Thirty-eight years later, the 40,000 Southern California students who abandoned their classes on that March Monday did so over immigration policy.
Whatever you think about that complex and sensitive issue, you have to acknowledge, I think, that Los Angeles' schools would be closer today to the excellence those Chicanos began fighting for in 1968 if tens of thousands of immigrants hadn't crossed the border illegally and then added their ill-prepared children to the foundering system.
So immigration is problematic as a student cause. It's also the kind of ideologically amorphous movement that attracts political parasites.
A couple of weeks ago I attended an immigration rally, heavily hyped as student-led. This one was on a Saturday. Kids didn't have to skip algebra to protest. At least 39,500 of the students who had walked out in March must have been in the library studying, because the few dozen who showed up to wallop drums and blow plastic horns on the City Hall lawn were outnumbered by those ubiquitous Revolutionary Communist Party folks and white guys with graying ponytails peddling anti-Bush bumper stickers.
Even those who looked more like aging professors than high schoolers seemed high on the potential of "student power." And at least one speaker suggested that the way to change immigration policy (and end imperialism and stop the rape of babies in Africa) was for Latinos to boycott classes until things change -- the old "that'll show 'em" strategy.
I found the City Hall shenanigans wearying. I called Paula Crisostomo, whose actions as a 17-year-old leader of the 1968 demonstrations at Lincoln High are the basis for the HBO movie.
Crisostomo, now director of community and government relations at Occidental College, where I teach a couple of classes, said she applauds student activism on immigration.
It's just that many of those who walked out back then went on to fight for better schools as teachers, counselors, principals or -- like Crisostomo -- by working to nudge along middle school and high school students who may not understand why college is important and what they must do to get in.
If students were going to march out of classes again, Crisostomo had hoped it would be to protest the hard-to-fathom fact that poor Latinos still drop out at a horrifying rate, still account for shockingly few college admissions and still receive a crummier education than their middle-class peers, almost 40 years after she risked her own college career by standing up to the district.
