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Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles
School Blowouts
Author(s): Dolores Delgado Bernal
Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, Varieties of Women’s Oral
History (1998), pp. 113-142
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3347162

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Dolores Delgado Bernal

Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized:
Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968
East Los Angeles School Blowouts

The 1960s was an era of social unrest in American history. Student movements
that helped shape larger struggles for social and political equality emerged from
street politics and mass protests. A myriad of literature discusses the social and

political forces of the 1960s, particularly the liberal and radical student move-
ments. Yet, as Carlos Mufioz, Jr., argues, there is a paucity of material on 1960s
nonwhite student radicalism and protest.’ He outlines various explanations that
have been provided by white scholars for their failure to incorporate nonwhite
student radicalism into their work: that the black student movement was not
radical enough and that Mexican students were simply not involved in the struggles
of the sixties. However, though Mufioz points to the omission of working-class
people of color in the literature on 1960s student movements, he neglects to
include a serious analysis of gender in his own examination of the Chicano Move-
ment and the politics of identity.

In 1968 people witnessed student demonstrations in countries such as France,

Italy, Mexico, and the United States. In March of that year well over ten thou-
sand students walked out of the mostly Chicano schools in East Los Angeles to

protest the inferior quality of their education. This event, which came to be
known as the East Los Angeles School Blowouts, has been viewed through a

variety of analytical historical perspectives including those of protest politics,
internal colonialism, spontaneous mass demonstrations, the Chicano student
movement, and as a political and social development of the wider Chicano Move-
ment. None of these historical accounts, however, include a gender analysis.2
Indeed, even contemporary depictions, such as the important documentary se-
ries Chicano: A History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, continue
to marginalize women’s activism; part three of the series, “Taking Back the Schools,”

Copyright ? 1998 by Frontiers Editorial Collective

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Delores Delgado Bernal

fails to tell the stories of young Chicanas and the roles they filled in the East Los

Angeles Blowouts.3
As an educational researcher and a Chicana, I am interested in the women’s

voices that have been omitted from the diverse historical accounts of the Blow-

outs-particularly those women who were key participants.4 The Blowouts pro-
vide an opportunity to rediscover a history that has been unrecognized and un-

appreciated. In addition, a historical analysis that focuses on the Blowout participation
of women allows us to explore how women offered leadership and how that

leadership, while different in form and substance from traditional interpreta-
tions, was indeed meaningful and essential.5

Hence, my purpose is twofold. Through the oral history data of eight women,
I provide an alternative perspective to the historical narratives of the 1968 Blow-
outs that have thus far only been told by males with a focus on males. At the same
time, I will use the oral history data to examine the concept of leadership in

community activism. I propose that a paradigmatic shift in the way we view

grassroots leadership not only provides an alternative history to the Blowouts,
but it also acknowledges Chicanas as important leaders in past and present grassroots
movements.

Methodology
The relationship between a researcher’s methodology and his or her theoretical
and epistemological orientation is not always explicit, but these elements are

inevitably closely connected. To reclaim a history of Chicana activism and lead-

ership, I utilize a theoretical and epistemological perspective grounded in critical
feminisms that are strongly influenced by women of color. Critical feminist theories

challenge the dominant notion of knowledge and provide legitimacy as well as a

logical rationale for the study of working-class women of color. Chandra Talpade
Mohanty points to the importance of traditionally excluded groups, such as
Chicanas, breaking through dominant ways of thinking and reclaiming history.
She discusses the development of alternative histories:

This issue of subjectivity represents a realization of the fact that who we are,
how we act, what we think, and what stories we tell become more intelligible
within an epistemological framework that begins by recognizing existing he-

gemonic histories. … [Thus,] uncovering and reclaiming of subjugated
knowledges is one way to lay claim to alternative histories.6

The struggle to reclaim history is a contention over power, meaning, and

knowledge. Critical feminisms provide a space within the academy for histori-
cally silenced peoples to identify unequal power relations and to take the first

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Delores Delgado Bernal

steps in constructing alternative histories. In short, my epistemological orienta-
tion, which is grounded in critical feminisms, allows for the identification of

unequal power relations, the development of alternative histories, and the valida-
tion of a methodology based on the lived experiences of Chicanas.

Kenneth Kann writes that there are three types of history: “the kind you
live, the kind you hear about, and the kind you read about.”‘7 The second, when
documented as oral history, transforms the first into the third: Lived history
becomes written history. In my own attempt to transform lived experiences into
written history, my primary method of data collection is the oral history inter-
views of eight women who as high school or college students participated in the
1968 Blowouts. Oral histories provide a special opportunity to learn the unique
perceptions and interpretations of individuals, particularly those from groups
whose history has been traditionally excluded or distorted. Oral sources are thus
a necessity when studying working-class women of color, though they may be
less important when studying topics involving white men of the dominant class
who have typically had control over written history and collective memory.8 Oral
histories, grounded in critical feminisms, provide a means of breaking through
dominant ways of knowing and reclaiming an alternative history of grassroots
activism in the 1968 Blowouts.

The interviews I conducted took place between June 1995 and January 1996
in a place that was most convenient for each woman, usually in her home. Fol-

lowing a network sampling procedure, I interviewed eight women who were
identified by other female participants or resource individuals as key participants
or leaders in the Blowouts.9 I followed an interview protocol with open-ended
questions in order to elicit multiple levels of data. Though the interview protocol
was used as a guide, I realized that as the women spoke of very personal experi-
ences, a less structured approach allowed their voices and ways of knowing to
come forth. Although I took interview notes, each interview was also recorded
and transcribed, and the full transcription of each interview tape has helped me
create a more complete database.

In addition to conducting an oral history interview with each participant, I
also conducted a focus group interview that included seven of the eight women

together for one interview. The videotaped interview took place at Self-Help
Graphics, a community art gallery and studio in East Los Angeles, during Febru-

ary 1996. Focus group interviews incorporate the explicit use of group interac-
tion to produce data and insights that would be less accessible without the inter-
action.10 Therefore, my interest in conducting a focus group interview was less
on reconstructing the “Truth” of what happened than it was on recording the

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Delores Delgado Bernal

new information, differing viewpoints, and recurring issues that the group com-
munication generated.

To work within critical feminist scholarship, I provided each woman with a

transcription of her individual interview so that she had a chance to reflect and
comment on her responses to questions. The women were given these transcrip-
tions prior to the focus group interview, allowing them the opportunity to reflect
and bring up concerns at the group interview. During the group interview, I also
shared my preliminary analysis with the women and asked for their reaction and

input to four themes I had identified from their oral history interviews. Their
comments have helped me to better understand the roles they played in the Blowouts
and the ways in which we might look at grassroots leadership differently.

The Women
All eight of the women are similar insofar as they are second- or third-generation
Chicanas, first-generation college students, and grew up in working-class neigh-
borhoods on the eastside of Los Angeles. However, these women are not a homo-

geneous group, nor does their composite lend itself to a “typical Chicana” leader
or activist. Two of the women grew up in single-parent households with only two
children, while the other six come from two-parent families with four or more
children. Four of the women come from families that had been involved in union

organizing or leftist political movements since the 1940s. Three women state
that they come from strong Catholic families, while three other women state

they were raised in families in which their parent(s) had abandoned the Catholic
Church. Though six of the eight women are bilingual in Spanish and English
today, only one of the women grew up in a predominantly Spanish-speaking
home. Three of the women come from mixed marriages and are half white, Jew-
ish, or Filipina. Finally, during high school, six of the women maintained an

exceptional academic and extracurricular record as college-tracked students.

Despite the similarities, the notable differences in the women’s family and

personal histories reflect the complexity and diversity of Chicanas’ experiences in
1968 and today (see table 1). Indeed, there are also similarities and differences in
the type of participation and leadership each woman contributed to the East
L.A. Blowouts. While this article is an interpretation based on the personal per-
ceptions and experiences of these women, knowing the historical circumstances
of the time provides a clearer picture of the 1968 East L.A. School Blowouts.

