Shuffling her feet in her Garden Grove home last weekend, Mariela Muniz stared into the carpet and suffered, as teenagers do, the silent deliberation of her parents. Soon, her father nodded and her mother uttered the words she'd been waiting to hear: "Lo puedes hacer."
"You can do it."
The next morning, the 15-year-old sophomore at Garden Grove High School -- with the permission of her parents, both of whom are factory workers and Mexican immigrants who became U.S. citizens after entering the country illegally -- skipped school for the first time in her life.
Immigration protest: An article and photo caption in Friday's Section A referred to 1,500 students who walked out of Garden Grove High and other Orange County schools during immigration protests Monday. The 1,500 was the countywide total. Fewer than 200 walked out of Garden Grove High, said Garden Grove Unified School District spokesman Alan Trudell.
Following in the footsteps of those who led the first of the student walkouts March 24 and the adults who organized last Saturday's massive protest against proposed immigration legislation, Muniz became one of a few dozen students in Southern California who helped spearhead a national exhibition of civil unrest, one of the largest and most boisterous since the civil rights movement four decades ago. By the end of today -- in Fresno, in Monterey Park, in San Diego -- more than 40,000 students in California will have walked out of their schools to protest the proposed reforms.
There is little question that some students took advantage of the protests to ditch school. Some acknowledged they had little idea what all the fuss was about. Others took the opportunity to throw bottles at police and to shut down freeways. Law enforcement officials criticized them for diverting resources from more pressing needs, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told them to go back to school.
But for the small group of students who instigated the walkouts, most of whom hadn't been politically active but were well-connected on campus and online, it was a transformative week.
Using modern technology -- mostly their communal pages on the enormously popular MySpace website -- they pulled off an event with surprising speed and dexterity. Planned in mere hours on little sleep, lacking any formal organization, the protests were chaotic and decentralized and organic.
They were also a reminder that there are more than 35 million Latinos in the United States, about 40% of them in California. At least 8 million are in the country illegally. But many of their children -- including many of the student leaders -- are citizens by birth. And they represent a voting bloc that could help shape the politics of the West for years to come.
