Numerous student speakers rocked the normally sedentary neighborhood around City Hall with a voluble warning that rocketed up and down the soon-busy streets:
“As Latinos, we resent being treated as second-class citizens,” the message went. “H.R. 4437 (one of the bills) will only make things worse. Our parents came here to be free. Brown, black, all colors. All people should be equal. We are not. We demand to be treated as equals.”
Impressively organized and disciplined, every student visible was on multiple message. Each motivated, enthused marcher displayed enough reserve energy to conduct a one-person rally, if necessary.
A smattering of school administrator-types were thinly distributed around the perimeter of the demonstrators. Several said they were there to maintain order and insure proper decorum. In each case, they emphasized they had nothing to do with the march or the reasons for it.
Student organizers indicated they had been planning this rally since last Saturday night, when the embers of the record-breaking march in downtown Los Angeles, for the same cause, were beginning to fade.
There Went the Weekend
Students said they were working furiously through the weekend to make sure each leader had a respectable army of followers in his or her wake.
Some classmates did not get the word until arriving on campus on Monday morning. Numerous students said they made spur of the moment decisions to abandon their classes for the day. When they walked out, they were not exactly sure how their day was going to be structured or where they would end up. They just knew they had to go.
Several students also said they were warned that punishment would be awaiting them when they returned. But they professed not to be worried. “Whatever it is,” girls and boys said, “it will be worth it to make this statement.”
As grimly determined as the estimated three hundred and fifty marchers were, they also were entirely upbeat. While repeatedly expressing anger over the plight of their class and culture in America, there was not a trace of mean-spiritedness in the air. Only the skies were cloudy, not the pointy-edged messages.
Alternately breaking into high volume Spanish and English, as the mood struck them, they waved the flag of Mexico and the flags of other Latin American countries along with home-drawn banners. Occasionally, they raised a poster or shouted an epithet that did not make it past the censors for this family newspaper.
Never, however, did they suffer from a paucity of melodious support.
Orchestrated, it wasn’t. Timely it was.
A Symphony of Horns
For hours, drivers passing City Hall on both sides of Culver Boulevard heartily honked their car horns, leaving no doubt about who they were supporting.
Nearby, a bemused police officer who insisted that his name not be used, said the unusual Downtown scene was laced with juxtaposed irony.
With a chuckle, he recalled how several drivers were ticketed a year and a half ago in a huge controversy on Veterans Day. At the intersection of Jefferson Boulevard and Overland, drivers were cited for honking their horns to signal agreement with anti-war marchers from West L.A. College.
On the occasion of the birthday of Cesar Chavez, the late hero of farm workers and labor unions, the demonstration was the liveliest, most spectacular political rally anyone around City Hall had witnessed in years — maybe ever.
Armed with admirably clarion voices that must have bounced to every border of Culver City, the student marchers, bearing an array of homemade signs and Latin flags, blended their voices in rising unison.
Most young men and women who addressed the patient, determined crowd identified themselves as first generation Americans. Almost without exception, they were articulate enough to be veteran members of the Toastmasters Club.
Bixby Spreads ‘em Out
Police Capt. Scott Bixby, who had strategically deployed about fifteen officers around the southwest corner of City Hall, at the intersection of Culver Boulevard and Duquesne, could not remember any similar rally.
Cautiously, the Police Dept. dispatched officers, but in barely noticeable trickles.
In a passive, almost but not quite inferential way, the officers were not taking any chances. Students may have been remotely aware of their presence, but no one wanted to risk challenging the law.
Although no announcement was issued by authorities, and no known attempt was made by the students, police were determined that the interior of City Hall was not going to be breached.
A small cordon of three officers, which later tripled, was posted before the iron gates of the inner entrance.
They stood there as a silent reminder, as casually as if they were observing playground activity.
Police cars were lined up on Duquesne, beside City Hall, as a mute but unmistakable message that law enforcement was poised.
Out front, on Culver, one of the busiest traffic stretches in the city, one police car was posted in the roadway, and several officers were distributed about.
As soon as the students settled in at the front of City Hall, police officers began appearing, though not in a menacing manner.