The 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts
Chicanos’ struggle for quality education and the right to include their culture,
history, and language in the curriculum is not a phenomenon of the 1960s but

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Delores Delgado Bernal

Table 1: Family and Personal History

Family Named
History of Named Influential

Strong Community Mother As Others
Two-Parent Catholic or Labor Influential Besides

Name Home Family Involvement Other Parent
Celeste Baca x x x
Vickie Castro x x x x
Paula Crisostomo x x x x
Mita Cuaron x x x*
Tanya Luna Mount x x x*
Rosalinda M. Gonzblez x x x x
Rachael Ochoa Cervera x x x
Cassandra Zacarias x x

*Indicates that a focus was placed on both her mother and father.

instead predates the 1968 Blowouts by a number of decades. In fact, many of the
concerns and issues that were voiced by participants and supporters of the 1968

Blowouts-implementation of bilingual and bicultural training for teachers, elimi-
nation of tracking based on standardized tests, improvement and replacement of
inferior school facilities, removal of racist teachers and administrators, and inclu-
sion of Mexican history and culture into the curriculum-were very similar to
those voiced in Mexican communities in the United States since before the turn
of the century.1″

For years, East Los Angeles community members made unsuccessful at-

tempts to create change and improve the education system through the “proper”
channels. In the 1950s the Education Committee of the Council of Mexican-
American Affairs, comprised of educated Mexican professionals, addressed the
failure of schools to educate Mexican students through mainstream channels.

They met with legislators, school officials, and community members and at-
tended hearings, press conferences, and symposia to no avail.12 In June 1967
Irene Tovar, Commissioner of Compensatory Education for the Los Angeles dis-

trict, explained to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that a long list of recom-
mendations to improve the inferior schooling conditions was presented to the
Los Angeles Board of Education in 1963 but that “few of those recommenda-
tions were accepted and even fewer reached the community.”13 In the years im-

mediately preceding the Blowouts, students and parents participating in one East
L.A. high school’s PTA specifically addressed the poor quality of education and

requested reforms similar to those demanded by the Blowouts two years later.14
Nonetheless, formal requests through official channels went unanswered.

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Delores Delgado Bernal

In 1963, the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations began
sponsoring an annual Mexican-American Youth Leadership Conference at Camp
Hess Kramer for high school students. These conferences were important to the

development of the 1968 Blowouts because a number of students who partici-
pated in the conference later became organizers in the Blowouts as well as in
other progressive movements. Given these outcomes, it is ironic that the camp
held an assimilationist perspective, stating that the official goal of the camp was
to improve self-image and intergroup relations so that Mexican American stu-
dents “may be free to develop themselves into the mainstream of Anglo-Ameri-
can life.”” Students were encouraged to be traditional school leaders, run for
school offices, and go on to college. The student participants were selected by
either a school, a community person, or an organization based on their ability to
contribute to the group as well as on their ability to return and create progress in
their own communities.

The weekend camps were held at Camp Hess Kramer in Malibu, Califor-
nia. The student participants were assigned to cabins, and college students served
as camp counselors and workshop leaders. Four of the women in my study par-
ticipated in at least one of the leadership conferences prior to their involvement
in the 1968 Blowouts. They remember the camp as a beautiful place where they
were given a better framework to understand inequities and where they devel-

oped a sense of community and family responsibility. As one woman put it,
“These youth conferences were the first time that we began to develop a con-
sciousness.” Rachael Ochoa Cervera discusses her memories of the camp:

First of all, it was a nice experience because you’d get away for a whole week-
end and the environment, the atmosphere was quite beautiful, very aesthetic.
Being by the ocean, yet you felt you were in the mountains …. It was very
affirmative. That’s where you began to have an identity. You weren’t with your
schoolmates, you could be more open. You could say what you wanted to.16

While the camp fostered civic responsibility and school leadership, many stu-
dents left motivated to organize around more radical and progressive issues.
Rosalinda Mendez Gonzailez describes how the conferences motivated students
to organize:

Well, when we started going to these youth conferences, there were older
Mexican Americans. Now we were high school kids, so older was probably
twenties and early thirties. They would talk to us, and explain a lot of things
about what was happening, and I remember they were opening up our eyes.
After those youth conferences, then we went back and started organizing to
raise support for the farmworkers, and things like that.17

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Delores Delgado Bernal

As a direct result of youth participating at Camp Hess Kramer, the Young
Citizens for Community Action (YCCA) was formed. The YCCA (which later
became Young Chicanos for Community Action and then evolved into the Brown

Berets) surveyed high school students’ needs, met with education officials to dis-
cuss problems, and endorsed potential candidates for the board of education.
YCCA members, still following official channels to bring about improved educa-
tional conditions, supported and helped elect the first Chicano school board
member, Julian Nava.18

Also influential in the development of the Blowouts was the fact that by
1967 a relatively larger number of Chicano students began entering college-
though still a small representation of the Chicano population. In that year, one
of the first Chicano college student organizations in the Los Angeles area, the
Mexican American Student Association (MASA), was formed at East Los Angeles
Community College. 9 Student organizations rapidly formed throughout college
campuses in California, including United Mexican-American Students (UMAS)
at the University of California, Los Angles; California State University, Los An-

geles; Occidental College; and Loyola University. The primary issue of these or-

ganizations was the lack of Chicano access to quality education.
Historians have also noted the importance of the community activist news-

papers Inside Eastside and La Raza to the rise of the Blowouts.20 Inside Eastside
had an emphasis on social, cultural, and political activities relevant to students
and for the most part was written and edited by high school students. In fact, two
women in this study wrote articles for Inside Eastside and La Raza. La Raza,
aimed at the Chicano community as a whole, was concerned with a spectrum of

political activities focusing on the schools, police, and electoral politics. The news-

papers provided a forum in which students and community members were able
to articulate their discontent with the schools, and frequent themes were the

poor quality of East Los Angeles schools and the cultural insensitivity of teachers.
The newspapers, the increased number of Chicano college students, and events
such as the Camp Hess Kramer conferences were all influential in bringing atten-
tion to the poor educational conditions of East Los Angeles schools.

During the 1960s, East Los Angeles high schools had an especially deplor-
able record of educating Chicano students, who had a dropout/pushout rate of
well over 50 percent as well as the lowest reading scores in the district. In con-
trast, according to a survey undertaken by the Los Angeles City School System,
two westside schools, Palisades and Monroe, had dropout rates of 3.1 percent
and 2.6 percent respectively in 1965-1966.21 According to the State Department
of Education’s racial survey, Mexican American students were also heavily repre-
sented in special education classes, including classes for the mentally retarded

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Delores Delgado Bernal

and the emotionally disturbed.22 The classrooms were overcrowded, and most
teachers lacked sensitivity to or understanding of the Mexican working-class com-
munities in which they taught. Rosalinda Mendez Gonzgilez recalls:

There were teachers who would say, “You dirty Mexicans, why don’t you go
back to where you came from?” So there was a lot of racism we encountered in
the school. We had severely overcrowded classrooms. We didn’t have suffi-
cient books. We had buildings that were barrack-type buildings that had been
built as emergency, temporary buildings during World War II, and this was in
the late 1960s, and we were still going to school in those buildings.23

As a result of the poor educational conditions and the fact that numerous

attempts to voice community concerns and school reforms were ignored, school
strikes took place during the first week of March 1968. Though the Blowouts
were centered at five predominately Chicano high schools located in the general
eastside of Los Angeles, other schools in the district also participated, including
Jefferson High School, which was predominately African American.24

The school boycott began on different days during the first week of March
and lasted a week and a half, with over ten thousand students protesting the
inferior quality of their education. Though there had been weeks of discussions
and planning, the first impromptu walkout was prompted by the cancellation of
the school play Barefoot in the Park by the administration at Wilson High School.
Paula Crisostomo, a student organizer at Lincoln High School, comments on the

atmosphere at her school preceding the walkout:

I know tension had heightened, activity had heightened districtwide, a lot of
schools were talking about it, everyone knew it was going to happen, everyone
was waiting for the sign. But I remember the atmosphere was absolutely tense,
I mean it was just electric in school. This had been building for so long, and
everyone knew it was going to happen and everyone was just waiting and
waiting.25

Though there was coordination between the schools, the planning and actual

implementation of each school walkout took on a distinct character. High school
students, college students, Brown Beret members, teachers, and the general com-

munity took on different roles and provided different kinds of support.
Vickie Castro, a Roosevelt graduate, was a college student who played a

crucial role in organizing and supporting the Blowouts. Vickie recalls that while
she was at Roosevelt trying to help organize students, she was recognized by a
teacher and escorted to the gate. The teacher told her, “If I see you on campus
again, I’ll have you arrested.” Vickie later used her old Mazda to pull down the

