Boulevard – about five and a half miles from UCLA – and accepted submissions from the larger community, including those who lived outside of Los Angeles or were not of Asian descent. Through the work of its volunteer staff and contributors, Gidra produced a total of 60 issues before its closure in 1974, Murase added. Coming of age in the 1960s, Asian American students at universities developed a new, distinct consciousness as Asian Americans shaped by the racial and international context of the time. By 1968, when the Asian American population numbered about 1.3 million, 80 percent of Japanese Americans and about 50 percent of Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans, respectively, were born in the United States. Asian Americans had come to reach the same educational attainment as whites, but still earned substantially less because of racial discrimination. For example, in 1960 Filipinos earned only 61 percent of the income of whites with comparable educations. Japanese and Chinese also earned less than their white counterparts, making 77 percent and 87 percent, respectively. Among the 107,366 Asian American college students on university campuses in 1970, Chinese and Japanese made up the vast majority, with over eight out of ten Asian American students being of either Japanese or Chinese American descent.
26. 1971 Asian Americans not only called for peace in order to bring troops home, but also protested U.S. intervention and imperialism in Vietnam As a newly-formed group identity, Asian American consciousness was rooted in the communities from which they came. Actively seeking to reclaim their histories and to find their own voices, they sought out narratives from their ancestors and elders. They became engaged with their home neighborhoods, creating local programs to “serve the people” and to rally the masses. They also sought to forge solidarities across ethnicity, race, and national boundaries as they identified with other “Third World” peoples. This term recognized the exploitative relations in the global hierarchy where the least developed nations faced oppressive histories and conditions similar to historically marginalized communities in the U.S. Through the practice of supporting one another’s movements and struggles, Asian American students built a collective identity and common cause to address racial injustices. Additionally, Asian American students were deeply influenced by major international developments of the 1960s. The anti-war movement against U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia reached its apex on campuses in early 1968; the success of North Vietnam’s Tet offensive demonstrated that despite the onslaught of U.S. military might, the war could not be easily won. Asian American war protestors realized their paradoxical position. On one hand, they knew they were Americans, but they were being sent to fight an enemy that not only looked like them, but were in a subordinate position in the world order like they found themselves to be within boundaries of their own country
27. 1969 1st Chicano Moratorium: Outside recruiting center
28. 1968 Los Angeles high school walkout protesters in their car: "Get Cops Out of Schools" This March 1968 photo provided by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, protesters in a car drive by with a sign that reads "Get the Cops Out of the Schools Now!" during a walkout by students at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. Participants of a 1968 Los Angeles high school walkout over dropout rates, paddle beatings for speaking Spanish and other issues . (Devra Weber/La Raza Photograph collection/UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center via AP)
29. Walkout covered in La Raza Newspaper 1968
30. 1971 Student and barrio youth lead protest march in Belvedere Park.
31. 2007 Dream Act The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, known as the DREAM Act, is a United States legislative proposal to grant temporary conditional residency, with the right to work, to undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as minors—and, if they later satisfy further qualifications, they would attain permanent residency. In April 2001, United States Senators Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) first introduced the bill in the Senate as S. 1291, but it did not pass. The proposal has since been reintroduced several times, but has not been approved by majorities in either house of the United States Congress.[1][2]
32. 1968 Gay-In festival at Griffin Park
33. 1992 Chinese Student Protection Act
34. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: After moratorium demonstration Chicano Moratorium Committee anti-war demonstrators gather in East L.A. "The biggest, bloodiest disturbance in Los Angeles since Watts five years earlier lasted several hours. When it was over, Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar was dead and two others mortally wounded, about 200 people were under arrest, 75 law enforcement officers and untold numbers of demonstrators were injured, 95 county vehicles were destroyed or damaged, 44 buildings were pillaged and eight major fires had been set.” “After the Chicano Moratorium, I said no way am I going to put myself in jeopardy ever again,” Jensen says. “Because that’s how scared I was.” Jensen stopped organizing
35. 1966 Youth being searched by police during crackdown on the Sunset Strip
36. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1974 ASCO First Supper After a Major Riot Harry Gamboa Jr.: LA County sheriffs open fired on innocent students and protestors, and wounded and killed many people who were protesting against the war in Vietnam, and were also protesting against police violence, which was followed by a two to three-and-a-half year crackdown on young people gathering on the streets of East Los Angeles. At the time that we shot [First Supper After a Major Riot], we felt that it had been long enough. It was time for it to be extinguished. And so, we declared it to be a celebration. Willie Herrón: At the time of the Moratorium, I was in high school. I remember the procession originating at Belvedere Park, protesting the Vietnam War and all the Chicanos that lost their lives. The police brutality was incredible. It affected me quite a bit and I think it affected all of us. So that's why Whittier Boulevard became such an important street, and a place for us to conduct our performances and connect them to our community and the way society viewed us at the time.
37. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1971 ASCO Stations of the Cross Stations of the Cross was a walking “ritual of resistance” against what the performance group Asco considered the “useless deaths” taking place in Vietnam. The male members of the group (which originally comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez) paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, with Herrón as a Christ/death figure bearing a large cardboard cross. The quasi-Passion Play ended with the trio blocking a U.S. Marines recruiting office with the cross, symbolically halting military recruitment from their Mexican American neighborhood.
38. 1960s/1970s Asian American protest Community and Place Mao told his followers to “serve the people,” and Movement activists took the call to heart. In the context of Los Angeles, they found their calling in historic Japanese, Filipino and Chinese American communities. Often neglected by government agencies and limited by language access and social stigma, these neighborhoods needed jobs, health services, and education access. As these younger, college-educated, radicalized Asian Americans worked in the community, they built intergenerational bridges and emphasized the importance of place. Their battles against eviction and redevelopment took on a double urgency: both protecting historical communities and the new Movement centers that shared spaces with them.
39. 1966 Riots on the Sunset Strip
40. 1971 “Liberation,” January 1971 issue of Gidra Though Gidra included women on its staff and women’s issues in its pages, a series of “rap sessions” led to a special women’s issue in 1971 with the word “Liberation” and a large Venus symbol on the cover. The issue linked international questions to those at home, from war brides and G.I.s to struggles of women within the Asian American Movement. The focus on the global and the local was also present in the popular International Women’s Day celebrations. Beginning in 1974, the festival united many of the different Movement groups in a common recognition of women’s struggles.
41. Chicana Feminists Chicana feminists in Southern California engaged in a range of groups and activities, both on college campuses and in their communities - often both. Regardless of the specifics of their politics or focus, most were initially politicized in the Chicano movement of the late 1960s; and most developed their feminist consciousness as a result of their direct experience with sexism in that movement. The six individual narrators in this series reflect this common background. The four activists in Hijas de Cuauhtemoc (Anna NietoGomez, Corinne Sanchez, Leticia Hernandez and Sylvia Castillo) cut their political eye teeth in the Chicano student group, UMAS/MEChA, at CSULB. In fact, it was their experiences in MEChA that motivated them to form the Hijas group (which published a newspaper by the same name). They were also involved in community groups and continued this activism after they left college, particularly in the Chicana Service Action Center. Yolanda Nava , who was one of the founding members of Comision Femenil Mexicana (CFM) and later served a term as president, was also introduced to the Chicano movement through MEChA. Although more than a decade older than these activists, Consuelo Nieto had similar experiences with sexism. Her introduction to the Chicano movement came while she was teaching in the schools in ELA, where high school students had organized to demand better education. A word about language in this series: While the term Anglo came to be used later, during the heyday of the Chicana feminist movement - and particularly in the debate and conflict with those who excoriated the feminists - White was the term most often used. In their interviews, the women themselves used the term White. It should also be noted that Cuauhtemoc is sometimes spelled "Cuahtemoc." NOTE: The interviews with the founders and former members of Hijas de Cuauhtemoc were conducted by Maylei Blackwell for what became her larger research project. As a courtesy to her, the audio recordings of these interviews will not be available until 2006. Until then, they can be used on-site at CSULB with her permission. See also her essay, "Contested histories: las hijas de Cuauhtâemoc, Chicana feminisms, and print culture in the Chicano movement, 1968-1973" in Gabriela Arredondo et al., Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) and the response by Anna NietoGomez. See also the writings of Anna NietoGomez, and other femenista pioneers in Alma Garcia, ed., Chicana Feminist Thought: Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997.
