Reflecting on Ironies of an Activist’s Life

There are times when the radical past of Chicano student militant Vickie Castro collides with the establishment world of educator and Los Angeles school board member Victoria M. Castro.

One such instance was when Castro, then a middle school principal in East L.A., had to suspend three students after 400 walked out of class because they couldn’t get their grades during a teachers’ work stoppage.

How could a leader of the famous 1968 Chicano student walkouts at five Eastside high schools, dubbed the “blowouts,” turn around and punish some students for doing the same type of thing in 1989?

“I was chuckling inside because I never thought I’d be on the other side,” Castro said the other day. “But it wasn’t the same thing [as in 1968]. Most of the kids walked out over silly things.”

Castro--and a lot of other Chicanos who lived in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and early ‘70s--have been reflecting about the past with the airing on public television of the four-hour documentary “Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.” The program’s first two hours ran Friday night and the other two will be presented this Friday night.

Much of the focus is on events that occurred in Los Angeles. One of this Friday’s segments features the student walkouts that Castro, teacher Sal Castro, former student and now filmmaker Moctesuma Esparza and others helped orchestrate to improve the educational opportunity for Mexican American students in the city’s schools.

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Vickie Castro was a bright, promising student at Cal State L.A., who had graduated from Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, when she made a disturbing discovery after attending a youth conference.

“I grew up in a world where everybody was Chicano,” she remembered. “But . . . when I got to Cal State L.A., I wondered, ‘Where’d all the Mexicans go?’ ”

The fact that few Mexican Americans made it into college led to a political awakening. Her activism reached the point where her father, like a lot of dads in those days, had to ask her the dreaded question:

“Mija, are you a Communist?”

“No, Dad, I’m not a Communist,” she remembered telling him. “I still have a belief in equal opportunity for my community.”

She helped form Young Chicanos for Community Action, an activist group that sought social and educational improvements for Chicanos. The group later became the Brown Berets, a militant Chicano rights group. She didn’t put on a Beret uniform, but she was a force to be reckoned with when Lincoln High teacher Sal Castro (no relation) and others decided to stage the student walkouts.

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Her duty on March 6, 1968, the first day of the walkouts, was to occupy the time of the Lincoln High principal while cohorts came on campus to encourage the students to leave school. She pretended to be a job applicant, peppering the principal with questions in his office while he tried to excuse himself to check out reports of student unrest.

Finally, after 20 minutes, he left, leaving a happy Castro content in the knowledge that she had delayed him while revolution spread among the students.

Later, she went to Roosevelt, where a teacher recognized her and ordered her off campus. “If you come back, I’ll have you arrested,” she told Castro.

Undeterred, Castro volunteered her beat-up Mazda to pull down a chain-link fence that had prevented walkout organizers from entering the campus to incite the kids. “They put a chain on my bumper and down came the fence,” she recalled.

When asked who was behind the wheel that day, Castro demurred. But others say it was an action any student radical--even one who would one day become a school board member--would be proud of.

At that time, such incidents seemed necessary to the Chicano activists. They were losing their patience with a school bureaucracy that seemed oblivious to their demands for bilingual and bicultural classes, more Chicano teachers and administrators, a more relevant curriculum and smaller class sizes.

Historians regard the blowouts, in which as many as 20,000 students left classes, as an important symbol of increased Chicano pride and a willingness to do the unthinkable to achieve more educational opportunities.

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“It empowered the Chicano students [in school] after the blowouts,” said Loyola Marymount University professor Fernando Guerra, director of the university’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles. “Suddenly, Chicano studies classes were available. It empowered many [who came after the blowouts] to go to college.”

Although she was not charged for her role in the walkouts--13 others, including Sal Castro, were indicted but the charges were thrown out--authorities tried to no avail to implicate Vickie Castro. Her role in the walkouts, however, caused a rift in her own family; one cousin, a sheriff’s deputy, refused to speak to her for many years.

Although she wanted to become a probation officer, Castro turned to teaching after graduating from Cal State L.A. Some administrators held her activist past against her, but not Frank Armendariz, then the principal at a junior high a stone’s throw away from Roosevelt, who gave her a job. “He took a chance on me when others wouldn’t,” Castro said.

The job showed her the establishment side of education, but she never forgot the reasons why she raised hell as a youth. She had been a principal at Belvedere Junior High for seven years when she decided to run for the school board in 1993.

“It was out of frustration for our kids that I ran,” she said. “I couldn’t take the [spending] cuts.”

Once, during the school board campaign, a spectator at a forum raised Castro’s involvement in the blowouts, wondering if she was suited to be a school board member. “I’ve been a reformer, and I do care about our schools,” she said.

No more was said about the blowouts.

As Castro, 50, looks back on those days, she has no regrets over her actions.

But she is frustrated.

That’s because the district’s resources continue to shrink. And because the educational gains sought by Chicano activists are now under attack. She was chagrined recently when she was paired off in a KCET discussion with a Latino parent who did not want his kids in a bilingual program.

“Can you imagine?” Castro asked, remembering the exchange with 9th Street School parent Lenin Lopez. “I’ll fight for his right to take his kids out of bilingual education, if that’s what he wants to do. But he shouldn’t deny the opportunity to other parents if they want it. He wants to take it away from them. It isn’t just an educational issue. It’s a civil rights issue.”

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Bilingualism and biculturalism are close to the hearts of many who took part in the blowouts, because Los Angeles teachers and administrators routinely dismissed such things as Chicano participation in historical events as unimportant.

(She still laughs when she hears Sal Castro, in the middle of one of his emotional tirades, blurt out: “Hell, there were more Mexicans than gringos inside the Alamo defending it!”)

Victoria Castro said many Latinos nowadays do not appreciate the advances gained from the walkouts, such as the increased numbers of Latino teachers and administrators.

“[Parents like Lopez] don’t have a balanced prospective,” she said. “They don’t have a memory of what the schools were like before the blowouts. A lot of people kicked in the doors to get the things that we have now.”

Add to that the growing public mood against immigrants and the passage of Proposition 187 and Castro gets even more depressed.

“Maybe this documentary will make people open their eyes and reflect,” she said. “I hope so.”