On Democracy in New Orleans—and America

School's out. (strike at John Marshall High School and other schools in Los Angeles, California, over Proposition 187) (Editorial)

The Nation November 21, 1994 | Kadetsky, Elizabeth It was twelve days before the November 8 election, and the high school where James Dean filmed Rebel Without a Cause had gone on strike. Three hundred students walked out of John Marshall High to protest Proposition 187, the anti-immigrant ballot initiative. One of these students was Leyda Azaneda, who was born in Peru and may or may not be a legal resident of the United States.

"I don't think they should come up with propositions that are racist and unfair like this," Azaneda said in explanation of the walkout. "They call this a free country." Azaneda is among the 90 percent of Marshall students who speak a language other than English at home. One teacher here estimates that half of Marshall's students would face deportation with the enactment of Proposition 187, which requires public employees to report "suspected illegals" to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Though it is impossible to estimate the number of students who are undocumented, one indication is that over a third of the county's 1.5 million public school students speak "limited" English. go to web site marshall high school

The apparent imminent passage of Prop 187 inspired a loosely organized network of these and other students to stage walkouts at virtually every high school in the city of Los Angeles in the two weeks before Election Day. Walkouts were so widespread that the L.A.P.D. was placed on tactical alert, and police in riot gear swarmed the streets in several neighborhoods and aimed pepper spray and stingball grenades at students on at least two campuses. At this writing more than 15,000 students had walked out at more than forty junior high and high schools throughout Southern California. In Pomona students boycotted school for three days while activists set up alternative classes in a nearby church. Here school officials suspended approximately seventy students, while throughout the region police arrested at least sixteen.

News reports and school administrators tended to brush off the activism as "a nice day to take a walk," but the mass walkouts and civil disobedience heralded a student movement unseen since the Chicano student demonstrations of 1968. This year students began stealthily announcing impromptu walkouts at breaks before classes shortly after Los Angeles's October 16 march against 187, believed to be the largest march in L.A. history. The confluence of immigrant families and Chicano activists in that demonstration was itself a feat of grass-roots organizing that owed most of its fire to a single immigrant advocate, Juan Jose Gutierrez, and his East L.A. legal aid center, One Stop Immigration. The march drew 125,000 supporters--even after mainstream Latino groups, including MALDEF and L.A.'s Coalition for Humane Immigrant and Refugee Rights, heeded warnings of anti-187 leaders against mobilizing a "sea of brown faces." Tapping into loose or inactive student networks, the march breathed life into groups spanning high school and college campuses, including MEChA, the Brown Berets redux, United Farm Workers solidarity contingents and the newly formed October Student Movement. go to site marshall high school

But as Election Day approached, the student walkouts seemed to be spinning from even the grasp of their grass-roots engineers. On October 26 Gutierrez and approximately 100 student organizers met to reassess a protest that, while intending to affirm a student's right to a free education, seemed to be jeopardizing that very right as administrators threatened to suspend strikers. "We're offering sit-ins to stay on campus," Angel Cervantes, a graduate student at Claremont College and a member of the October Student Movement, said after the meeting. "We're taking the moral position of not walking out but wanting to stay there to learn." Two days later students resoundingly rejected that advice. Outside the Van Nuys Civic Center police carted protesters back to school in school buses. On one, 18-year-old Blanca was perched on her seat instructing fellow students: Walk out tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

Several principals and teachers privately conceded that they were terrified that walkouts would escalate into violence. Approximately 1,000 Southern California teachers and administrators have already signed pledges refusing to comply with the initiative, and they begged students to "be reasonable," in the words of principal Charles Molina. But as teacher Steve Zimmer glumly forecast, "November 9 is going to be a really ugly day." Kadetsky, Elizabeth