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Delores Delgado Bernal

chain-link fence that had been locked to prevent high school students from leav-
ing: “I remember having to back my car and put chains on and pull the gates
off.” In contrast, her key role at Lincoln was to set up a meeting with the princi-
pal and detain him while other college students came on campus to encourage
high school students to participate in the walkouts. Vickie recalls the strategy she
used at Lincoln, pretending to be a job applicant to get an appointment with the

principal:

I remember we had a whole strategy planned for Lincoln, how we were going
to do it. And who was going to be in the halls to yell “walkouts” at the various

buildings. And my role was to make an appointment with the principal to
meet him, to talk to him about either employment or something. I’m in his
office and my job is trying to delay him. He kept saying, “I’ll be right with
you, I’ll be right with you.” So I was to just keep him distracted a little bit.
Then when the walkouts came, of course, he said, “I have to leave.” And then
somehow, I don’t even recall, I got out of the building too.26

Just as the planning and actual implementation of each school walkout took
on a distinct character, so did the response by each school administration and by
the police. While the student walkouts on other campuses could be characterized
as ranging from peaceful to controlled with mild incidents of violence, the stu-
dents on Roosevelt’s campus experienced a great deal of police violence. Police,
county sheriffs, and riot squads were called. With a number of students and
community members injured and arrested, the student protest turned into a near
riot situation. Tanya Luna Mount, a student organizer, points out that even though
the students were following the legal requirements of a public demonstration,
the situation with the police escalated to the point of senseless beatings with
school administrators trying to stop the police:

They [the LAPD] were treating it like we were rioting and tearing everything
up, which we weren’t. We weren’t breaking, destroying anything. Nobody was

hanging on school property and tearing it apart. Nothing, nothing like that

happened. And we were told to disperse, we had three minutes. Everybody
kept yelling that we had a right to be there. . . . All of a sudden they [the riot

squad] started coming down this way. They start whacking people. Now they’re
beating people up, badly, badly beating people up. Now people, administra-
tors are inside yelling, “Stop, my God. What are you doing?” Once you call
LAPD, the school no longer has any jurisdiction. They couldn’t even open the

gate and tell the kids to run inside because the police were telling them, “Re-
move yourself from the fence and go back, mind your own business.” That’s
when all of a sudden they [the administrators] realized, “My God.'”27

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Delores Delgado Bernal

The student strikers, including those at Roosevelt who were subjected to

police violence, were not just idly walking out of school. They proposed that
their schools be brought up to the same standards as those of other Los Angeles
high schools. The students generated a list of grievances and pushed for the board
of education to hold a special meeting in which they could present their griev-
ances. The official list of student grievances to be presented to the board of edu-
cation consisted of thirty-six demands, including smaller class size, bilingual edu-
cation, more emphasis on Chicano history, and community control of schools.28
Many of the grievances were educational reforms previously proposed by con-
cerned parents, educators, and community members, and all of the demands
were supported by the premise that East Los Angeles schools were not properly
educating Chicano students.

The Blowouts generated the formation of the Educational Issues Coordi-

nating Committee (EICC) by parents, various community members, high school
students, and UMAS members. With pressure from the EICC and the student
strikers, the Blowouts also generated at least two special board of education meetings
in which students, the EICC, and supporters were allowed to voice their con-
cerns. By Friday, March 9, the school strikes had not ended, and the board of
education scheduled a special meeting to hear the students’ proposals. At this

meeting it was decided that another meeting would be held at Lincoln High
School and that the board would grant amnesty to the thousands of students
who had boycotted classes.29

Approximately twelve hundred people attended a four-hour board meeting
that was held at Lincoln High School, yet the board of education made no com-
mitments. Students walked out of the meeting in response to the board’s inac-
tion. The sentiments of the board were captured by an article in the Los Angeles
Times stating that “school officials deny any prejudice in allocation of building
funds and say that they agree with 99% of the students’ demands-but that the
district does not have the money to finance the kind of massive changes pro-
posed.”30 At this meeting, the board went on record opposing the discipline of
students and teachers who had participated in the boycott. Yet in the late evening
of June 2, 1968, thirteen individuals involved in the Blowouts were arrested and

imprisoned on conspiracy charges. Though female students were involved in or-

ganizing the Blowouts, the “L.A. 13” were all men, including Sal Castro, a teacher
from Lincoln High School. With a focus on males, especially those who looked
the militant type, females avoided arrest. Though the charges were later dropped
and found unconstitutional, Sal Castro was suspended from his teaching posi-
tion at Lincoln High School. For many months students, community, and EICC

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Delores Delgado Bernal

members rallied in support of the L.A. 13 and then focused organizing efforts on
the reinstatement of Sal Castro.

A Reconceptualization of Leadership
In exploring how and when women participated in the Blowouts, it is important
to outline a reconceptualization of leadership that places women at the center of
analysis and does not separate the task of organizing from leading. The
reconceptualization I put forth comes out of a women’s studies tradition that in
the last twenty years has produced an impressive body of new knowledge and has
contributed to the development of new paradigms on leadership. Rather than
using traditional paradigms that view leaders as those who occupy a high posi-
tion in an organization, feminist scholars have developed alternative paradigms
that more accurately consider gender in the analysis of leadership.31

In the area of science, Thomas Kuhn’s influential work The Structure ofSci-
entific Revolutions presents a model for a fundamental change in theories and
scientific paradigms, arguing that without major paradigm shifts we may never
understand certain scientific phenomena. He gives the example of how Joseph
Priestley, one of the scientists said to have discovered the gas that was later found
to be oxygen, was unable to see what other scientists were able to see as a result of
a paradigm revision.32 Similarly, a paradigm shift in the way that we understand
and study leadership allows us to see how women-specifically the women in my
study- emerge as leaders. Perhaps there is something faulty in the previous lead-
ership paradigms that have not allowed us to understand and explain the lived
experiences of Chicanas.

Karen Brodkin Sacks indicates that the traditional paradigm of leadership
implicitly equates public speakers and negotiators with leaders and also identifies
organizing and leading as two different tasks.33 She challenges this notion of
leadership by placing working-class women at the center of analysis. Leadership
in this perspective is a collective process that includes the mutually important
and reinforcing dynamic between both women’s and men’s roles. Leadership as a
process allows us to acknowledge and study a cooperative leadership in “which
members of a group are empowered to work together synergistically toward a
common goal or vision that will create change, transform institutions, and thus
improve the quality of life.”34 This paradigm of cooperative leadership along with
the inclusion of women’s voices allows an alternative view of the Blowouts and of
different dimensions of grassroots leadership to emerge.

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Delores Delgado Bernal

Dimensions of Grassroots Leadership
In previous work, I have identified five different types of activities that can be
considered dimensions of grassroots leadership in the 1968 Blowouts: network-

ing, organizing, developing consciousness, holding an elected or appointed of-
fice, and acting as an official or unofficial spokesperson.35 The distinction be-
tween these activities is not meant to be a rigid and impermeable one, nor are
these activities inclusive of all dimensions of grassroots leadership. Not every
leader need participate in every dimension of leadership, and I argue that there is
no hierarchical order assigned to the different dimensions. The activities can be
viewed as locations on a moving carousel, each location being of equal impor-
tance. There are many entry points at which one can get on and off, and once on
the carousel one is free to move about in different locations (see figure 1).

Developing Consciousness
Helping others gain an awareness of school and

social inequities through discussions and
print media.

Holding Office

Serving an elected or appointed

position in a community or

student organization that
was directly or indirectly V-
related to the blowouts

Dimensions Of

Grassroots organizing
Attending meetings and

Leadership planning or implementing
events/activities that were

directly or indirectly related
to the blowouts.

Networking
Building a base of support and

linking diverse groups that could Acting as Spokesperson
offer legitimacy to the blowouts. Speaking to the media or before large

groups of people as an official or

unofficial representative

Figure 1: Dimensions of Grassroots Leadership

Writing about black women involved in the civil rights movement of the
same period, Charlotte Bunch points that “while black male leaders were the
ones whom the press called on to be the spokesmen, it was often the black women
who made things happen, especially in terms of organizing people at the com-

munity level.”36 Likewise, when I initially described my research proposal to a
male Chicano colleague of the Movement generation, he sincerely encouraged
me to pursue the topic, but unassumingly warned that there were no female

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Delores Delgado Bernal

leaders in the Blowouts and that few women were involved. Perhaps because he
views the Blowouts from a traditional leadership paradigm, he overlooked Chicanas
as leaders and failed to recognize their important contributions to the Blowouts.
Yet in distinct ways and to varying degrees, the women I interviewed participated
in these different dimensions of leadership. Their participation was vital to the
Blowouts, yet because a traditional leadership paradigm does not acknowledge
the importance of those who participate in organizing, developing conscious-
ness, and networking, their leadership remains unrecognized and unappreciated
by most historians.

