Chicano Unbound
(Review of the film “Walkout”)
Questions of education access continue to impact the Latino
community. In the face of discouraging indicators that include continued low
test scores, high rates of truancy and academic desertion (in 2011 the Latino
high school graduation rate was 67.7 percent, behind that of “Whites” at 83.4
percent and “Asians” at 89.4 percent) and low representation in university
enrollment, there have been continued initiatives to try to combat these
problems. There have been legal, financial and cultural proposals that have
been considered, and they are part of an overall debate about the need for
educational reform.
There has been legal recourse, as evident in the actions of
the ACLU that, in conjunction with parents, has brought attention to the issue
of inequitable school conditions, in particular, to the assertion that “high
poverty” school in California are denying students sufficient “learning time”.
(http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/05/29/316701934/aclu-sues-california-for-equal-learning-time)
Politicians have also sought to address the situation of low performance school
and advocated for “takeover” initiates to wrest control of schools from
perceived ineffective school administrators and personnel. There has also been another
avenue evident in the legislation such as that introduced by former state
senator Gloria Romero, whose “Open Enrollment Act” of 2010 allows students to
transfer out of lowest-performing schools, but has been little used to date. (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/parents-647074-school-districts.html) And, in an era of burgeoning charter school
enrollment, there has been other approaches, evident for example in the attempt
to create a curriculum that more fully engages Latino students by accessing
elements of their cultural background, such as is evident in the Semillas del
Pueblo Charter school of Los Angeles. This particular school takes a position
of cultural advocacy that promulgates notions of identity influenced by the
Chicano movement of the 60s and 70s, and features bilingual instruction in
Nahuatl and a community approach of empowerment and engagement that reveals the
influence of cultural advocates such as the historian Rodolfo Acuña, who has
pioneered a framework of oppositional identity that is evident most notably in his work Occupied America.
They had to fight to keep their doors open, but were ultimately successful. (http://www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/2014/11/14/40329/how-an-el-sereno-charter-school-fought-for-and-won/)
Conditions have changed in the intermediate years ever since
the landmark lawsuit of 1947, Méndez vs. Westminster School Board, once that
preceded the famous case Board versus the Board of Education from 1954. With regards to the former, which dealt with
school segregation practiced against children of Mexican origin in California,
a group of parents filed suit in the forties to challenge the decision not to
allow their children to attend the local schools. The decision had to do with
the assignation of racial identity, and the fact that one group of
Mexican-origin children were lighter-skinned and looked more European, but
their cousins, who were darker-skinned, were denied entry, and told they would
have to attend a special school for Mexicans. The fathers of these family
members filed suit, and on Feb. 18, 1946, the finding was made that segregated
schools were an “unconstitutional denial of equal protection”. The original conditions had formed part of
cultural attitudes enshrined in a legal matrix that were geared to portraying
those of Mexican background as unfit or unsuitable, and was evident in a
pattern of exclusion that was illustrated in the case of the denial Timoteo
Andrade’s petition to become a naturalized citizen based on his testimony that
he was “a pure-blooded Mexican”, neither of the “original Aztec race in Mexico”
nor of the Spanish “race” of Europe. (The presiding judge, T.S. Maxey,
ultimately rules that he was eligible for citizenship, based not on reasons of
racial classification, but on the clauses regarding collective naturalization
in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.) Both cases illustrate a policy of
exclusion that reflected ongoing racial conceptions inherited from the 19th
century.
The film Walkout (2006) chronicles the legacy of these ideas
as embedded in cultural and institutional framework of this country. It focuses
on a moment in the educational struggle of the Latino community, and on a
period of political struggle. It is set in the year 1968, in the schools of
East Los Angeles, and it dramatizes the situation of poor and working class
students of primarily Mexican background who became aware of the educational
inequities in their own schools. As dramatized in this film, these public high
schools were considered mainly holding grounds for students who, in their vast
majority, failed to obtain their diplomas. It highlights the journey of one
student, Paula Crisostomo, of mixed Mexican-Filipino background, who comes into
contact with Chicano ideology and its promulgation of a new identity.
