Women’s Leadership in the High School Blowouts of 1968

Education inequality has always been a common subject in the Latino community but the first time this issue was actually heard of across the country was during the 1968 East L.A. School Blowouts. These protests began in five East L.A. High Schools including Belmont, Garfield, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson where the student dropout rates were about fifty percent.  The participants and supporters of the blowouts wanted to implement a bilingual and bicultural training for teachers, the elimination of tracking based on standardized tests and overall better access to a quality education. These high school walkouts were the beginning of a wave that brought about the student-ran organizations that create the main focus of the Chicano movement. Today there are plenty of articles and news stories that can be found on the Blowouts including how much has changed since then (http://articles.latimes.com/1988-03-07/local/me-488_1_lincoln-high-school-graduate). Yet, the role of women participation during these walkouts continues to be unrecognized. As Dolores Delgado Bernal mentions in “http://www.jstor.org/pss/3347162,” “their participation was vital to the Blowouts, yet because of a traditional leadership paradigm does not acknowledge the importance of those who participate in organizing, developing consciousness, and networking, their leadership remains unrecognized and unappreciated by most historians” (262).

A protest always takes a lot of planning; however this is the “behind the scenes” stage of an event that is never quite noticed. Before coming to the conclusion of a Boycott, numerous women including Tanya Luna Mount, Vicky Castro, Paula Crisostomo and Rachel Ochoa Cervera, attended and actively participated in meetings that were necessary to develop strategies from which to gather enough information of what really went on at these schools. The attendees for these meetings were primarily women and some even took place at the home of Tanya Luna Mount’s parents.

Another important stage of a protest is developing the consciousness of individuals, in which women took a great lead. “Developing the consciousness of individuals is crucial to generating and maintaining the momentum needed for any social movement,” and Delgado Bernal knows that this was possible thanks to the commitment of women. In her article, Delgado Bernal shares the stories of several women who participated in raising consciousness through informal conversations with their peers, family and other community members. They raised consciousness in any way they could regardless of the number of people that may not have believed them. It was in this step of the process that women also used print media to raise consciousness. Tanya Luna Mount and Mita Cuaron used their families’ mimeograph machines to duplicate their informational flyers that they would distribute throughout the community. Others were somehow connected to community activists newspapers like Inside Eastside and La Raza. Those that were directly involved with the publishings of these newspapers tried writing articles on the issues they saw in the education inequities and those that did not work directly in publishing all read and encouraged others to read these newspapers. Since Tanya Luna Mount and Paula Crisostomo were both still high school students at the time, they wrote articles that specifically addressed the educational conditions they had themselves witnessed in the East L.A. schools. Developing consciousness is often not seen as big of a task normally associated with the traditional characteristics of leadership, yet it is this type of “behind the scenes” work that sets up the stage for a movement to actually come about. It takes a leader to gather a community and to get a community together for a specific cause takes the time and effort to spread consciousness, this was one of the most important roles in women leadership during the walkouts, and although it may not be recognized as such, it was the fondation for the development of the movement itself.

Sources:

Delgado Bernal, Dolores. “Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Vol. 19, No. 2, Varieties of Women’s Oral History (1998), pp. 113-142

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