In the following sections, I will discuss each of the five identified, interre-
lated dimensions of leadership, exploring the ways in which the oral histories of
the women in this study further our understanding of the Blowouts and of women’s
activist leadership.

Participation and Implementation ofMeetings, Events,
andActivities: Organizing

Organizing includes attending meetings and planning or implementing events
and activities that were directly or indirectly related to the Blowouts. There were
numerous meetings, events, and activities that took place prior to and after the
Blowouts in which students, teachers, parents, and community members raised
concerns about the quality of education in the East L.A. high schools. All eight of
the women discuss attending and actively participating in PTA meetings, school
board meetings, Blowout committee meetings, or community planning meet-

ings that were held in such places as the Cleveland House, the Plaza Community
Center, and the home of Tanya Luna Mount’s parents.37

In an attempt to address and remedy school inequities, activists in these

organizations implemented a number of strategies before resorting to a school

boycott. For example, Vickie Castro, Paula Crisostomo, and Rachael Ochoa Cervera
were intimately involved in YCCA, a community youth group formed by former

Camp Hess Kramer participants that took up issues of education. Members of
this group met regularly, talked to other youth at government-sponsored Teen
Posts, and conducted a needs assessment survey to find out what was going on in
the schools. Vickie discusses her and others’ organizing efforts in the years prior
to the Blowouts:

And we even had like a questionnaire that we had made. I wish we had kept all
these things. We wanted to compile complaints and I guess we were trying to
develop, even in our simple perspective, like a needs assessment. We would
talk to kids, What do you think about your school? Do they help you? Do

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Delores Delgado Bernal

they push you out? Are you going to college? … I know that we compiled
quite a bit of complaints and that’s where during the walkouts when you hear
about the demands, a lot of that was based on these complaints. So we had a

process in mind.38

After the surveys were returned and tallied up, Vickie, Paula, Rachael, and other
YCCA members decided to actively support and work on Julian Nava’s school
board campaign. Paula remembers how their organizing efforts progressed:

So it was interesting when we got it [the surveys] back and we tallied it up and

again it strengthened our belief of how inadequate we saw the schools to be.
Well, of course, the next question was, “Okay, now what do we do?” We got
involved in a campaign, my first political campaign that I worked in, for Julian
Nava, the first Latino to run for school board. It was an at-large position
before the board was broken up into districts or regions, and he courted us.
We worked with him, we worked for him, thinking that this was the way, this
was an answer.39

When Tanya Luna Mount speaks of her organizing efforts, they range from
the antiwar movement she helped organize at Roosevelt just prior to the Blow-
outs to the work she did against police brutality in her community. In addition,

Tanya remembers participating in the planning of what would be presented in
discussions with the board of education: “I was on the committee that would
decide what would be said at the board of education meetings. And we’d elect
who would do it.” She also speaks of the many Blowout organizational meetings
that were held at her home and how “we were open all night … [and] people
would come over our house during the walkouts.” She remembers that her home
even made the news when George Putnam, a conservative news commentator,
said that there was a house at “126 South Soto Street in East Los Angeles, in

Boyle Heights that is notorious for being commies, rebel rousers, and anti-gov-
ernment.”

In fact, an important component of organizing the Blowouts was the active

participation in meetings that helped to develop or support the demonstrations.
Mita Cuaron remembers actively participating in many community meetings
prior to and during the Blowouts in which “we set up a list of demands on vari-
ous topics and issues that we felt we were being deprived of,” and community
members decided that these concerns had to be brought before the board of
education.40 Rosalinda Mendez Gonzailez describes the school board meetings in
which she and others protested the suspension of teacher Sal Castro and de-
manded that the board return him to his teaching position at Lincoln High School.

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Delores Delgado Bernal

Though the police employed various intimidation techniques, she and others
continued to organize and actively participate in these meetings:

I mean there would be so many hundreds of us that would show up, students,
elderly people, some professionals, all kinds of people that would show up to
these meetings that we couldn’t even fit inside the board room. I mean people
were out in the courtyard and they had to have the P.A. system …. But I
remember also at these meeting all of the intimidation. The police were going
around literally, aisle by aisle, snapping, snapping, snapping, snapping pic-
tures of everybody who was there. I mean it was pure intimidation. If you’re
here to testify and you’re here to demonstrate, we’re going to have you on
file.41

Without the organizing efforts and persistence of these and other young
Chicanas the Blowouts probably would not have taken place, and the attention
needed to expose poor educational conditions may not have been garnered. By
organizing community people, the women in this study demonstrate the dy-
namic process and complex set of relationships that comprised the leadership of
the 1968 Blowouts. Indeed, this reconceptualization of leadership allows us to
consider organizers as leaders in various grassroots movements, including the
Chicano Civil Rights Movement.

From Behind the Scenes: Developing Consciousness

A second dimension of leadership is developing consciousness, the process of

helping others gain awareness of school and social inequities through discussions
or print media. Developing the consciousness of individuals is crucial to generat-
ing and maintaining the momentum needed for any social movement. Yet just as

organizing is separated from the task of leading, consciousness shaping is often
overlooked as part of the dynamic process.

Each of the women I talked with participated in raising consciousness through
informal dialogues with her peers, family members, or community members. As

young women they challenged others to think about and consider the inequities
that they confronted on a daily basis. One woman put it bluntly, “You raised
consciousness in any way that you could do it, subtly or outright.”42 Often one of
the most difficult and least rewarding tasks of leading, developing consciousness

requires one to help others see and understand things like they never have before.
Cassandra Zacarlas reflects on the difficulty of the task:

I was talking to students and trying to explain to them, and I remember that
was really hard for me because I was a really shy person at the time. I was a real
introverted person and this was really difficult to have people actually say,

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Delores Delgado Bernal

“Oh you’re nuts. What the hell is wrong with you?” And I remember feeling
sometimes, what have I gotten myself into.43

In addition to holding informal discussions about school conditions or so-
cial inequities, these women used print media to raise consciousness. Both Tanya
Luna Mount and Mita Cuaron’s families had mimeograph machines that they
used for mass duplication of informational leaflets and flyers that were then dis-
tributed throughout the communities and schools. Furthermore, all the women
I interviewed were somehow connected to the community activist newspapers
Inside Eastside and La Raza. Celeste Baca worked in the La Raza office as a volun-
teer, Tanya Luna Mount and Paula Crisostomo wrote for and distributed news-

papers, and the other women all read and encouraged others to read these news-

papers. As high school students, Tanya Luna Mount and Paula Crisostomo
contributed to building consciousness by writing articles specifically addressing
the poor educational conditions in East Los Angeles schools. Paula recounts her
involvement with the community activist newspapers:

I typed and did layouts, and wrote ghost articles about the schools. I would
also go to the [Whittier] Boulevard to sell Chicano Student Movement or Inside
Eastside. … I would bring a whole stack to school and I would give a few to
people, and they would pass them out to their friends. And then the school
said we couldn’t do it anymore, so I’d get to school early and I’d leave them
around the campus. I would go into the bathroom and I would put them in
the bathroom, the cafeteria, where I knew kids hung out, and I would tell

people where they could find them. People would find them, but I wasn’t
actually distributing.44

Developing consciousness, whether through verbal or written communica-
tion, is less public than tasks normally associated with traditional interpretations
of leadership. Like organizing and networking, it is work that is done from be-
hind the scenes, often unrecognized and unappreciated. By placing working-
class females at the center of analysis, we are able to see this behind-the-scenes
work and appreciate its importance in the leadership of the 1968 East L.A. Blow-
outs.

