Changes

This article focuses on one specific event in history that is extremely important to understand the Chicano Movement. The East L.A. Walkouts would begin in the late 1960s as youth were beginning to become frustrated about how Anglos treated the larger Chican Chicano community inside the classroom and outside of their communities. At this time the United Farm Workers Movement was in full throttle and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were gaining membership and participating in strikes in California for Mexican and Filipino laborers. <ref>Matt Garcia, "A Moveable Feast: The UFW Grape Boycott and Farm Worker Justice," ''International Labor and Working Class History'', 83, (Spring, 2013): 146-153.</ref> Although the East L.A. School Walkouts do not necessarily provide information about the complexity of issues surrounding the Chicano Movement, I argue that the walkouts were part of a spark that would ignite the Chicano and Mexican American community to begin the fight for equality alongside their Native American, Asian, and African American brothers and sisters during the Civil Rights Era.

The East L.A. walkouts is only one of the important markers signifying the beginnings of a political revolution that would span the entire Southwest of the U.S. Non-profit organizations and other community organization rose out of the Chicano movement in order to better serve the local Chicano communities through the arts and of course representation legally and in protest. Another subject that will need it’s own historical article is women within the Chicano movement. Chicanas would come out of this important era with an understanding of how both racism and sexism have resulted in the oppression by the men in their own communities. With influence from both the Chicano movement and the Feminist movement, Chicanas would begin to write their own literature and create their own art that was expressive of their identities. These pieces of literature and art inform today’s Chicano scholars and only improve the understanding of the Mexican American and Chicano culture. The Chicano movement would last up until about the early 1980s and fizzles out as the media focuses its’ attention elsewhere. What is important to understand about the ‘ending’ of this movement is that the people who took part in all of the marches and protests for equality never stopped working with their ''communidad '' in order to fight for social, economic, and political justice for the ''gente''.

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