Full transcript of “Week 11 - El Movimiento”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:02 Okay everybody. Welcome to week 11. Um, we did not have a video for week 10 because you were doing um your Google videos. That assignment is still open. Again, you get one week grace period. So, the Google Vids images assignment again is just um really building out your visuals for your testimonials. So, you're pulling in photos of yourself. Say you have testimonial about maybe you as a kid. So, maybe you have like kid pictures or family pictures, pictures of Mexico, um you know, images, art, symbols. So
0:47 really looking forward to see what sort of imagery you all are pulling. You're not doing the voice over yet. Um we'll be doing that very very soon. Um but you can play with it if you if you like. Um maybe I'll post an additional video just to kind of see how you can sort of play with Google Vids. So test it out. Do the voice record, click the tools, things like that. Okay. For this week, we're going into a moimeto, the movement, the CHO movement. Really, where this, you know, the title of this course, Chuco studies, really comes from. Now, um, what we're going to be looking at is, um, particularly here a specific
1:34 sort of, um, case in Sacramento, a desegregation case. Um, so let's go into into that. Okay. So, let me make sure you all are seeing what you're supposed to be seeing. Yes. Where you from? Okay. So, to sort of set the stage, set the scene for the article around the um desegregation case here in Sacramento. So the article is talking about particularly a case at Washington Elementary in 1968. It was a predominantly Mexican school in the Washington Bario in
2:20 Sacramento. So you'll see where it's located right here, right between F and uh E Street um on 18th. Right. So, if you're familiar with um the neighborhood Midtown um area, there's a sort of really popular um cultural center, a historic cultural center called the Washington Neighborhood Center that I've also marked right here. So, in the 60s, the late60s, the school board had voted to close it. So, this is post Brown versus Board of Education. These were efforts at the time many schools were taking to integrate, right? To sort of follow the law and make sure
3:07 that schools were diverse, were desegregated, were integrating. One of those integration efforts was sort of a busing system where they were to bus students from one neighborhood over to another neighborhood. So, this is what the school board had decided for Washington Elementary, that they would close Washington Elementary and bus students to a white majority school about 12 miles away. Now, you might already suspect how the parents responded. The parents of Washington Elementary, 97% of parents voted against this desegregation effort. um you know and if you're a parent or if
3:54 you have kids or if you have nephews and nieces um you know in school you might already have some ideas of why parents would vote against desegregation against efforts for integration. Now the article goes into why parents had organized um against this. So this is again at the uh in the backdrop of um anti-Mexican racism in the United States. So um you know when we're talking about sort of Mexican-American history um in the United States 1848 always has somewhat of a starting point. Obviously, there was history before that, but 1848 was
4:40 the treaty of Alopeeago that ended the Mexican-American War. We had American settlers and courts didn't recognize um that treaty, the article 8 of that treaty. So, there was this huge land grab of u Mexican-own land. So basically Mexicans who had owned property in what was once Mexico um American settlers had sort of like taken by force and the US courts systems had sided with American settlers. There's been history of great deportation of deportation efforts similar to what we're seeing today with the ICE raids. So that happened during the Great Depression. Mexican and Mexican-Americans meaning US-born citizens were deported. We saw the Vasetto program happening between the
5:25 40s and the 60s which was this labor agreement that had really started off around the war efforts to sort of meet the labor shortage in the United States. But as you see, Mexicans were seen as dirty. They were being sprayed with pesticides there. They were processed. They were exploited. They were put into like Brasero housing um barracks that were really really you know not good living conditions. Um both my grandfathers were brastoeros and um one in particular um always said always told stories to my dad that he was felt the most exploited, most discriminated um you know um really undignified, treated horribly. Um there was deep
6:11 segregation as well. The Juan Quoro era sort of playing off of Jim Crow. So racist violence and segregation. So there were Mexican schools, right? um that were created particularly in California. So um we saw throughout efforts in California and throughout the country to integrate. So even in California we had the lemongr Lemong Grove incident in 1931 that preceded the big Brown versus Board of Education in the 50s. This was the first successful desegregation case. Mexican children were denied entry to local school in Lemong Grove, California. That's down in the Sacramento um excuse me, San Diego area. Um, Mendes versus Westminster was a statewide. So, while Leven Grove incident was sort of a countybased
6:57 desegregation case, Mendes versus Winster Westminster was a statewide case. So, the California Supreme Court had basically ended um desegregation in California before the country before the National Supreme Court had ended um segregation in 1954. And so you saw then the Chuco movement itself coming around in the 60s and 70s, right? This sort of political and cultural renaissance. So there was all these efforts, there were struggles, there was fights before the big movement, but the movement was sort of like this consolidation of efforts, this sort of a coming together. Um before incidents were happening somewhat in silos, community- based, right? Whereas
