As she joined about 2,500 marchers striding through neighborhoods east of downtown Los Angeles on Saturday with placards that read, "Brown and Proud: I'm the next generation," 17-year-old Santa Monica High School senior Jennifer Galamba said, "We're here to honor heroes and a defining moment in our history."
Galamba was among those who turned out for a 40th anniversary celebration of the student walkouts and marches at five high schools -- Roosevelt, Garfield, Wilson, Belmont and Lincoln -- that helped ignite a powerful new force on the American political scene: the Chicano Movement.
The event featured a 1.5-mile march from Lincoln High School to Boyle Heights' Hazard Park that included hundreds of youths and dozens of the original student activists whose actions unfolded into the first act of mass militancy by Mexican Americans in Southern California.
Later this year at the park, a granite boulder with a plaque is to be dedicated to the courage and legacy of the students now known as "Los Ninos Heroes."
In March 1968, hundreds of high school students walked out of the predominantly Mexican American high schools, demanding better teachers, smaller classes and equal opportunity in higher education. They did not know they were launching a civil rights crusade that would affect generations to come.
Within days, close to 22,000 students, some flanked by Brown Beret bodyguards, were participating in walkouts, speeches, picketing, clashes with police and emergency school board sessions.
Margarita Cuaron was a 15-year-old junior at Garfield High when she strode out of English class, picked up a bullhorn, climbed on top of a car and began shouting, "Walkout! Walkout! Walkout!"
A few days later, she was arrested in the principal's office on misdemeanor charges of disturbing the peace, then suspended for a month. When Cuaron returned to school, her history teacher chastised her in class. "You should be ashamed of yourself," said the teacher, who flunked her.
The events "left an indelible mark on me," said Cuaron, 55, now a registered nurse with the Highland Park office of the L.A. County Department of Mental Health. "It was like living in the eye of a torrential and profound storm."
The man of the hour Saturday was Sal Castro, a former social studies and government teacher at Lincoln High who walked out of class with his students.
