Understanding the value of education became the driving force behind the Chicano Youth Movement in Southern California. As one 19 year old students stated “Education is the only tool which will raise our influence, commend the respect of the rich, and enable us to mingle in their social, political and religious life
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Traditionally, issues of segregation arose since the conflicts of 1846-1848. Carlos Muñoz, in “Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement” argues that “Mexican Americans were subjected to a process of colonization, in which in addition to undermining their culture, relegated the majority of them to a permanent pool of cheap labor for the U.S. Capital”.
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The segregation was also obvious in the public school system. Although the “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo” signed at the end of the Mexican War required for the U.S. Government to honor the rights and the culture of the Mexican population left in the U.S., it was never honored.
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Mexican children were placed in completely segregated schools and access to a higher education was very limited. More so, the placement of Mexican children of working class families in segregated schools without any support of the primary language, custom and traditions can be categorized as “assimilationist” methods of teaching instead of efforts of integration.
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Often, the harsh conditions and the need to survive economically forced families to depend on child labor. Many Mexican children dropped out of school after third or fourth grades to help support their families.
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In addition, issues of racism were inevitable and anti-Mexican feelings were some of the major problems Mexican youth were facing regardless of what was taught in schools as the “American Democracy.”
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From the Mexican perspective, the efforts of assimilation were seen as hegemonic efforts dominating over other “competing” ideologies; the dominant ideology to become a “Good American,” otherwise known as the process of the Americanization, overpowered the efforts to maintain a cultural identity.
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The Chicano Movement became multidimensional in the late 1960s once the Mexican-American youth of East Los Angeles boycotted school in response to the discrimination practices. Moreover, the drafting of the youth, including Mexican-Americans during the Vietnam War has launched a series of protest and dissident talks among students in colleges across California, (from the memoir of the filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño). Students of Mexican heritage enrolled in social sciences, such as philosophy and politics, were relating their ideas of social injustice, inequalities with the actuality and the political situation especially in the Southwest United States where protests were crushed by the government. This represented a political awareness, a quest for self-identity started to demonstrate among the Mexican-American youth.
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One of the prominent figures in the war to end poverty among the Mexican families as well as the push for educational reforms was Sal Castro, a Korean War veteran who became a civil rights activist, spokesperson, and founder of the Association of Mexican American Educators. Castro believed that the Mexican immigrants were ignored in the Civil Rights Movement and the Democratic Party did not put an emphasis on the Mexican population and their civil rights. Disheartened by politics of corruption, Sal Castro returned to teaching only to find out that racism in the public schools system was strongly persistent.
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The racial issues and the treatment of Mexican children in the public system were a good enough reason for Castro to take his efforts to a non-violent strike against the educational system and therefore sacrificing his teaching career. Castro’s efforts marked a milestone in the battle for Chicano self-identity which now was crystallized in two distinguished movements: Chicano Students Movement and Chicano Power Movement.
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