42. March 1968 Sal Castro with walkout students at Lincoln High School Image courtesy of LA Times Photographic Archive, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Set the Night on Fire: "Castro, a high school teacher long active in liberal and Mexican-American causes, was a key force in organizing student walkouts to protest school conditions in East L.A. The "Blowouts", as they were soon called, were genesis events in the emergence of a new, militant "Chicano" identity.
43. 1960s/1970s GIDRA sisters
44. 1968 Brown Berets Poster from La Raza Newspaper
45. 1971 Anti-War demonstration on Wilshire Blvd Politicized by War For many young Asian Americans in the 1960s, the War in Vietnam was a brutal and urgent politicization. Watching the war unfold on the nightly news, a common sentiment was that America “killing people who looked like us.” Unlike the mainstream anti-war movement, many Asian Americans saw the Vietnam War as genocidal, or at least imperialist. They placed the war within the larger history of anti-Asian racism in America and imperialist expansion into the Third World.
46. 1970 East L.A. picketing to protest conditions at the school
47. 1967 Vietnam War Opposition
48. 1967-68 The Peace and Freedom Party (Eldridge Cleaver)
49. 1968 Walkout outside Roosevelt High School
50. 1960s Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies
51. 1976 - The Great Wall of Los Angeles The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’s artistic director and founder Judith F. Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over six summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
52. 1968 SFSU Mass Strike Called THE CALL FOR ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES ON WEST COAST CAMPUSES, As students became involved with both international and local issues, they began to call for a relevant education that could address these concerns. However, as Irene Dea expressed, they found a system of higher education that largely excluded students of color from admission and whose courses showed little reflection of their histories and experiences
53. 1966 First Pride Parade as part of the First National Homophile Protest to end the ban on gays in the military
54. 1960s Brown Beret belonging to Gloria Arellanes
55. 1960s/1970s Student protesting for Asian Studies classes Students had to keep fighting for Asian American and ethnic studies courses to be offered every year in the early period of the ethnic studies centers.After the TWLF strikes at SF State and UC Berkeley and the creation of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, the struggle to establish Asian American studies continued as students sought to develop the curriculum that was relevant to their communities
56. 1967 First national gay newsmagazine (The Advocate, 1967)
57. 1969 Portrait of Brown Beret member Hilda Jensen Rodriguez took this portrait of a Chicana demonstrator in the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights in 1969 Hilda’s Jenson’s photos has graced the covers of books, films etc, but often the names of her and her fellow women organizers have often gone unrecognized. In 2003 she wrote to filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño who had included her image in his memoir to identify her by name and include her maiden name: Hilda Reyes.
58. 1964 -1965 The Free Speech Movement
59. 1968 Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting. Photo by Los Angeles Public Library. In 1967, Mexican American students throughout the Southwest held a 60% high school dropout rate. If they did graduate, they averaged an 8th-grade reading level. Due to Anglo-centric internal school policies many Chicano students were fielded to vocational training or classes for the mentally disabled. Prejudice from teachers and administrators instigated stereotypes of Mexican Americans that discouraged the students from higher learning. These inequalities in education led to the 1968 East Los Angeles Walkouts, also known as the "Blowouts," which displayed the largest mobilization of Chicano youth leaders in Los Angeles history.
60. 1970 Official Resignation of all women in the Brown Berets LA chapter
61. 1970 - Marching for peace-rally through through the streets of Little Tokyo For many young Asian Americans in the 1960s, the War in Vietnam was a brutal and urgent politicization. Watching the war unfold on the nightly news, a common sentiment was that America “killing people who looked like us.” Unlike the mainstream anti-war movement, many Asian Americans saw the Vietnam War as genocidal, or at least imperialist. They placed the war within the larger history of anti-Asian racism in America and imperialist expansion into the Third World. In 1969, Asians Americans for Peace was founded in Los Angeles. Groups like the Thai Binh and Van Troi Brigades (named after Vietnamese freedom fighters) formed to mobilize youth. Meanwhile, Asian Movement for Military Outreach
62. 1968 Walkouts in Boyle Heights
63. 1967 Police Raid Silverlake's Black Cat "As the Rhythm Queens, a trio of black women, sang a rock version of "Auld Lang Syne," balloons fell from the ceiling and gay men exchanged the traditional midnight kiss. That was when uniformed police, who had been alerted by the undercover officers, rushed in and began to swing billy clubs, tear down leftover Christmas ornaments, break furnishings, and beat men brutally. Sixteen customers and employees were arrested and forced to lie face down on the sidewalk until squad cars came to take them away."- GAY L.A.
