How The East Los Angeles School Walkouts And Chicano Moratorium

The East Los Angeles School walkouts and Chicano Moratorium are two historical examples that emphasize forms of Chicana and Chicano resistance that have been examined in varied ways, particularly through print media such as the Los Angeles Times and La Raza. In 1968 more than 10,000 Chicana and Chicano students walked out of schools in East Los Angeles to protest inferior educational conditions and demand equal access to quality education. Then, in 1970, the Chicano Moratorium, which intended to be a peaceful demonstration to call for social justice and protest the Vietnam war, transformed into a display of police repression and brutality that left several marchers dead. Descriptive material, such as print media, served as instrumental extensions

As observed from the article, “Start of a Revolution?: ‘Brown Power’ Unity Seen Behind School Disorders,” by the Los Angeles Times, they implicitly put forward the idea that the Chicano Blowouts intended to spark chaos and do not intend to inform readers why students were forcefully agitating for change. It is striking that the catalysts for the walkouts, which included high dropout rates, crumbling schools, lack of Mexican-American teachers are avoided throughout the article and instead focuses on the violence caused by student demonstrators. Unequal access education was not exclusive to Mexican-Americans and it is not the first time a community of color has resisted against oppressive conditions. For example, in a newspaper article published by Ebony, James Turner states that “The high school and college curriculum as a whole are irrelevant to the needs of non-white students. It is against this reality that black students are rebelling.”. With this in mind, it is evident that student resistance in communities of color is prevalent but also a battle that continually fought hard to be heard despite the powers that stood against

As observed in the Los Angeles Times, people engaging in thoughtful direct action in order to call out systems of injustice and oppression, are criminalized. The media makes language choices that result in a double standard for people of color, who are spoken of in worse ways than the police, who are oftentimes the perpetrators of violence. Print media played a salient role in capturing the Chicano movement and while the Los Angeles Times reached a general audience with no particular target, La Raza established a voice for the Chicano community and availed of dissent by advancing the struggle for social justice and rejecting discourse that enables negative stereotypes and narratives about marginalized