7:45 the CHO movement, it was really this sort of like nationalist um Chico nationalist movement of folks coming together. Um so they had like nationwide conferences in Denver that brought folks from all over the country to talk about okay how can our local efforts sort of be unified under maybe one banner and that was the CHO movement. And so going that sort of you know sets the scene for like at this time what was happening particularly in also Sacramento because Sacramento was a part of the CHO movement as well. There's a deep deep history in the ch of the CH movement here in Sacramento. Um so Brown versus Board of Education as I mentioned was the big national case that ended um segregation um you know at least legally
8:33 at that time. Obviously this takes time. Um as you know government works really slow. So even though a legal a case was a decision was made in the case in 1954 we didn't see real integration efforts happening until really the 60s and the 70s. So on the left hand side um you see really the resistance to Brown versus Board of Education. So this means that hey even though you know the Supreme Court said it is illegal to segregate there was a lot of resistance while Brown v. board promised racial equality. Right par white parents across the US resisted integration. They were
9:20 known as like the anti-bus movement. So as I mentioned the sort of busing was incorporated as sort of a strategy to integrate um schools you know moving one some students from one school to the other. Um, this is where sort of the language of neighborhood schools started coming about because anti-busters, basically white parents would be saying, "No, these are our neighborhood schools. You know, we got to keep folks in the neighborhood." Um, you know, if basically neighborhoods were already segregated, they're basically saying we should keep schools then segregated, right? There was a huge um white flight to the suburbs that reshaped US cities.
10:05 So, white folks were then moving away from urban centers and sort of creating their own communities and basically suburbia was created, right? What we see is like these strip malls, these culde-sacs, all of this was like created and basically with white folks sort of taking themselves out of an integrated school district. legal equality didn't undo social and economic racism. A quote from the reading says, "Lent's version of self-determination differed from those espoused by civil rights advocates." Laente here, the author is referring to basically the people, the community, the parents of that Washington elementary
10:52 school. So, compared to what's happening here in Sacramento in the 1930s through the 1960s, um, red lining had been happening. Red lining was discriminatory lending, basically identifying Mexican neighborhoods, not only Mexican but black and Asian neighborhoods as sort of high-risisk, high liability, right? Banks would not let these communities borrow money. So, they refused loans outside of white zones, right? They would, it was called redlinining because they would actually create maps and outline the neighborhoods they would not loan to in red. This was eventually overturned as sort of as racism, as racist discrimination.
11:37 Um, and redlinining was made illegal, but the effects of redlinining have been um are still being felt today. So neighborhoods were segregated and if you have neighborhood schools then the schools are segregated. Right? From 1954, right, the decision of Brown versus Board of Education to 68, 19 of 20 new schools were built outside of the city limits for white suburban families. So we're talking about that white flight again. New schools were being popped up in these like newly segregated areas. Sacramento's unified school district's neighborhood school argument sort of protected white property values. Did not protect equity. Sacramento real estate
12:22 agents and mortgage lenders singlehandedly maintained segregation and for that matter white supremacy. So the CHO movement was happening in the 60s and 70s. As I mentioned, this involves the grape strike, the march from Deleno to Sacramento where 10,000 people marched hundreds of miles. We have East LA walkouts. These are high school students in Los Angeles demanding better education. Um, demanding that, you know, they don't get punished for speaking Spanish. So there were still, you know, there was even though maybe schools might have been somewhat integrated, um, Mexican students, Mexican-American students were sort of geared towards more vocational blue
13:07 collar work. There was a huge antivietnam war. Chicanos, Mexicos were at higher rates going into the military and dying in the war. And so there was a huge protest. She got a moratorum. Like I mentioned, there was conferences that were really trying to pull these like sort of efforts together. So there was a CHO youth liberation conference. They adopted elam plan um this this idea chanismo meta which is a student organizing um um organization um an act student um cho activist organization. They still have chapters today. I was a part of my metro chapter at SAK State when I went to SAK State in
13:54 the early mid 2000s. And so you had these ideas of self-determination um that really was part of this CHO movement. Dr. Lorenna Marquez who is the author of the article that we're reading around the Washington Elementary um case. She says, "Inspired by developments of the of a political philosophy and expression that had been emanated from the black power struggle in the previous several years, Chuco and Chico activists in different places, including Sacramento, had begun to put the term to use to express their quest to liberate ethnic Mexicans from racism, poverty, political powerlessness, historical neglect, and internal defeatism, and to determine their own future on their own terms, which is
14:40 self-determination." Um so this idea of self-determination was used as sort of like this idea to integrate but they were all it was also used by lente again laente is the parents of Washington elementary students and they were this using this idea of self-determination to vote against this busing effort and so laent again so going back to that idea a of like why would parents what Dr. Marquez is talking, you know, um, describes as like laent, the community, the people. Laente is literally translated to the people. She said, "Why would the people resist desegregation?"
