Changes

The 1960s and 1970s have been well documented and covered historically by scholars interested in the Black Liberation Movement, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks, amongst other popular African American civil rights activists. What we know about the African American/Black civil rights movements are the obvious events leading up to the political revolutions that ensued. Segregation, Jim Crow laws, and the scars of slavery had all had their violent and discriminatory effects on the African American/Black population, especially in the South. Unfortunately, there has been a silencing of the powerful movement that was comprised of millions of Mexican and Mexican American individuals in the U.S. Southwest that happened during the same time as the African American/Black civil rights movement. These individuals eventually came to claim the political identity, Chicano. Chicano had previously been a derogatory word used by Mexican and Mexican Americans in the U.S. for individuals who were poor and newly immigrated in to the U.S, but was rarely used at all. <ref>Richard Griswold del Castillo and Arnoldo de León, ''North to Aztlan: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States'', (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 126.</ref> In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicano’s reclaimed the word in order to signify that their indigenous ancestry was important to them and their culture, as well as to the land they had lost from Spanish and American imperialism.

The Chicano movement, or El Moviemiento, is complex and came in to being after decades of discrimination, segregation, and other issues arising over decades of war and violence around the region we now know as the U.S. – Mexico border. The East L.A. School Walkouts were an expression of the frustration over the treatment of the larger Chicano community by Anglos both in and out of the classroom. Contemporaneously to the walkouts, the United Farm Workers Movement was in full throttle. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were organizing strikes and convincing Mexican and Filipino laborers to become union members. <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.