A Need For A Wide Base Of Support. Networking
A third dimension of leadership, networking, refers to activities that link diverse

groups in building a base of support. During the time of the Blowouts it was

important to have support from community members as well as from those out-
side of the community who could lend some legitimacy to the students’ efforts.
Thus, networking involved both transforming community and familial ties into

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Delores Delgado Bernal

a political force and building a supportive political front by reaching those out-
side of a comfortable social network. As Brodkin Sacks found in her study of

workplace networks at Duke Medical Center, the networks formed during the
Blowouts functioned as a sort of “telegraph system, carrying a collective message
of protest against unfairness.”45

Students who were involved in the walkouts were continuously accused of

being communist, being organized by outside agitators, or just wanting to skip
school. Networking within the community was a way to develop an awareness of
the school inequities and develop a political force. Cassandra Zacarias remem-
bers having to defend her own and other students’ actions while trying to gain
support from teachers, peers, and some family members:

The issue would come up, well, it’s all outside agitators, it’s all communists

coming in and riling up the little Mexicans and these little teenagers and we’d

say, “No it’s not. It’s within our community.” … I remember feeling like most
of the kids didn’t really like us and they’d say, “Oh, you know you guys are
communists and you’re crazy.”. .. I’d tell my family, “No, I’m not a commu-
nist,” and then start to tell them that there’s all these inequities in the sys-
tem.46

Similarly, Vickie Castro, a college student at the time, comments on how impor-
tant it was that high school students not cause a disturbance or skip school with-
out understanding the issues:

I remember something that was very important to all of us is that we just
didn’t want disturbance for disturbance sake. And we were really talking to
kids saying, “We want you to know why you’re walking out.”. .. There was a

purpose so that we did meet with groups in the park, in the schools, on the
corners and we tried to say, “This is why we’re doing this and we need your
support.~47

Cassandra and Vickie’s statements exemplify how networking-transforming
community ties into a political force-is closely interrelated with raising con-

sciousness-helping others gain awareness of school and social inequities.
During my interview with Sal Castro, he discussed networking strategies

that involved the students connecting with individuals outside of the communal
or familial social networks. He knew that an endorsement from the church, Cesar
Chavez, or politicians would lend legitimacy to the students’ cause: “I constantly
wanted people of the cloth to support the kids. I was never able to get any sup-
port from the Catholic Church. We had to steal a banner of the Our Lady of

Guadalupe because we couldn’t get any priest.”48 Finally, after a number of phone

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Delores Delgado Bernal

calls and some pleading, “a major coup” was set in place: Bobby Kennedy agreed
to talk to the students and make a statement of support. Kennedy was on his way
back to Washington, D.C., from a visit with Cesar Chavez in Delano, California.
He had to make a stop at the Los Angeles airport, where he agreed to meet with
a group of students that included Paula Crisostomo and Cassandra Zacarias. A

picture of Kennedy with the students appeared in local East Los Angeles papers,
and Kennedy’s endorsement proved to be a helpful networking strategy that in-
creased support for the Blowouts.

During the actual week and a half of the Blowouts, Paula Crisostomo was
involved with other students who were building a base of support throughout
the city with groups such as the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith and Hamilton

High School on the westside. Through speaking engagements, students voiced
their concerns and discussed school inequities with others who could offer sup-
port and advocate on the students’ behalf. Crisostomo recalls:

We were also doing speaking engagements. I remember we spoke to the B’nai
B’rith in West L.A. And we went to Hamilton and they had a rally for us in a

park. During that week we were hot items, and a lot of groups were asking us
to come and speak, and we were getting more support, so the board had to
[listen] .49

In light of the widespread communist and outside agitator accusations, it was

especially crucial to develop a network formation of individuals and organiza-
tions who could sanction and endorse the students’ actions and demands.

Less Focus on More Visibility: Holding Office

Holding an elected or appointed office is a fourth dimension of leadership. Four
of the women I talked with held an elected or appointed office in direct or indi-
rect relationship to the Blowouts. Vickie Castro was the first president of YCCA,
the youth organization that focused on education and was a precursor to the
Blowouts. Shortly after the school walkouts, Mita Cuaron and Cassandra Zacarias
were elected student body officers. Their Freedom Candidate slate was made up
of Garfield Blowout Committee members and was based on the ideal of “insti-

tuting an educational system in our school which is based on equality, justice and

first-rate education for all.”50 Months after the Blowouts, Rosalinda Mendez
Gonz~ilez was one of the youths appointed to the Mexican American Education
Commission, which was originally an advisory board to the school board.

Though these positions probably accorded these women slightly more vis-

ibility than other young female participants, the positions seemed to be second-
ary to their other leadership activities. For the most part, women casually mentioned

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Delores Delgado Bernal

these positions during their interviews. They spent much more time recalling
and talking about the more private tasks that I have included under the dimen-
sions of networking, organizing, and developing consciousness. In other words,

they seem to identify their role in the Blowouts more in relation to these dimen-
sions of leadership than in the elected or appointed positions that they held. Yet,

though these women gave less focus to the more visible and public roles, docu-

menting this dimension of leadership is important in that it demonstrates that

young Chicanas also contributed to the Blowouts (and in other social move-

ments) within the more prevalent notion of leadership that equates elected offic-
ers and public speakers with leaders.

A More Public Space: Acting As Spokesperson
The fifth dimension of leadership is acting as an official or unofficial spokesper-
son. During the Blowouts male participants usually took on this role and were
found in front of the camera, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, or speaking before
crowds. However, there were occasions in which a female student who was active
in other dimensions of leadership also took on the role of spokesperson. Rosalinda
Mendez Gonzailez and Paula Crisostomo were both asked to act as official spokes-
persons by providing testimony about Mexican Americans in education based on
their experiences as students. Each of them testified before the United States
Commission on Civil Rights at hearings held in Los Angeles. As a recent gradu-
ate of Lincoln High School, Rosalinda felt that the school curriculum was prima-
rily responsible for the failure of many Chicano students. The following is an

excerpt of Rosalinda’s comments before the United States Commission on Civil

Rights in June of 1967:

From the time we first begin attending school, we hear about how great and
wonderful our United States is, about our democratic American heritage, but
little about our splendid and magnificent Mexican heritage and culture. What
little we do learn about Mexicans is how they mercilessly slaughtered the brave
Texans at the Alamo, but we never hear about the child heroes of Mexico who

courageously threw themselves from the heights of Chapultepec rather than
allow themselves and their flag to be captured by the attacking Americans. …
We look for others like ourselves in these history books, for something to be
proud of for being a Mexican, and all we see in books and magazines, films,
and T.V. shows are stereotypes of a dark, dirty, smelly man with a tequila
bottle in one hand, a dripping taco in the other, a serape wrapped around
him, and a big sombrero. But we are not the dirty, stinking wino that the

Anglo world would like to point out as a Mexican.51

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Delores Delgado Bernal

In an effort to return Sal Castro to the classroom, Rosalinda also testified before
the Los Angeles School Board, as did Vickie Castro and other young Chicanas.

Though most young women involved in the Blowouts did not fill the
role of official spokesperson, several of the women I interviewed described in-
stances in which they spontaneously addressed a group of students or the media
in relation to the Blowouts. Mita Cuaron reconstructs a situation in which she
was an unofficial spokesperson:

It was just so spontaneous. And I remember picking up an orange cone from
the street, and began talking about, we are protesting and this is what’s hap-
pening. And I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember physically
standing on a car and talking out loud. And for two minutes there was quite a
group of students not going back into school and then the police were called
and they began to chase us.52

Thus, although acting as a spokesperson is a dimension of leadership that
was more often filled by males, these examples show that some women did par-
ticipate in this dimension of leadership while also participating in other dimen-
sions.

The Multidimensional Influence of Gender

How is it that these eight women came to participate in the 1968 Blowouts in
the ways that they did? What influenced and shaped their participation? This
study provides evidence suggesting that the dimensions of leadership are not
necessarily gender specific, and the same individual may engage in several di-
mensions.53 While young women were more likely to be found participating in
the first three dimensions of leadership-networking, organizing, and develop-
ing consciousness-it is important to look at the factors that shaped their par-
ticipation rather than assume that these are gender-specific dimensions of leader-
ship that are only filled by females. In a study of traditional and nontraditional
patterns of Chicana and Mexicana activism, Margaret Rose concedes that per-
sonalities have shaped female participation in the United Farm Workers ofAmerica

(UFW).54 However, she argues that the pattern of participation is more greatly
influenced by complex factors such as class, cultural values, social expectations,
and the sexual division of labor. Indeed, the eight women I interviewed discuss
similar factors that appear to have shaped their participation in the school boy-
cotts. In this final section, I will present the oral history data that speaks to the
multidimensional influence of gender.