Paula, played by Alexa Vega, is an above-average student who
is about to graduate from Lincoln High School. She comes into contact with a
high school teacher by the name of Sal Castro, played by Michael Peña, who has
been energized by the new ideology of liberation that permeated the
revolutionary culture of the 1960s. Mr. Castro seeks to question an official
historical narrative that is maintains is based on an ideology of erasure and
exclusion, negatively affecting minority groups and specifically those of
Mexican ancestry. He tries to engage his students who seemed easily distracted
or indifferent by their school experience, one that seems foreign to them, with
teachers and administrators who by and large appear indifferent to questioning
these norms. In fact, as their teacher prods them into accepting the need to
rewrite history, many of his students openly scoff. The question, then, is who
is ready to receive his message?
The school conditions that are dramatized in this film
reflect a mentality that more closely parallels the prison guard dynamic.
Students are punished for any use of Spanish, and are paddled in front of the
class in humiliation fashion, as a form of intimidation. They are also subject
to the assignment of janitorial duties as punishment, needled and abused in one
notable sequence that leads to an escalation of tension and the inevitable
backlash. They are also forced to tolerate racist comments from their teachers,
in addition to low expectations wherein most of them are shunted into tracks
that are vocational and vary rarely college-track. These conditions are
dramatized in other ways that bring the crushing weight of these policies into
dramatic focus, for they are treated as a suspect underclass, even denied
access to bathrooms during lunch breaks while others schools are much more
expansive and inclusive in outlook, a contrast that is elaborated in another
sequence where the students are taking outside to see “how the other half
lives”.
The charismatic teacher Sal Castro, a young and impassioned leader
but also a careful strategist, is a figure barely tolerated by the
establishment himself, a troublemaker who, it is said in the film, had been reassigned
to Lincoln High School as a disciplinary action for having supposedly incited his
students to political awareness at Belmont High School. He is portrayed as a
rebel, a father figure and a friend, a tactician and a go-between who lives in
both worlds, in those of power (he knows who to approach on the School Board as
well as in the principal’s office) as well as who to reach out to among his
students. He encourages them to question their conditions and at times comes
across as a bit of a wise-ass as he challenges them to come to terms with what
it means to identify themselves as Chicanos (an action that carries with it an
inevitable political dimension). As Gregory Rodriguez has summed up, was
impelled by the political consciousness of a select group: “The emerging
Chicano Movement was in large part driven by an identity crisis. The sentiment
that inspired many young politically conscious Mexican Americans was similar to
that which had moved so many young whites and blacks to action in the 1960s:
alienation.” (p. 204, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds)
This represented a big hurdle for many of them, and it was
long been noted that the awareness and acceptance of group identity was a
construct that was consciously formulated only in the latter half of the 20th
century. People of Mexican origin had long been held to be too fragmented by
class, by culture, by region and by ideas of cultural affiliation, and their racial
impurity, their notion of an essential mestizaje
that contrasted with the absolute categories that prevailed among in American
and Western ideologies. People of Mexican heritage were more comfortable
identifying themselves as “Mexicanos”, and not as “White” (ethnic Europeans or
Anglos Saxons) or “Blacks” or other headings or categories, something that has been
noted by in responses to the US Census questionnaires, which typically demanded
a clear-cut racial label. This was evident in the very terms that they used to
describe themselves, with some opting for Mexican-American, others for Hispanic,
others for the term Mexican, for Spanish-American, and still others for Latino,
American, or in a supremely individualistic notion, the personal pronoun that
insisted that they were all just individuals (just another “I”).
