Published: April 02, 2006 12:25 pm      

VIDEO: L.A. student walkouts, then and now

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By PAUL CHAVEZ

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The recent images of Hispanic students marching, chanting and waving Mexican flags to protest a pending immigration bill may have seemed familiar to some in Los Angeles -- if they were around for the 1968 Chicano student walkouts, a little-known chapter of the U.S. civil rights movement.

That’s why the recent release of the HBO movie “Walkout” seems so timely.

The movie recounts those walkouts by Mexican-American students fed up with inequality in the Los Angeles school system, where graduation rates were dismal, students were banned from speaking Spanish at school and textbooks omitted the contributions of Hispanics to U.S. culture and history.

The film, directed by Hispanic activist and actor Edward James Olmos, was released March 18 and continues to be shown on HBO. It was screened recently for about 120 Hispanic high school students at the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference, the same conference that helped inspire students in the ’60s to organize the walkouts.

Jose Ruiz, 17, a student body co-president at overcrowded Belmont High School near downtown Los Angeles, said watching the movie gave him courage.

“It makes me know for a fact that students have a lot of power and we shouldn’t be afraid to open our mouths,” said Ruiz, who has been accepted at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Conditions at Ruiz’s high school aren’t much better than they were nearly 40 years ago, he said. For one thing, the school has only one college counselor for a student body of 5,400 -- though Ruiz said two more are being hired in response to students’ demands.

“At Belmont, out of 2,000 incoming freshman in this year’s class of 2006, only 632 are going to graduate, so that tells you we are losing more than half of the incoming freshmen we get,” Ruiz said. “It’s either the system that is not working, or the fact that we don’t get enough attention.”

A new study released last week by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center confirmed that a wide educational achievement gap for Mexican-American students still exists.

The nationwide study, based primarily on 2000 Census data, found that out of 100 Chicano students who start elementary school, only 46 graduate from high school. Only eight of those students graduate from college and just two of them earn a professional or graduate degree.

In contrast, of every 100 white elementary school students, 84 graduate high school, 26 earn an undergraduate degree and 10 earn a professional or graduate degree.

“The same conditions that existed in the 1960s leading up to the walkouts in some cases are even worse today,” said Daniel Solorzano, co-author of the report and associate director of the research center at UCLA.

Sal Castro, 72, has been sounding the same alarm since he was a teacher in Los Angeles schools in the early ’60s.

Castro helped form the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference, which pulls Hispanic students from Los Angeles-area high schools for a weekend camp in Malibu where volunteers, including college students, hammer home a message: Take pride in your heritage, stay in school, go to college and get a graduate degree.

The conference’s graduates include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has been waging a vocal campaign to give the city direct control over the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Castro, who is portrayed in the film by actor Michael Pena, said the 1968 student walkouts -- known as “blowouts” at the time -- took place during a tumultuous era when the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement led to massive protests. High school students felt it was their turn to have their voices heard.

Castro was arrested as part of the “East L.A. 13” on a felony charge of conspiring to commit a misdemeanor -- disturbing the peace -- but the charge was later dropped. One of the highlights of the HBO film shows a massive rally of students demonstrating for the release of Castro and the others who were arrested.

The scenes looked eerily familiar for those following the recent student walkouts over the federal immigration bill. About 36,000 students marched out of Los Angeles-area schools Monday -- California’s Cesar Chavez Day -- as Congress debated proposals to crack down on the nation’s illegal immigrants. Some 11,600 students cut classes Tuesday in Los Angeles County, while thousands of other students demonstrated in other parts of California and the West.

Castro said he does not support the current student walkouts, noting that the 1968 walkouts took place only after the ad-hoc Mexican-American Educational Committee’s demand for reform was ignored by the school board.

He believes the students, who temporarily closed a downtown freeway Monday, may be unnecessarily exposing themselves to danger.

“You can’t use kids for this, it’s an adult issue and it should be adults out there,” Castro said. “The children belong in schools trying to get an education. Things are bad enough in the schools.”

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Paul Chavez is an asap reporter based in Los Angeles.

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