The influence of gender was perceived in a somewhat nebulous way by the
women in this study. Women made statements ranging from, “Nobody ever said

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Delores Delgado Bernal

that you couldn’t do this because you were a girl,” to “I know that the females
were not the leaders,” and from, “Being a female was not an issue, it was just a
non-issue,” to “I’m sure I knew that there was sexism involved. .. but we prob-
ably didn’t talk about it.” This diversity of statements, both within interviews
and between interviews, leads to a conclusion that these women held no single
distinct and precise viewpoint on the influence of gender. Rather, the women’s
individual and collective thoughts on gender represent the indeterminate and

complex influence of gender within a system of patriarchy-a system of domina-
tion and unequal stratification based on gender. Though the way that boys and

girls were socialized may have reinforced the gender differences in how they exer-
cised leadership in the school Blowouts, the women’s diverse comments reflect
the complexity of gender’s influence while also attributing their participation in
various leadership roles to sexism, role-compatibility, choice, and expectations.

The social, cultural, and temporal milieu all contributed to what was ex-

pected of young women in 1968. And though most of these women ventured
from these expectations, they were very aware of them. For example, one woman
stated, “So I think that my home life, in one sense, brought me up very tradi-
tional. And I definitely knew what the female role was suppose to be. And that it

wasn’t college, and it wasn’t this and that.””55 Paula Crisostomo also comments on
the way that gender expectations, “how it was then,” and her personal agency
shaped the ways in which she participated in the Blowouts:

Boys were more outspoken and I think that’s just because of, that’s how it was
then. They were given the interviews more than the girls were. When we
would talk about the division of who was going to speak to what group, it was
the boys who were chosen and the girls who sort of stayed back. And I think
that’s just how it was …. And I was happy, as I still am today, to be in the

background. I’ll do what you want me to do, but I’ll do it back here. Don’t
have me stand in front of a mike, or in front of a group of people, I just don’t
want to do that.56

Vickie Castro points out that patriarchy and her own agency were complex
forces that interacted to shape her participation. Vickie believes there was a “big
gender issue in the family.” She grew up in a “traditional” family with a very
strong and dominant father who expected her to get married and have children.
Her father was an inspiration through his own strength and leadership, yet he
often held traditional gender expectations and tried to place limitations on Vickie.
On the other hand, her older brothers were always encouraging and supportive,
and they urged Vickie to go on to college. Her family’s influence gave her the

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Delores Delgado Bernal

strength to combat the sexism she and other young women found in some of the
student organizations:

Maybe my male friends at the time, in the organization, would try to put me
in female roles. Like be the secretary, make the sandwiches, do that. But I
think that I had such a strong male influence in my household, you know,
four brothers and my father, that among my brothers I was equal. So I always
challenged. And when I would see that there were no women involved, boom,
I made myself right there.57

Rosalinda Mendez Gonzailez also offers comments that demonstrate how
the influence of gender interacted with various structures and social systems to
offer a multidimensional influence. First, she acknowledges that few people raised
the question or offered a critique of patriarchy in the early part of the Chicano
Movement (a point with which most of the women concur), yet Rosalinda expe-
rienced sexism in a personal relationship. Second, she points to the fact that it
was older males involved in Camp Hess Kramer and other organizations, rather
than females, that encouraged her and other young women to become involved
in Blowout related activities:

I think that when we participated in things initially, there wasn’t a conscious-
ness of patriarchy. If you were a young man or young woman and you saw
injustice, whether in regards to the farmworkers or in regards to our college,
you spoke out and got involved. Now in my case, I very early on began to
encounter some patriarchal hostilities from my own boyfriend, who very much
criticized me for taking an active role and speaking out. But he didn’t con-
vince me nor did he succeed in holding me back. I was just very hurt by it, but
I didn’t accept his arguments or his reason. I encountered it at a very personal
level. At the same time there were a lot of men, older men that were encourag-
ing me to speak out and participate.58

Rosalinda explains that after the Blowouts, as the Movement began to gain mo-
mentum, she encountered increasing evidence of sexism and that women began
addressing patriarchy as a system of domination. In fact, she argues that in many
cases it was the female students who were at the forefront of the Movement and
that male students tried to hold young women back and move into the more
visible leadership positions.

Though sexist gender expectations were prevalent within the existing patri-
archal relations, Vickie Castro also points to how she and other female and male
students were conscious of gender stereotypes and used them to their advantage.
They would strategize the roles that students would take based on individual
characteristics and resources. For her, that meant different things at different

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Delores Delgado Bernal

times. At one point it meant using her car and a set of chains to pull open the

gates around Roosevelt High School; at other times it meant using her “goody-
two-shoes image”:

So we knew that if we needed someone who didn’t look threatening, that
looked like a nice person, I was to go in. I was the, you know, I’m a little bit
more giiera. I didn’t really dress, I didn’t really look chola. If we wanted some-
body to be aggressive and very vocal then that was David’s [Sanchez] role….
I always had the look to get out of it. I always looked real straight laced. And
I knew that. And I used it. I never looked the militant type, the chola type.59

In other words, she did not embody what some school officials feared most in
Mexican American students. As a fair-complexioned female who dressed “appro-
priately,” she was not threatening to the white mainstream community nor to
the older or more conservative Mexicans in her own community. Vickie’s physi-
cal appearance influenced the type of participation and leadership she offered to
the Blowouts, and she used it to gain support for the Blowouts.

Gender interacted with sexism, patriarchal relations, personal agency, and
the family to shape the participation and leadership of young women in the
Blowouts. And while the women in this study acknowledge the impact gender
expectations had on their participation, they link their participation in the Blow-
outs to the discrimination and oppression of the community as a whole rather
than to that of women. One woman stated, “I felt as a whole, in terms of my
peers and I, we were being discriminated against, but, personally, as a woman, I
didn’t feel that there was a differentiation.”60 This echoes the findings of Mary
Pardo’s study of the Mothers of East L.A. in which she points out that working-
class women activists seldom opt to separate themselves from men and their
families.6′ As the women in my study reflect back, they too view their participa-
tion in the school Blowouts as a struggle for their community and quality educa-
tion.

Conclusion
The oral history data I present challenges the historical and ideological represen-
tation of Chicanas by relocating them to a central position in the historical nar-
rative. Through a cooperative leadership paradigm that recognizes diverse di-
mensions of grassroots leadership, we are able to move beyond the traditional
notion of leadership and identify ways in which women offered leadership to the
Blowouts. Though their stories are often excluded in the writing of history, I
confirm that Chicanas have been intimately involved with and have offered lead-
ership to the ongoing struggle for educational justice. The experiences of Celeste

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Delores Delgado Bernal

Baca, Vickie Castro, Paula Crisostomo, Mita Cuaron, Tanya Luna Mount,
Rosalinda Mendez Gonzailez, Rachael Ochoa Cervera, and Cassandra Zacarfas
rebuke the popular stereotypes of Mexican women as docile, passive, and apa-
thetic, and demonstrate that women’s leadership in events like the 1968 East Los

Angeles School Blowouts has often been unrecognized and unappreciated.
Through the oral history data of these eight women, I illustrate that looking

at grassroots leadership within a cooperative leadership paradigm leads us to an
alternative history of the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts-a history that
makes the invisible visible. This alternative history of women’s participation and

leadership also pushes us to consider how we can redefine the categories for studying
and participating in community activism. By redefining the leadership paradigm,
we may be able to break through dominant ways of thinking and doing and
reclaim histories that have been silenced in our communities, as well as shape our
future histories to be more inclusive of traditionally silenced voices. Indeed, there
is something faulty in previous leadership paradigms that have not allowed us to

acknowledge Chicanas as leaders in the 1968 Blowouts, the Chicano Movement,
and in other grassroots movements. A cooperative leadership paradigm allows us
to address the erroneous absence of Chicanas as participants and leaders in his-

tory and contemporary life.62

Notes
I would like to thank the many individuals who provided me with supportive
criticism during the different stages of analyzing, conceptualizing, and writing.
The completion of this article benefited from the feedback and encouragement
of Ramona Maile Cutri, Claudia Ramirez Weideman, Anne Powell, Amy Stuart
Wells, Freddy Heredia, Mary Pardo, Danny Solorzano, Octavio Villalpando, and
the readers at Frontiers, including Vicki Ruiz. A special thanks also to Sal Castro.
I am especially indebted to the eight women who allowed me to transform their
lived history into a written history-muchisimas gracias.

