Still going, and getting less issue-oriented and more violent and disruptive.

Friday, March 24: What I missed

I don't work Fridays, so the walkout went on in my absence. The students peacefully filed out the door, then sat down on school grounds, following their plan to not leave school grounds. It's been pointed out that this sort of sit-in tactic generally leads to some sort of teach-in or airing of demands - but another school marched by, yelling for our students to join, and I can also understand that they wanted to see if there was action somewhere else. That's what the LA Times first covered: 1500 students gathering in a park. Still peacefully. No arrests. No tickets. Just some detentions for those kids when they came back to school with unexcused absences from class.

Monday, March 27: One, two, three, what are we fighting for? I don't give a damn...

I walked into fourth period and saw a total of five students there. "What, is there another walkout today?" I joked. Indeed, there was. A kid instantly started complaining about how today's protest devalued Friday's since many of today's walkout particpants didn't seem to know what they were fighting for. There was also some class-wide distaste for the involvement of the local middle school, as in "Why drag little kids into this? They don't understand."

We have Hippie Math Teacher this period, who I'm sure has done his share of protesting but is also a teacher dealing with most of his class missing the lesson to be on the street. In addition to the algebra classwork, he gave a writing assignment: tell me what you did and saw on Friday. This is repeat-failure Algebra 1A, so even with such an easy classwork credit, only one student did it: Winnie, (who I am happy to have in class again this semester, and who is much less belligerant these days). She wrote a full page, not exactly an A+ on mechanics but a least a B on content. She wrote something to the effect of, "On Friday I saw hundreds of beautiful Latino people fighting for their rights and the rights of their neighbors. Today, I see dum [sic] people who don't even know what they're protesting."

She further explained to me, when I asked for details, that this walkout was poorly organized and that there had already been fights and some throwing of bottles, and that they were "blowing up" a McDonalds down the street. When a dozen or two kids yelling "Walkout!" passed the school later, a couple of the kids in my class yelled "You're stupid!" out the window. "They're going the wrong way," they told me, "Downtown is the other way."

I left that class early and had lunch, because it was pointless. There was some debate in the staff room about today's events. I repeated the statements from students about today's walkouts being misguided. Another tutor quoted a student who'd said that since these protests had violence, it did make them look like terrorists, which is particularly bad since the bill in question is under the name of "Homeland Security." Some staff disagreed, "It's still meaningful." I don't know. Is it meaningful if the protesters don't give it meaning, or don't know what it means? I have no way of knowing how many of them have good motives and how many just want to get out of class.

In period 5, I got to wondering about how many people with good motives even understood the legislation they were railing against. The English teacher asked a girl who'd walked out on Friday what she was protesting. "If you help an immigrant, you go to jail?" and "They want to kick all the Mexicans out of the country?" Scary prospects both, but not what we're talking about. The kid who was the best-informed (and still outraged) didn't walk out either day! I started to feel a little racist, assuming these kids weren't well informed about their issue. But then, I would expect my Latino SAT students from private schools to know what's up. I was being classist, not racist -- but since so many students at this school don't read on a high enough grade level to understand a news article -- and if they did, wouldn't pick one up, because they think reading is gay -- how am I supposed to assume they're educated on the issue. Word of mouth? Radio talk shows? Cable news? All notoriously unreliable prospects. Face it: I'm a news snob. It's a prejudice I'm gonna have to deal with.

Fifth period English is also when we went into lockdown. The PA crackled, but instead of the usual drone of "Please excuse the interruption," we got "We are in lockdown." Click. A few seconds later, they repeated it, and further elaborated that no one was to leave class. "What if you have to pee?" joked the teacher, and continued giving the quiz. A few minutes later, we could hear sirens, then yelling, then helicopters. Another PA announcement, this time instructing teachers to close the windows and shut the blinds, since the crowd outside was getting so "unruly." More sirens, more choppers, and some of the screaming sounded like people in pain. "I hope no one's getting pepper sprayed," said one student. The teacher put in a movie. One student tried to sneak to the window for a peek. Others asked me to do so and report back. "Nah, I'll see it on the news tonight like everyone else." We were on the wrong side of the school, anyway. "Check the internet," asked one kid. "I just did," I said, "nothing new." "ABC7.com!" he urged, and I complied, since I'd only tried the LA Times. Nothing.

