Episode 89: Rise Up. Walk Out.

It was March 1968, and East Los Angeles was ready to explode.

The city didn’t know it yet—hell, the country didn’t know it—but a brown revolution was about to burst forth out of its high schools. Over the course of a single week, up to 22,000 Chicano students—most of them teenagers, some still clutching textbooks and brown paper lunch bags—stood up, turned their backs on the chalkboards, and walked out. Their message was clear: they were tired of being treated as second-class citizens in the school system.

The East L.A. Walkouts, also known as the Chicano Blowouts, marked the first major youth-led protest of the Chicano Movement. The walkouts forced mainstream America to confront a question that had long been ignored: why were Mexican American students being denied an equal education? The Los Angeles public school system in the 1960s was a machine designed to break Chicanos into manageable labor. By the time you hit high school, you were already labeled: mechanic, secretary, janitor. You weren’t supposed to dream—you were supposed to obey. In predominantly Chicano neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and East L.A., schools were overcrowded, underfunded, and soaked in neglect.

Sixty percent—let me repeat that—sixty percent of Mexican American students dropped out before graduating. The ones who did make it out with a diploma often read at an eighth-grade level. The system wasn’t broken; it was built that way. Vocational tracking was the scam of the century. The white kids were groomed for college; the brown ones got shuttled into auto shop or clerical courses. The message was clear: “You’re not going anywhere.”

Bibliography

Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Revolt of the Cockroach People. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.

Acuña, Rodolfo F. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 8th ed. New York: Pearson, 2015.

Esparza, Moctesuma, and Robert Connelly. Walkout: The True Story of the Historic 1968 Chicano Student Walkout in East L.A. Los Angeles: Moctesuma Esparza Productions, 2006.

García, Mario T. Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Muñoz, Carlos Jr. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement

Your Hosts:

Kurly Tlapoyawa is an archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and filmmaker. His research covers Mesoamerica, the American Southwest, and the historical connections between the two regions. He is the author of numerous books and has presented lectures at the University of New Mexico, Harvard University, Yale University, San Diego State University, and numerous others. He most recently released his documentary short film "Guardians of the Purple Kingdom," and is a cultural consultant for Nickelodeon Animation Studios.
@kurlytlapoyawa

Ruben Arellano Tlakatekatl is a scholar, activist, and professor of history. His research explores Chicana/Chicano indigeneity, Mexican indigenist nationalism, and Coahuiltecan identity resurgence. Other areas of research include Aztlan (US Southwest), Anawak (Mesoamerica), and Native North America. He has presented and published widely on these topics and has taught courses at various institutions. He currently teaches history at Dallas College – Mountain View Campus.

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Transcript

 | Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales From Aztlantis — where we explore the fascinating worlds of Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, while also challenging the myths and misinformation that surround them. We are your hosts Kurly Tlapoyawa, and Ruben Arellano Tlakatekatl.

It was March 1968, and East Los Angeles was ready to explode.

The city didn’t know it yet—hell, the country didn’t know it—but a brown revolution was about to burst forth out of its high schools. Over the course of a single week, up to 22,000 Chicano students—most of them teenagers, some still clutching textbooks and brown paper lunch bags—stood up, turned their backs on the chalkboards, and walked out. Their message was clear: they were tired of being treated as second-class citizens in the school system.

The East L.A. Walkouts, also known as the Chicano Blowouts, marked the first major youth-led protest of the Chicano Movement. The walkouts forced mainstream America to confront a question that had long been ignored: why were Mexican American students being denied an equal education? The Los Angeles public school system in the 1960s was a machine designed to break Chicanos into manageable labor. By the time you hit high school, you were already labeled: mechanic, secretary, janitor. You weren’t supposed to dream—you were supposed to obey. In predominantly Chicano neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and East L.A., schools were overcrowded, underfunded, and soaked in neglect.

Sixty percent—let me repeat that—sixty percent of Mexican American students dropped out before graduating. The ones who did make it out with a diploma often read at an eighth-grade level. The system wasn’t broken; it was built that way. Vocational tracking was the scam of the century. The white kids were groomed for college; the brown ones got shuttled into auto shop or clerical courses. The message was clear: “You’re not going anywhere.”

Teachers punished kids for speaking Spanish—their native tongue, the language of their parents and grandparents—treated like an obscenity. Some mocked Indigenous ancestry outright, laughing at Aztec names as if they were punchlines. In the worst cases, administrators pushed Mexican American children into remedial programs meant for the developmentally disabled.