1. Carlos Muiioz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (New York: Verso,
1989).

2. The following scholars have studied the Blowouts from theoretical perspectives: Myron
Puckett, “Protest Politics in Education: A Case Study in the Los Angeles Unified
School District” (Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1971); Carlos Muiioz,
Jr., “The Politics of Chicano Urban Protest: A Model of Political Analysis” (Ph.D.
diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1972); Louis R. Negrete, “Culture Clash: The
Utility of Mass Protest as a Political Response,” The Journal ofComparative Cultures
1:1 (1972): 25-36; Juan G6mez-Qui iones, Mexican Students Por La Raza: The Chicano
Student Movement in Southern California, 1967-1977 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Editorial

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Delores Delgado Bernal

La Causa, 1978); and Gerald Rosen, “The Development of the Chicano Movement
in Los Angeles from 1967-1969,” Atzlan 4:1 (1973): 155-83.

3. Luis Ruiz (executive producer) and Susan Racho (segment producer), “Taking Back
the Schools,” part 3 of Chicano: A History ofthe Mexican American CivilRights Movement

(Los Angeles: National Latino Communications Center & Galin Productions, Inc.,
1996).

4. In this paper “Chicana” is used when referring to female persons of Mexican origin
living in the United States-irrespective of generational or immigration status. “Chicano”
is used when referring to both male and female persons; I specifically indicate when
the term refers only to males. Terms of identification vary according to context and
it should be noted that during the period of interest in this paper, 1968, these terms
were especially prominent within the student population as conscious political iden-
tifiers. The term Chicano was not prominent prior to the 1960s and is therefore
used interchangeably with “Mexican” when referring to pre- 1960s history.

5. In the last fifteen to twenty years there has been a relative increase in the works that
look specifically at the grassroots leadership, community activism, and historical

struggles of Chicanas. The following are but a few examples: Adelaida R. Del Castillo,
ed., Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History (Encino, Calif.: Floricanto

Press, 1990); Rosalinda Mendez Gonzilez, “Chicanas and Mexican Immigrant Families,

1920-1940,” in Decades ofDiscontent: The Women’s Movement, 1920-1940, ed. Lois
Scharf and Joan M. Jensen (Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 59-83;

Magdalena Mora and Adelaida R. Del Castillo, eds., Mexican Women in the United
States: Struggles Past and Present (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center Pub-
lications, University of California, 1980); Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery
Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry,
1930-1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Adaljiza Sosa-
Riddell, “Chicanas and El Movimiento,” Aztlan 5:2 (spring and fall 1974): 155-65;
Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera, eds., Building With Our Hands: New
Directions in Chicana Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mary
Pardo, “Identity and Resistance: Mexican American Women and Grassroots Activ-
ism in Two Los Angeles Communities” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los

Angeles, 1990); and Patricia Zavella. “Reflections on Diversity Among Chicanas,”
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 12:2 (1991): 73-85.

6. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education
in the 1990’s,” in Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, ed.

Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren (New York: Routledge, 1994), 148.
7. Kenneth Kann, “Reconstructing the History of a Community,” International Jour-

nal of Oral History 2:1 (1981): 4.
8. Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop Journal 12

(1981): 96-107.
9. Patricia Gindara defines a networking sampling procedure, which is sometimes called

a “snowball” procedure, as one in which participants identify other potential participants

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Delores Delgado Bernal

based on an informal social or professional network (Over the Ivy Walls: The Educa-

tionalMobility ofLow-Income Chicanos [Albany: State University of New York Press,
1995]).

10. Richard A. Krueger, Focus groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research (Thousand
Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1988).

11. For different interpretations of the Blowout demands see Puckett, “Protest Politics
in Education”; Rosen, “The Development of the Chicano Movement”; Carlos Mufioz,
Jr., “The Politics of Protest and Chicano Liberation: A Case Study of Repression and

Cooptation,” Aztlan 5:1/2 (1974): 119-41; and Jack McCurdy, “Frivolous to Fun-
damental: Demands Made by East Side High School Students Listed,” Los Angeles
Times, March 17, 1968, 1, 4-5. For an overview of educational concerns and issues
of Mexicans during the first half of the century, see Gilbert G. Gonzilez, Chicano
Education in the Era of Segregation (Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1990), and
“The System of Public Education and Its Function Within the Chicano Communi-
ties, 1910-1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1974).

12. Kaye Briegel, “Chicano Student Militancy: The Los Angeles High School Strike of
1968,” in An Awakened Minority: The Mexican-Americans, ed. Manuel P. Servin,
2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974), 215-25.

13. California State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil

Rights, “Education and the Mexican American Community in Los Angeles County,”
CR 1.2: Ed 8/3 (April 1968), 16.

14. Rosalinda Mendez Gonzailez, personal interview, October 8, 1995.
15. “Conference Fact Sheet: Fifth Annual Mexican-American Youth Leadership Confer-

ence, 1967.”
16. Rachael Ochoa Cervera, personal interview, December 10, 1995.
17. Mindez Gonzailez, interview.
18. Rosen, “The Development of the Chicano Movement.”
19. G6mez-Quiiiones, Mexican Students Por La Raza.
20. Briegel, “Chicano Student Militancy”; and Rosen, “The Development of the Chicano

Movement.”
21. California State Advisory Committee, “Education and the Mexican American Com-

munity.”
22. California State Advisory Committee, “Education and the Mexican American Com-

munity.”
23. Mendez Gonzailez, interview.
24. Based on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s “Historical Racial Ethnic Data

1966-1979,” the percentage of “Hispanic” students in each of the five schools in
1968 was as follows: Garfield, 96 percent; Roosevelt, 83 percent; Lincoln, 89 per-
cent; Wilson, 76 percent, and Belmont, 59 percent.

25. Paula Crisostomo, personal interview, November 16, 1995.
26. Victoria Castro, personal interview, June 8, 1995.

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Delores Delgado Bernal

27. Tanya Luna Mount, personal interview, January 31, 1996. For a historical analysis
of patterns of police brutality in East Los Angeles, see also Armando Morales, Ando

Sangrado/ I Am Bleeding: A Study of Mexican American Police Conflict (La Puente,
Calif.: Perspectiva Publications, 1972).

28. McCurdy, “Frivolous to Fundamental.”
29. Jack McCurdy, “School Board Yields on Some Student Points,” Los Angeles Times,

March 12, 1968, 1, 3.
30. McCurdy, “Frivolous to Fundamental,” 1.
31. Karen Brodkin Sacks, Caring By the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke

Medical Center (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), and “Gender and Grassroots

Leadership,” in Women and the Politics of Empowerment, ed. Ann Bookman and
Sandra Morgen (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 77-94. These works
have greatly influenced my conceptual analysis of grassroots leadership. See also
Helen S. Astin and Carole Leland, Women ofInfluence, Women of Vision: A Cross-
Generational Study ofLeaders and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991).

32. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1970).
33. Brodkin Sacks, Caring By the Hour, and “Gender and Grassroots Leadership.”
34. Astin and Leland, Women oflnfluence, Women of Vision, 8.
35. Dolores Delgado Bernal, “Chicana School Resistance and Grassroots Leadership:

Providing an Alternative History of the 1968 East Los Angeles Blowouts” (Ph.D.
diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1997).

36. Charlotte Bunch, foreword, Astin and Leland, Women oflnfluence, Women ofVision,
X111ii.

37. Tanya Luna Mount’s parents had a long history of labor, civil rights, and peace
activism. Her mother, Julia Luna Mount, was actively involved in a labor resistance
movement at one of the largest food processing plants in Los Angeles that included
a massive walkout and a twenty-four-hour picket line to end deplorable working
conditions. See Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives.

38. Castro, interview.
39. Crisostomo, interview.
40. Mita Cuaron, personal interview, January 23, 1996.
41. Mendez Gonzailez, interview.
42. Ochoa Cervera, interview.
43. Cassandra Zacarfas, personal interview, December 7, 1995.
44. Crisostomo, interview.
45. Brodkin Sacks, “Gender and Grassroots Leadership,” 81.
46. Zacarias, interview.
47. Castro, interview.
48. Sal Castro, personal interview, February 6, 1996.
49. Crisostomo, interview.
50. Election campaign materials, Garfield Blowout Committee, 1968.

