Nuestras Historias (Issue 1, Vol 1)

the blowouts was the active participation in
meetings that helped to develop or support the
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demonstrations.” Here is where the students
made their lists of demands, including demands
such as smaller classrooms and more Mexican
American administration, which became their
main form of justification for their actions, and
what they presented to the School Board
multiple times. The blowouts lasted for over a
week, with heavy disapproval and punishment
from administrators. Students were threatened
with removal of scholarships, and academic
discipline. However, most harshly, the walkouts
eventually led to some form of violence as the
police were quickly sent, and they treated the
students like if they were rioting, which they
weren’t. Eventually, the students were promised
a review of their demands in the next School
Board Meeting, and while that did happen, no
change occurred. On top of that, weeks later, 13
were arrested in conspiring to initiate the
walkouts and they each faced up to 66 years in
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prison.
The aftermath of the walkouts was not
what many had envisioned. Many of the
demands the students believed in and fought for
were ignored by the school board, and
additionally, people from their community were
arrested and feared prosecution because of the
walkouts. However, their resistance still
continued, and a state appeals court exonerated
them, throwing out all the charges as they were
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protected under the first amendment. Both the
walkouts and the legal consequences helped
legally established Mexican Americans as
“non-white” aiding in their future fight for
greater, more equal and rightful opportunities
they were being denied.
While the students did not have many of
their demands met by the school board, they still
had bigger victories. There was a change to the
spirits of Mexican American students as they
were able to redefine themselves and realize the
power they held against racial injustice. In the
months and years following the blowouts, the
number of Chicano students attending college in
California tripled, quadrupled, and even
quintupled the number of Chicanos attending
before. Walkouts like this, and even the Chicano
movement, gave marginalized groups of people
the ability to fight for social injustice and others
their rights. It is what inspired many other
Mexican Americans to become educated, to be
able to pursue a career as school administrators
or even as politicians. These blowouts also
inspired other protests and the formation of
groups such as MeCHa, which is still active till
this day. The youth developed an identity for
themselves that would follow them into
empowering future generations of successful
Mexican Americans. ◻
59 Bernal, Dolores Delgado. “Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized:
Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts.”
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies ​19, no. 2 (June 1998): 113–42.
doi:10.2307/3347162.
60 López, Ian F. Haney. “The Chicano Movement and East L.A. Thirteen.”
Racism on Trial the Chicano Fight for Justice (2003): 157-177.
61 López, Ian F. Haney. “The Chicano Movement and East L.A. Thirteen.”
Racism on Trial the Chicano Fight for Justice (2003): 157-177.
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