John Salapa's ninth-graders have been at Grant High for only two months, but they have already learned a few things.
They know that Armenian American students hang out on the north side of the quad under the big trees and that Latinos hang out on the south.
They know that Armenian Americans' dress is sort of conservative and Latinos' dress sort of baggy--or at least that's what people expect.
And they know what October means: fights between Armenian Americans and Latinos, who at Grant are primarily Mexican American.
"It's a tradition," one said. "That's why they call it the October riots. They probably schedule it."
The comment was voiced during a carefully moderated discussion led by a communications student from Cal State Northridge.
The discussion was part of a nationwide pilot initiative, "Communicating Common Ground," that seeks to eradicate hate speech and ethnically based campus violence at 30 sites nationwide, in places as different as Baltimore and Fargo, N.D.
Locally, Northridge professor Kathryn Sorrells and a cadre of 35 intercultural communications students are going into three freshman classes once a week for seven weeks this fall to talk about stereotypes, race, history, tolerance and what can be done to end ethnic violence on campus.
The project is co-sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Communication Assn., Campus Compact and the American Assn. for Higher Education.
The goal at Grant, Sorrells said, is to educate new students before they are indoctrinated in the campus culture.
For as long as most people there can remember, tensions between Armenians and Latinos at Grant have flared in late October. The 3,300-member student body, representing 32 cultures, is one of the most diverse in the San Fernando Valley. In general terms, the school is 4% Asian, 6% African American, 2% Filipino, 51% Latino and 36% white, which includes Armenian American.
No one seems to know how or why the annual fights began.
One district official speculated that tension between the Latino and Armenian students may have originated from disputes over relief efforts in the mid-1980s after earthquakes in Mexico and Armenia. At the time, students from each ethnic group claimed that the other received more empathy and relief, Fran Ramirez, a Los Angeles Unified School District administrator who was a Grant assistant principal then, said in an interview last year with The Times.