You think that’s an exaggeration? Listen to this one. A teacher named Richard Davis from Lincoln High once wrote, and I quote:

“Most of the Chicanos have never had it so good. Before the Spanish came, he was an Indian grubbing in the soil, and after the Spaniards came, he was a slave. It seems to me that America must be a very desirable place, witness the number of ‘wetbacks’ and migrants, both legal and illegal, from Mexico.”

That wasn’t some fringe crank writing from his parent’s basement. That was a teacher—the kind of man who graded the minds of brown children.

So yeah, the schools were like prisons with chalkboards.

It was against this backdrop of institutional racism and neglect that a generation of Chicano students began to question why they were being denied opportunities their white peers took for granted. This growing sense of injustice propelled them to demand change. Across the country, the civil rights movement was challenging racial segregation, while college students organized sit-ins and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Inspired by these struggles, young Chicanos began to articulate their own vision of justice.

In East Los Angeles, Sal Castro, a charismatic & dedicated Lincoln High School social studies teacher, was instrumental in that awakening. To Castro, education meant empowerment. He encouraged his students to take pride in their culture, question authority, and demand better for their community.

Castro was also a central organizer of the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference (CYLC), an annual retreat founded in 1963 at a Jewish summer camp in Malibu. Each year, hundreds of Mexican American students from East L.A. schools attended the conference, where they learned about Mexican and Mexican American history—subjects their schools ignored.

For many students, the experience was transformative.

“Seeing, listening, and being proud of all of these accomplishments really helped the students think critically about their own families,” said Dr. Valerie Talavera-Bustillos, a professor of Chicano Studies at Cal State L.A. “They began to ask, ‘Why should we put up with these things?’”

At the conference, students like Moctesuma Esparza and Victoria “Vickie” Castro discovered their voices. Both would go on to play critical roles in organizing the 1968 walkouts. Moctesuma Esparza’s path to activism began in 1965, after attending a CYLC retreat. Energized by what he learned, he helped form Young Citizens for Community Action, a group of politically minded Chicano teenagers determined to fight for equality. The group later evolved into Young Chicanos for Community Action and eventually became known as the Brown Berets, a militant organization loosely modeled after the Black Panther Party.

After graduating from high school in 1967, Esparza attended UCLA, where he co-founded United Mexican American Students (UMAS). The group’s goal? To increase Chicano enrollment in colleges and universities. But UMAS didn’t just limit itself to campus issues. Members fanned out into local high schools—Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Belmont, Wilson—mentoring students and encouraging them to think critically about the injustices they faced.

Garfield High, for example, had a 58% dropout rate, the highest in the city. At Roosevelt, it was 45%. The connection between poor conditions rooted in systemic racism and Chicano academic failure was undeniable. Esparza and others believed that only a bold, collective action could force the school district to confront these inequities. Sal Castro agreed with this approach. Inspired by the tactics of the civil rights and anti-war movements, Castro urged his students to consider a walkout—a mass strike that would draw public attention to their cause. Organizing intensified by late February 1968, with meetings at local coffee shops and community centers, most notably La Piranya, a popular hangout run by David Sanchez and Vickie Castro of the Brown Berets.

Castro, a UCLA graduate who had grown up in East L.A., understood the power of education. Vickie had seen the inside of those broken schools, the cracked walls, the overcrowded classes, the teachers who thought she was just another brown girl who’d disappear into the city’s service economy.

“This is where I got my voice,” she would later recall. “This is where my passion for justice was born in me. It changed my whole being.”

And so the list of demands took shape: bilingual education, smaller classes, Chicano teachers, Mexican American history courses, better facilities. Basic humanity on paper.

All that remained was to light the fuse.

The first spark came unexpectedly. On March 1, 1968, students at Wilson High School walked out after the principal canceled a school play he considered “too risqué.” Between 200 and 300 students participated in what was meant to be a small act of defiance—but it was enough.

Four days later, on March 5, roughly 2,000 students at Garfield High staged the first planned walkout. As students poured into the streets, police were called in to restore order. The next day, the movement spread to Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Belmont High Schools, where administrators locked gates and called police to block exits. Students scaled fences, broke through gates, and marched out chanting “Viva la raza!”

Over the next week, walkouts erupted at Jefferson and Venice High Schools as well. By mid-March, more than 15,000 to 20,000 students had joined the protest, making it one of the largest high school demonstrations in U.S. history. Importantly, students timed their walkouts before attendance was taken, depriving the school district of daily attendance funds and amplifying the economic pressure.

Among those on the front lines was Carlos Montes, a student at East Los Angeles College and a founding member of the Brown Berets. Two years earlier, Montes had nearly dropped out of Garfield High himself.