15:26 Going back to that question I asked at the beginning. She says they rejected the idea that Mexican children would improve simply by being near white students, which is a huge, huge, huge misconception around integration efforts. The idea around integration and eliminating desegregation is not simply because we wanted black and brown children to sit next to white students. It was the idea that we wanted black and brown children to have the same resources as white students. Right? So if you are going to fund a white school, then you need to fund a Mexican school at the same level. But that was not happening. Right? I had a an a scholar,
16:12 a black education, feminist scholar. She said, "I would rather have had a true pie than a fake brown." And what she's referring to there in terms of pie is the United States Supreme Court decision called Pie versus Ferguson, which reaffirmed segregation. It basically allowed segregation to persist. um it that's where we got the separate but equal doctrine, right? That's what the court's decision was. She refers to Brown versus Board of Education which overturned PI versus Ferguson, right? And outlawed segregation. So she said, I would rather have a true pie, right? An actual factual true separate but equal. I would
17:01 rather have that. I would rather have a black school that's funded at the same levels as white schools than a fake brown basically saying you did us dirty. You said you this this promise of desegregation did not bring about equity. So this idea that they the believed desegregation reinforced racial hierarchies and assimilation not justice. the idea that then black and brown students would just have to adapt to then a white education system, right? Laente, the people saw their neighborhood school as the cheapest, safest um and fastest way to transport children. Again, the busing proposal was to close their school and then move the
17:47 Mexican students 12 miles away. Who in their right mind is like a parent would want their kid to now go to a school 12 miles away when they moved into a neighborhood and their kid you could walk your kid to school that's down the block and now you have to like figure out transportation now you have to figure out if it's like safe now you have to figure out like different schedule right so again they had Mexican schools adapting to white models that doesn't disrupt the system it just reinforces white suprem pharmacy, the source of smaller class sizes and stronger teacher relationships. They saw their neighborhood school as smaller class sizes. Now they're going to this larger school, class sizes were going to be bigger. They're going to be taught by
18:32 maybe a majority white now teaching staff, right? There's, you know, parents didn't want that. And in the Washington elementary, their neighborhood school, they had community control. They had parent involvement. If your kid's school is two blocks away, heck yeah, you're probably gonna go to like open houses and the events that they host, it's much more easier, right? But now it's 12 miles away. You got to figure all that out. Maybe you don't have a car, right? All this stuff. They valued bilingual instruction and cultural programs that reflected their lives. Those bil that bilingual instruction, those cultural programs were going to be lost at these white schools. So they feared that being bust would also mean losing their language,
19:18 their culture, their safety. Right? They saw this as an assimilationist tactic. So their self self-determination, the way they saw the people is that they saw their neighborhood as a center of family community, not a problem to fix. Why? They're basically standing up and saying as why does our school have to close? Why do we have to figure out our lives and readjust? Why does our lives have to be disrupted? Right? Why not close down a white school and bust white students to our school? So outside voices described the vario as poor or in decline, but residents saw it as strength and care, right? What the school district was seen was this like poor brown school that needed to close down and they were like, "No, these are this is our culture. This is our
20:03 cultura." School programs and community programs overlapped. Education, art, health, social services work together. that was also in danger of being lost. Their demand was not separation but funding and respect to strengthen. Again, the idea here was not like we want to sit next to white kids. We want the same resources as white kids. Self-determination meant deciding for themselves what education should look like. It should look like bilingual instruction, local and rooted in culture. Um so that is quick rundown of the um article around politics of speaking up for Laente. You'll see um I have here linked also in
20:52 uh a few videos around student protests that fuel the Chuco rights movement. This goes much in detail into the East LA walkouts that I had mentioned in slides. So again, these are high school students that walked out, coordinated walkouts demanding better education. Again, not fighting to sit next to white students, but resources. And then this is the creation of UFW. Now, you'll see um in this um image the videos of Cesar Chavez. If you've been if you've been watching the news lately, you saw that there's been um allegations. There was an investigation that the New York Times had did um which uncovered a bunch of abuse that Cesar
21:39 Chavez had um committed against young girls and women in the movement, Dolores Werta included. And so the community is now sort of working through that, removing monuments, right? Um, basically this this image of a movement leader has um been ruined by his own actions really. Um, so the community is now working working through that. Um, so you'll probably see um images here. Now the now the now the work of our community is to continue to tell the story of a movement of a labor movement of a labor struggle without censoring abusers.
22:26 Um so for this week as well for week 11 you have a check-in quiz a knowledge check-in quiz that you'll need to do that'll go over um some of the past weeks after spring break. That's it for this week. If you have questions, let me know. Thank you very much, and you'll hear from me again next week.
