Comparing The East Los Angeles School Walkouts And Chicano Moratorium

The East Los Angeles School walkouts and Chicano Moratorium are forms of Chicana and Chicano resistance that have been examined in varied ways through mediums such as the Los Angeles Times and La Raza. In what is now termed the Chicano Blowouts, the East Los Angeles School walkouts of 1968 were led by more than 10,000 Chicana and Chicano students who demanded equal access to quality education. The Chicano Moratorium, on the other hand, occurred in 1970, and while it was intended to be a peaceful demonstration to protest the Vietnam war, it unexpectedly transformed into a display of police brutality that left several marchers dead. Print media became a historical record that publicized the physical mobility exercised by Mexican-Americans during

With the rise of student resistance, Chicana and Chicano students in East Los Angeles schools were motivated by a desire to create just and equitable learning environments. However, the school resistance of Chicana and Chicano students is often marred by narratives, such as the one in the Los Angeles Times, which suggests that the students’ goal was to incite chaos and violence without acknowledging that the walkouts were a response to unequal access to education and omission of Chicano history and culture in their school curriculum. In the Los Angeles Times article, “Start of a Revolution?: ‘Brown Power’ Unity Seen Behind School Disorders,” the author, Dial Torgerson includes the voices of students at the foreground of the Chicano movement, but fails to include that their acts of resistance were more than a rise of militancy. Torgerson recognizes the walkouts as acts of “Mass Militancy” and “Scenes of Disorder” sparked by student rebellion, and by doing so he is ignoring the role police played in executing violence against students. More importantly, Torgerson marginalizes the experiences of Mexican-American students when he questions the validity of students’ complaint about facing discrimination at the academic level (“Is there any significance to students’ complaints that Mexican-Americans are being pushed into shop courses, and

Although the author does include the voices of Brown Berets, they are not included for the purpose of advancing representation of student resistance, but to highlight one form of mass militancy that emerged as a result of “Brown Power” unity. Torgerson states that they are the “[...] most militant of East Los Angeles Mexican-American groups. They have been accused of inciting high school students to riot, using narcotics, being Communists.”. This image places the Brown Berets in a condemnable position by drawing attention to their hostility rather than accurately illustrating what the militant group was actually about—combating discrimination and protecting the Mexican-American community from police