64. 1969 1st Chicano Moratorium protester Rosalio Muñoz
65. 1972 JoAnne/Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima perform at the Third World Storefront organization Art and Communication The Movement marked the first time Asian people collectively owned and created their own images in this country. Culture—musical, visual, written, performed—was a way to exorcise and subvert dominant American narratives. Young artists had to cut against the stereotypes and caricatures they had been fed since youth. Art was “for the people”: and there was little differentiation between it and activism, and it infused the new identity of Asian America with anti-imperialist and multiethnic critiques. Los Angeles became home to the first Asian American films ever made. Community-based and politically-charged, they showed Asian struggles, families, and histories in a way Hollywood never imagined. A plethora of newspapers got out the word. From personal essays to reports on U.S. militarism and Asian communities, the concerns and goals of the Movement took shape in those worn and circulated pages.
66. 1968 Walkouts make it into LAUSD Board of Education
67. 1973 three young activists in New York City recorded A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America The Movement marked the first time Asian people collectively owned and created their own images in this country. It was no small feat: young artists had to cut against the stereotypes and caricatures they had been fed since youth. These lines from “We Are the Children” on the seminal album A Grain of Sand capture this tension: Foster children of the Pepsi generation Cowboys and Indians ride, red man, ride! Watching war movies with the next-door neighbor Secretly rooting for the other side Culture—musical, visual, written, performed—was a way to exorcise and subvert dominant American narratives. It infused the new identity of Asian America with anti-imperialist and multiethnic critiques. The verse above both names a dominant paradigm then re-appropriates the image of the heroic cowboy and soldier by actually identifying with the ‘villain’—in this case, the indigenous and Asian combatants.
68. 1967 Century City Antiwar Protest Far more powerfully, the Century Plaza confrontation foreshadowed the explosive growth of the national antiwar movement and its inevitable confrontations with police. It shaped the movement’s rising militancy, particularly among the sizable number of middle-class protesters who expected to do nothing more than chant against Johnson outside the $1,000-a-plate Democratic Party fundraising dinner and were outraged by the LAPD’s hard-line tactics. Johnson rarely campaigned in public again, except for appearances at safe places like military bases. Within nine months, opposition to the war grew so strong that he shelved his reelection campaign. White liberals in Los Angeles, meanwhile, began to complain about excessive force by the LAPD, a subject traditionally raised only by black and Latino residents. By the next summer, when Chicago police beat demonstrators in the street outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the country was at war with itself. In retrospect, the Century Plaza demonstration was one of the earliest battlegrounds. …
69. 1968 Walkouts at Venice High School
70. Free Huey Huey P. Newton, in full Huey Percy Newton, (born February 17, 1942, Monroe, Louisiana, U.S.—died August 22, 1989, Oakland, California), American political activist, cofounder (with Bobby Seale) of the Black Panther Party (originally called Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). An illiterate high-school graduate, Newton taught himself how to read before attending Merritt College in Oakland and the San Francisco School of Law. While at Merritt he met Seale. In Oakland in 1966 they formed the Black Panther group in response to incidents of alleged police brutality and racism and as an illustration of the need for Black self-reliance. At the height of its popularity during the late 1960s, the party had 2,000 members in chapters in several cities. In 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of a police officer. His imprisonment sparked protests—and the popular rallying cry “Free Huey.” His conviction was overturned in 1970, and he was released from prison. In 1971 he announced that the party would adopt a nonviolent manifesto and dedicate itself to providing social services to the Black community, which included free meals for children and health clinics. In 1974 Newton was accused of another murder and fled to Cuba for three years before returning to face charges; two trials resulted in hung juries.
71. 1969 UCLA philosophy department hired Angela Davis
72. 1968 Female student being arrested at Venice High School Walkout LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 12: Image originally published on March 13, 1968--Police struggle to arrest a female student at Venice High School during a clash with 1,000 students. She was accused of using obscene and abusive language. Eight people were arrested. March 1, 1968: Over 15,000 Chicanos, students, faculty, and community members, walk out of seven East L.A. high schools. Those schools included: Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Belmont, Wilson, Venice, and Jefferson High School. Some students from East L.A. junior high schools join the protests, as well