The term “Chicano” has long been in use in the community,
but it had been pejorative, and had a class association that precluded its
identification with social or class progress. It was reserved for those who
were lower class, a group to whom were attributed all manner of social pathologies,
and thus, not a term in which they could feel pride. It was a subsequent
generation of educated and politically conscious Mexican Americans who would
rescue the term and apply it to an ideology that was collective and redemptive,
ushering in a political movement in the 1960s that drew inspiration from other
movements of colonial liberation. In the United States the term was used by
organizer Rodolfo “Corky” González, who in 1969 used it to christen a new
movement. This moment of awakening is dramatized in a lyrical passage in the
film, where the students gather together and listen with rapt attention, then
perform a sort of line dance (a dance of collective union) at a student youth
conference held by the California coast (a location that is both idyllic as
well as redemptive, in that it suggests a sort of baptism) and that was
preceded by a Chicano homily, the recital Corky Gonzalez’s seminal poem “I am
Joaquín”.
The fact is that the students begin to see that they are
living under conditions that are unequal and oppressive, forcing them to
recognize that they share a common bond. Even Paulina, whose father refers to
her derisively as a “Chilipina” (Chicana-Filipina), and who had seemed destined
to escape the fate of her friends who chose weren’t as studious as she was and
who had been told by their counselors that they should aspire to be secretaries
or skilled labor, not educated professionals, has what one may term her own
awakening. (In many ways one can see as a product of guilt, something she feels
as she nears graduation and contemplates having to leave behind her friends who
won’t be joining her in college, as well as the difficulties and divisions in
her own family, as she contemplates leaving behind her suffering Chicana mother,
played by Laura Harring, who fits the mold of a passive and sufriente “Guadalupe”
that is at the heart of Mexican matriarolarchy, the cult of the suffering
Virgin Mother). Paulina is in search, then, for a family that she can redeem,
if not her own, then another one which is cohesive and inspiring in a way that
her own family is not, engaged in a cause, not resigned to perpetual suffering.
She finds this family in a group of activist Chicanos (may
we call them her fellow apostles, with the teacher Sal Castro cast in the role
of Jesus?), and they begin to formulate a list of demands. They want changes in
their school, are at a loss as to how to begin. Should they have faith in the
system? Can they use peaceful means, or will they be forced to consider the
other approach, the one advocated by a group of Brown Berets that represent the
other side of the pendulum, the fighters who have taken to heart the
revolutionary methods of Che Guevara and insurgent movements in the rest of the
world and are inspired by the forceful tactics and ideology of the Black
Panthers? Will it come to that, a revolutionary struggle, or can they carry out
their revolution in the classrooms using the means at their disposal, writing
articles, presenting petitions, trying to awaken a passive community? There is
the fear that they could be termed subversive and persecuted, the way the Black
Panthers were, for that group fed the anxieties of a middle-class America
trying to come to terms with what for them was a troubling Civil Rights movement
that was the natural outcome of a troubled and violent legacy that had been
contained (although it was still violent and degrading, as witnessed by the
effects of the Jim Crow apparatus in the south or the systematic suppression of
Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest). The outlaw (or freedom
fighter) has ever become the martyr, as evident even then in the immediate
temporal period of the film, with the assassination of Martin Luther King in
April of 1968. Perhaps it was the foreshadowing of another Watts riot to come,
conditions that we may say persist even now, with the fear and anxiety on the
part of mainstream America that accompanied the unrest provoked in Ferguson,
Missouri and in New York City with the killings of unarmed black men.
There is a progressive dynamic of frustrated engagement that
leads to new actions, as the engaged Chicanos try to present their demands but
are ignored or dismissed. Conditions come to a boil, and the students are
forced to consider an extreme tactic: a walkout. The dramatic tension is
portrayed in effective fashion, but one must say, in a fairly condensed and
straightforward way that somehow one imagines doesn’t capture the messiness of
the moment, but is an artistic license. There are internal debates by the
student organizers, and worries they express that scenarios that seem very real
for us even now, with questions such as: What if we stage a revolution, and no
one joins in? Will the only recourse be to armed struggle and not discourse?
What will it take to engage the rest of the students, so that they finally
break through the wall of apathy and fear that are part and parcel of the
perception of powerlessness, and try to fight the power that seems so
monolithic, so entrenched, so intimidating (the LAPD sends swarms of police
officers to surround the schools, and the students are threatened repeatedly with
arrest and expulsion) so pervasive and, ultimately, so ordinary? (There are
unresolved power dynamics at play even in Paulina’s family, for her father is
an angry and intimidating figure in his own right who not only rails against
agitators, but who doesn’t believe in questioning power, affirming in a boxing
analogy that whoever steps into the ring can expect a pounding. This as he
scowls and berates his wife and daughter, the mirror image of what the police
do with the student protestors or the administrators do when the disdain their
students.)