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Delores Delgado Bernal

51. California State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil

Rights.
52. Cuaron, interview.
53. See Brodkin Sacks, “Gender and Grassroots Leadership,” who suggests that grassroots

leadership roles need not be gender specific.
54. Margaret Rose, “Traditional and Nontraditional Patterns of Female Activism in the

United Farm Workers of America, 1962 to 1980,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women
Studies 11:1 (1990): 26-32.

55. V. Castro, interview.
56. Crisostomo, interview.
57. V. Castro, interview.
58. Mendez Gonzilez, interview.
59. V. Castro, interview.
60. Mita Cuaron, interview conducted by Susan Racho, December 3, 1994.
61. Mary Pardo, “Mexican American Women Grassroots Community Activists: ‘Moth-

ers of East Los Angeles,”‘ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 11:1 (1990): 1-7.
62. The following provides the reader with a quick snapshot of the where the eight

women are today:

Today, Celeste Baca lives in Sonoma County, California, with her husband. She
holds a Master’s in Education from the Claremont Graduate School and a Master’s
in Computer Technology in Education from California State University, Los Ange-
les. She has taught elementary school for twenty-four years and currently teaches in
a Spanish two-way immersion classroom in Roseland School District. She has been
a member of the National Association of Bilingual Education throughout most of
her teaching career. In addition, Celeste teaches computer courses as a part-time
lecturer in the Mexican American Studies Department at Sonoma State University.

Vickie Castro obtained her bachelor’s degree from Cal-State, Los Angeles, her teaching
credential from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Master’s of Science
in School Management and Administration from Pepperdine University. She has
worked as an employee of the Los Angeles Unified School District for twenty-eight
years. Throughout her career, Vickie has been very active in the Association of Mexi-
can American Educators (AMAE), serving as the East Los Angeles local chapter
president and then the state president in 1981. In 1993, Vickie was elected to the
Los Angeles City Board of Education, the second largest school district in the na-
tion. Vickie continues to volunteer as a sponsor or workshop facilitator to various
Latino youth leadership conferences in the Los Angeles area. A resident of the Echo
Park community, Vickie is mother to an adult daughter and grandmother to a new

grandson.

Paula Crisostomo graduated from California State University, Sonoma, with a ma-

jor in liberal studies. Today she lives with her husband and two teenage children in

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Delores Delgado Bernal

the Los Angeles area. For a number of years Paula was a fund developer for the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal De-
fense. For more than five years, she has been working in the field of social market-

ing-selling public service ideas-and is currently working on public housing and
economic development issues for Los Angeles County. Paula continues to partici-
pate in various community-based activities and over the years has remained very
active in the Mexican American Youth Leadership Conferences at Camp Hess Kramer.
As a member of the nonprofit Educational Issues Coordinating Committee and

acting director of the conferences, Paula has been involved in fund-raising to main-
tain the conferences since 1988.

Mita Cuaron’s social activism has often been displayed through her work as a nurse
and an artist. Beginning in the late 1970s, she was a member of the “Flying Samari-
tans,” a group of medical professionals who made monthly trips to Baja California,
Mexico, to administer free medical care. In the early 1980s, she went to Nicaragua
to participate in the International World Health Tour. More recently, Mita has also
served as a volunteer nurse for the Mexican American Youth Leadership Confer-
ences at Camp Hess Kramer. She has exhibited her artwork at various sites, includ-

ing Self-Help Graphics, Plaza de La Raza, and University of California, Riverside.
She recently donated a piece of art to a silent auction benefiting the Rigoberta Menchu
Fund. Today Mita continues to reside in the Los Angeles area with her husband and

four-year-old son. She works at White Memorial Hospital in East Los Angeles as a

registered nurse specializing in the area of psychiatry.

Throughout college and her career as a professor, Rosalinda Mendez Gonzilez has
been active in movements against gender, class, and ethnic/racial oppression. She
and another graduate student, Linda Apodaca, created and then cotaught with a
third woman the first course in women studies at University of California, Irvine,
“The History of Women’s Oppression.” She has conducted and presented research
at various regional and national conferences such as the National Association for
Chicana and Chicano Studies and the Latin American Studies Association. She was
awarded the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for Women’s Studies for her dissertation
research, and in 1980 she was invited to be a delegate to the International Confer-
ence on Women in Copenhagen, Denmark. Today Rosalinda is a mother of two
adult children and is a college professor at Southwestern College in Chula Vista,
California. Most recently, she has been very involved in issues of culture and the

empowerment that comes from reclaiming family roots and community history; she
is currently working with two other historians on a book on the history of Chicanos
in San Diego County.

Over the years Tanya Luna Mount has worked and volunteered in various political
and social justice movements. In the 1970s she took undergraduate courses at Cali-
fornia State University, Los Angeles, and worked as a teaching assistant in the bilin-

gual/ESL program at a junior high in East L.A. She was active in the anti-Vietnam

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Delores Delgado Bernal

movement, La Raza Unida, and organizing against police brutality. She worked with
the Barrio Defense Committee, which was a support and advocacy organization
that brought attention to police brutality in East Los Angeles communities. During
the 1980s Tanya remained active in developing a third political party through the
Peace and Freedom Party. She also worked at the East Los Angeles Health Task
Force, which is a multiservice social agency. Today Tanya has an eighteen-year-old
daughter and a twenty-one-year-old son and continues to live in the Los Angeles
area. She works at a junior high in East Los Angeles as a cafeteria clerk for the
Federal Lunch Program. She actively supports the Los Angeles Catholic Worker
Brittania House, which is a progressive Catholic social service organization in East
Los Angeles.
After graduating from Cal-State, Los Angeles, Rachael Ochoa Cervera attended the
Claremont Graduate School to earn her Master’s in Education and a Bilingual Spe-
cialist Teaching Credential. During her early teaching career she was very involved
in the Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) and served on its state
executive board. Rachael has been teaching elementary school for twenty-four years.
She is a bilingual teacher in the Garvey School District and teaches evening adult
education classes at the El Monte/Rosemead Adult School. She is active in the Cali-
fornia Teachers Association (CTA) and was recently appointed to be a Reading Re-
covery Specialist and a member of the Mentor-Teacher Selection Committee by her
district. She continues to live in the Los Angeles area with her husband and two

school-aged children, and over the years she has remained actively involved in Roosevelt

High School’s Class Reunion Committee.

Cassandra Zacarias attended the Claremont Graduate School while working on her

teaching credential. However, after teaching for a short period, she realized teaching
was not for her and left the program. She worked for a while outside of the educa-
tional field and then returned by attending graduate school and obtaining her Master’s
in School Counseling and her Pupil Personnel Services Credential from California
State University, Los Angeles. Early in her high school counseling career, Cassandra
was involved with the Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE), at-

tending monthly meetings and participating in scholarship fund-raisers for Latino
students. Today, Cassandra is a high school counselor in the Whittier Union High
School District. She continues to live in the Los Angeles area with her husband, who
is an elementary school administrator, and her elementary school-aged daughter.

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• Article Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, Varieties of Women’s Oral History (1998), pp. i-vi+1-253
Front Matter [pp. i-vi]
Introduction [pp. iii-v]
Harvest Stories: Interviews with Gladys Lillian Marke [pp. 1-15]
A Chicana in Northern Aztlán: An Oral History of Dora Sánchez Treviño [pp. 16-52]
In Their Own Voices: Oral Histories of Festival Artists [pp. 53-71]
The Helga Pictures [pp. 72-82]
Petland: A Woman’s Life [pp. 83-88]
Petland [pp. 89-93]
Activist Stories: Culture and Continuity in Black Women’s Narratives of Grassroots Community Work [pp. 94-112]
Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts [pp. 113-142]
Domestic Violence and Poverty: The Narratives of Homeless Women [pp. 143-165]
Gender, Sexuality, and Class in National Narrations: Palestinian Camp Women Tell Their Lives [pp. 166-185]
Treading the Traces of Discarded History: Oral History Installations [pp. 186-198]
Women of the British Coalfields on Strike in 1926 and 1984: Documenting Lives Using Oral History and Photography [pp. 199-230]
A Penny for Your Thoughts: Stories of Women, Copper, and Community [pp. 231-249]
Back Matter [pp. 250-253]