The Chicano Protest

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Toward the beginning of March of 1968, roughly 15,000 students, lead by secondary teacher Sal Castro, pursued strikes against seven schools in East Los Angeles and neighboring regions to challenge the nature of training in the schools. It was the first major protest by Chicanos; it had the backing of the whole Mexican-American community as well as the locals by the end. The protest marked to be one of the historic movements as after it there was a lot of drastic changes in the way Chicanos would be viewed as in East Los Angeles. The protesters were able to reach their objective and a small example of it is that before the protest only 2% of Chicanos were able to go to college but after the protest as much as 25% made to the college. To see …show more content…

Civil disobedience should be a last resort to any conflict as it can hurt the nation in many ways as well. Numerous amounts of protests all over the world have always led to violence and like we saw in the movie it can have a major impact on your life as well. Thirteen Chicano activists were arrested in the protest and some major charges were filed against them that involved major jail time, even though the charges were dropped two years later it still shows the consequences of taking such major steps. One should always try to make a difference by non-violent means. A lot of students were injured during the protests and this shows the level of dangers for performing such acts so it is always better to first work your way in the system first than taking it to the …show more content…

In the end all of their hard work did pay off and it surely was worth it. More Mexican-American students started to think about building their future and pursuing a career path of their choice. The number of Chicano students at UCLA rose drastically from 40 to 1200 just after the protests and they increased which each passing year. Now more young Mexican Americans students were graduating from high school, as they did not feel left out and they had an inkling of what they wanted to do in life with the backing of the teachers and the systems. Julian Nava, who was a Chicano, was one of the students who organized the protests and later she grew up to be an elected representative to the Los Angeles school board. This shows how all the effort of the students did not go in vain and it is an example of the accomplishment of the

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