There are other forces undermining them as well. There is
the fact that they know that they have an informant among their group, someone
who has been feeding information to the police, for they become aware that not only
are the dates of their planned walkout actions known in advance by them, but
also the schools that have been enlisted to participate. The activists know that they are being
surveilled, with police cars openly stationed around their hangouts and
harassment of their leaders as they attend their meetings, as well as photos being
taken of them in plain view. Who is the informant, and will this drive them
apart in mutual suspicion? In the end, they are left to reclaim a spirit of
cohesion in service to an ideology of peaceful resistance, trying to change the
mentality not only of their own fellow students but also of a city that seems
to be riven by its own fears, in this tumultuous decade.
The protests come to a boil, in the tension-filled second
half of the film that reveals how the process of intimidation and suppression
serve to challenge their faith in the process. Throughout it all they have the
steadying presence of teacher Sal Castro, who faces his own dangers and who
comes across as an immensely appealing and redemptive figure, an everyday
revolutionary who doesn’t seek the limelight and who, towards the end, after
having been arrested and imprisoned (their Judas is revealed in this sequence)
leaves the jail after having posted bail, resurrected as it were, and elevating
him to the status of Chicano icon. (The real Sal Castro passed away in 2013.)
The film presents, then, a narrative of personal as well as
collective awakening on the part of a community that sought to makes its
presence felt and overcome a cycle of powerlessness. It is structured as a
redemptive drama (I have highlighted the biblical parallels), presenting as it
were a struggle that was waged in the face of long odds, for even when the
student protestors face the prospect of utter defeat, with their leaders
arrested and charged with serious felonies, and the movement seemingly having
been frustrated by the machinery of power, they find strength in the
recognition of having achieved a collective identity. There is also the element
of personal redemption introduced as well, although this bit comes across as a
little cloying in its sentimentality, in the way in which mother and daughter
are united and the mother is redeemed by taking pride and supporting her
daughter. It is maybe a little saccharine, and as with the dialogue that seems
a little too polished and literary (the screenplay was written, after all, by
Victor Villaseñor), and the impossibly noble student activists who don’t show
any failings and who are thus almost one-dimensional, this strikes one as being
a heavily idealized treatment of this historical episode. Perhaps this was
necessary to appeal to a wider audience, although we are aware that there is a
fair bit of mythologizing taking place, and that Hollywood imposes its own
structures, those that include the proverbial happy ending. (We are reminded of
the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, that is set just ten years after the event
depicted in this film, and which seem to indicate that conditions didn’t
change, schools were continuing to fail their students in the East LA region
and it was up to another redemptive figure, the depoliticized master motivator
Jaime Escalante, to rescue his students.)
As Paulina exclaims towards the end, while it may appear
that the movement was doomed to failure, in reality it has already won, for it
ushered in a process of community awakening, with the coming to power of a
whole generation of Chicano politicians (although they didn’t always prefer to
use that label, bidding as they did to appeal to a wider electorate; such was
the case with Antonio Villaraigosa, the recent mayor of Los Angeles). The truth
is all around her, as storyboarded in the film. She is at the county jail, but
she is surrounded by her peers and by members of the community, everyone has
come together in a cross-generational reunion, to celebrate the collective “we”
of a Chicano community that has awoken and finally broken aside the barriers
that were placed in its way.
Up to now, the movie prominently featured images of keys and
chains and fences and locks (remember the school bathrooms that weren’t
available to Chicano students during lunch time, or the way Paulina has to
sneak into her house after each meeting because she can’t go through the front
door late at night, or the students jumping over the chain link fences that
surround their schools?), and what is evident is that this metaphor of
constraint segue ways one of liberation.
This film presents the narrative of the Chicano unbound.
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