“The vice principal called me in to sign up for the Selective Service when I was 18,” he remembered. “The teachers only cared about the elite intellectuals. The rest of us were just shuffled through.”

On March 6, Montes and several others drove to Lincoln High to support the walkouts.

“At 10 a.m., we ran into the school yelling, ‘Walkout!’” he recalled. “The principal came out and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ We said, ‘Get out of the way—this is business. This is a walkout.’”

Later that day, Montes and other Brown Berets helped students at Roosevelt High tear down a locked gate to join the protest. Undercover officers photographed the scene. Montes was detained briefly for distributing flyers, but he refused to be intimidated.

On March 11, students, parents, and teachers—calling themselves the Educational Issues Coordinating Committee (EICC)—attempted to present a list of 39 formal demands to the Los Angeles Board of Education. But the board’s response was dismissive. When they finally discussed the demands on March 28, officials claimed that while some proposals were “commendable,” there simply weren’t enough funds to implement them.

For the students, the message was clear: the system wasn’t going to change willingly. Instead of reform, the city responded with repression. On March 31, 1968, police arrested Sal Castro and twelve other organizers—dubbed the “East L.A. 13”—charging them with conspiracy to disturb the peace and other crimes. And defending the East L.A. 13 in court? None other than Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Brown Buffalo himself—the same wild-eyed Chicano attorney who would later stumble into infamy alongside Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Acosta saw the blowouts for what they were: a full-throated roar of a people waking up.

Their arrests sparked outrage. Hundreds of community members picketed the Hall of Justice, and sit-ins were held at school board meetings demanding Castro’s reinstatement. Students carried signs reading “Free Sal Castro!” and “Education, Not Incarceration.” After two months in custody, the defendants were released on June 2, 1968, and all charges were eventually dropped in 1970. Castro was reinstated as a teacher after sustained community pressure.

Even though the walkouts didn’t immediately transform the schools, they succeeded in something powerful: they helped awaken a generation. The East L.A. Walkouts represented a fundamental shift in the Chicano struggle—from the rural labor organizing of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta’s United Farm Workers to an urban fight for educational and cultural empowerment.

Carlos Montes would later reflect: “It put us on the map. It energized the community, and radicalized a new generation of Chicano activists.”

Many of the young leaders who participated in the blowouts went on to play central roles in later movements. Some became educators and professors, while others pursued careers as artists, filmmakers, and community organizers. Moctesuma Esparza went on to become a prominent film producer, using cinema to tell Chicano stories. Vickie Castro served on the Los Angeles Unified School Board, shaping the very system she once protested.

Two years later, on August 29, 1970, many of the same activists helped organize the Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, the largest anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles history. So yeah, the immediate effects of the walkouts were modest. Class sizes remained large, and bilingual education remained a controversial issue. But the symbolic impact was monumental. For the first time, Chicano youth had asserted themselves as agents of change rather than passive victims of discrimination.

“It taught us that the only way things can change is by protesting and challenging the system,” said Montes.

The walkouts also led to concrete gains in the following decades: Bilingual education programs expanded in California schools, Chicano Studies departments were established at universities like UCLA, Cal State L.A., and UC Santa Barbara, and political representation grew, as former student activists entered public office and community leadership.

Perhaps most importantly, the walkouts changed how Chicano students saw themselves. No longer were they ashamed of their language or Indigenous heritage—they were proud of it. More than half a century later, the East L.A. Walkouts remain a cornerstone of Chicano history. They are studied in classrooms, depicted in films and documentaries, and commemorated in murals throughout Los Angeles. For scholars like Valerie Talavera-Bustillos, their importance lies not only in what they achieved but in what they inspired.

“Those students who walked out really gave back. They became professors, activists, and leaders in their communities. They changed the narrative.”

The story of the East L.A. Walkouts reminds us that change often begins with the courage of young people—those willing to stand up, speak out, and demand a better future. And in 1968, Chicano students did exactly that. Their defiance reshaped the city of Los Angeles, transformed the national conversation about education, and helped define what it meant to be Chicano in modern America.

A generation unchained itself from the machinery of a racist system—and in doing so, gave birth to a movement that would echo across decades.

So here’s to the kids who walked out.
 Here’s to Sal Castro and the Brown Berets.
 Here’s to Oscar Zeta Acosta, the mad buffalo in the courtroom.
 Here’s to the 22,000 Chicanas and Chicanos who dared to say no—and in that refusal, found themselves.

Because in 1968, for one furious, beautiful week, the Chicano kids of East L.A. didn’t just demand education.

They took it.

Chicano Power