Eventually things quieted down and lockdown ended right before period 6. In the hall, I passed a kid from period 3. "Riot," he said, jerking his thumb towards the front entrance. I stopped by the office to get the scoop. "Did you see it?" they asked. "No, I was in the 100s, no view." "It was beautiful." "Beautiful? I heard it was a riot." Well, technically, since more bottles were thrown, and the school who was coming and hoping to pick up more of our students for the walkout seemed to be trying to tear the gates down. This is also when I heard that some of the walkout kids had moved onto the freeway and were stopping traffic. Better than violence, but I hoped no one got ploughed down.

Off to period 6, where the teacher hadn't shown up and the kids were milling aimlessly around the door while a neighboring teacher called for coverage. A few kids were considering leaving but I advised against it because I knew truant students were starting to get tickets. I heard the McDonalds rumor repeated, this time "threw rocks at" instead of "blew up." Also rumors, still unsubstantiated, that there were other riots and robbery in the neighborhood. One student compared it to the LA riots and I repeated the chestnut I'd heard once: the first day was about Rodney King and the second day was about shopping, while here, Friday's protest had better motives and today's seemed to be about ditching class. He insisted that the '92 riots weren't about Rodney King even on the first day. "Haven't you heard that Sublime song?" I had. It goes partially like this:


Cause everybody in the hood has had it up to here
It's getting harder, and harder, and harder each and every year
Some kids went in a store with their mother
I saw her when she came out she was gettin' some Pampers
They said it was for the black man
They said it was for the Mexican
But not for the white man
But if you look at the streets, it wasn't about Rodney King
It's this fucked-up situation and these fucked-up police
It's about comin' up and stayin' on top
And screamin' 1-8-7 on a mother fuckin' cop
It's ain't in the paper, it's on the wall
National guard
Smoke from all around


I walked back to my car after school, amid trucks honking with people hanging out the windows with Mexican flags. I felt guilty for hoping nothing had happened to my car during the chaos.

The rest of the week

The news media started focusing on the negative, of course. I'm sure they were disappointed Friday's walkouts and Saturday's 500,000-person downtown demonstration didn't give them any ammunition. I turned on conservative talk radio just to get the other side, and heard them talking about how "these students looked like gangbangers to me" and so on. One crank talked about a girl he met who was "half Mexican and half AY-rab." "Did you really say 'ay-rab?'" asked the traffic and weather girl later, in disbelief. The news that night reported on how much money the walkouts were costing the districts, since funding is tied to daily attendance. Hello? Let's focus on either the immigration issue, or the issue that truancy is an enormous problem EVERY day of the school year and no one does jack about it.

Chicano activists who I respect, like Luis Rodriguez, started coming out in full support, like some of the people at my job. I understand his reasoning: the kids aren't missing out on an education, because becoming an activist is an education in itself. Ideally, yes. But practically, students who already read and write and calculate far below grade level need to be in class learning the basics. You've got MySpace: organize something for after school. Most of you don't have any extracurricular activities after school to miss, because you school doesn't have the staff or budget for them, anyway.

But walkouts are easy, and we're talking about a population that can't write their senator (not voting age, sometimes not citizens) or buy ad space (too poor) or use any of the traditional channels. They're non-white teenagers, mostly poor, doing what they think will get the world's attention.

There have been meetings and discussions, attempting to provide positive forums to drain the energy off the walkouts, but Sublime was right: everybody in the 'hood has had it up to here, and kids walkout out because school sucks are, in their own way, protesting from a pure motive. School DOES suck, and that's just another way we are failing all the working people of LA and their children. But that's another issue.

The police have started giving hefty tickets to kids walking out (while, as I mentioned earlier, failing to do anything about everyday truancy). My nonprofit has found a legal aid organization willing to help the kids with tickets. I announced this in one class yesterday, right after I found out, and it (of course and unfortunately) sparked another discussion on the situation. Someone said there was another walkout tomorrow and I asked them, for their own sakes, to find another way to get heard and not tempt fate now that the cops were out. "Don't give them an excuse to mess with you - you know some LA cops are mean and racist," I reminded them.

"They're chorizos," one kid muttered.

"Yeah, so steer clear. And don't talk like that in school."

Chorizo is Mexican sausage. It's also slang for a penis. It was then, when I realized not only that I know way too many Spanish swears, but that I was probably in this business deeper than I'd been admitting. I am giving legal, tactical advice to dozens of kids in the midst of a historic event - that I knew about a day before it happened. All this time, I knew something major would happen while I was living in LA. I worried about earthquakes, about Tookie Williams-oriented riots, about everything but the part of history I wound up in.