As cheering, arm-waving, honking drivers suddenly began to materialize, going east on Culver Boulevard, past City Hall, traffic officers closed off the inside lane of the boulevard, from one block west to the middle of the City Hall property.
Whether or not the rally was scripted, the conduct of the students throughout several hours of intermittent speeches and cheers was nearly faultless.
Knotted together — tightly and militantly — by a smoking-strong cause, the students, who appeared to be overwhelmingly but not entirely Latino, were instantly bonded.
Many of them knew each other, and strangers soon broke down walls that exist between people who don’t know each other.
They may have streamed in from separate and periodically competitive high schools, but they drew together as if they were family, and a few demonstrators used that term.
Meet a Lead Organizer
Oscar Vargas, self-identified as a principal organizer of the demonstration, is a twelfth-grader at Culver City High.
Before talking to a reporter, Mr. Vargas, wearing a white tee shirt with a homemade message covering the entire front of it, scanned the crowd, and did what a good leader does. His searching eyes thoroughly covered the crowd, seeking to make certain everyone’s conduct was within bounds.
Shouting to make himself heard over the din of cheers and chants of milling, spirited students, Mr. Vargas said at least three hundred students marched out of Culver High. But if Venice and Hamilton were as well represented as each school claimed, somebody got lost during the earlier innings of the rally.
He said that it was “the right” of Culver students to walk off campus and stage a valid protest.
“They let us know what our consequences would be if we left, and we are here now.”
Mr. Vargas’ stature on campus is enhanced by dint of holding the office of president of Latinos Unidos, which, he said, “promotes higher education for minorities. We make sure everybody is treated fairly, equally, according to the law. We try to protect everybody, including immigrants, because this economy does not value what it gets from Latinos and a lot of illegals who come here to work.”
Mr. Vargas said that “it’s hard to say” whether he believes immigrants should be able to walk freely into the United States without documentation or other paper work. “I know there would be chaos if everybody who wanted to come in were allowed to enter.
“If everyone who worked with the crops were legal, though, they would have to get paid at least minimum wage. If that happened, it would cause the price of vegetables to go to $10 a pound. So we need legals and illegals to be working here.”
As for his motivation, Mr. Vargas said he was prepared for this momentous moment by being taught throughout his school years that “the U.S. is a democracy. Majority rules, minorities have rights, and the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. But I don’t see that happening. In the Constitution, it promises equal rights for everybody. But I don’t see that.”
Mr. Vargas said many minorities are denied equal treatment when law enforcement officers approach. “There is plenty of racial profiling,” he charged. “It’s crazy. It’s ridiculous how minorities get stopped. Statistics show that every single group does the same amount of crime, including the whites.
“But, somehow, it is only the Latinos and blacks who get pulled over.
“I’ve been stopped. I was jogging. All I was trying to do was exercise. I was not the only one running that night, but somehow I was the only one stopped.”
Mr. Vargas said many more students would have joined the rally but they were “scared away” by the threat of discipline from administrators.
Speaking of Illegal Immigration
From the well of the demonstration, near the southerly footing in front of the façade of the Original City Hall, the sounds of cheering but angry students were deafening — they would say in a pleasant way.
Maricella Gutierrez, a sophomore at Culver High, said she was marching because her father and her grandfather, both immigrants, came here as young men, and she is proud of their considerable accomplishments.
She said that most immigrants come to America for the most honorable of reasons, “to send money back to Mexico. People in Mexico are so poor.”
Ms. Gutierrez said she did not find out about the planned walkout until eight Monday morning. “I went to other classrooms to encourage other guys to join us,” she said.
After an initial glitch when students attempted to walk away from campus, she said that eventually they were able to leave “because Security helped us.”
Leslie Vallarta, a junior at Culver High, found out about the rally during her A.P. English class, and she, too, was busy recruiting marchers. She joined the throng of protestors at Saturday’s rally in downtown Los Angeles. “It felt beautiful,” Ms. Vallarta said. “We had all kinds of minorities there, Asians, blacks, Latinos, whites. We had every race possible.
“I am very involved in minority work,” she said. “It is not fair that all of a sudden America wants to turn its back on us.
Ms. Vallarta said she did not regard illegal immigration as a sizable problem for the United States because “they come here to do backbreaking work no one else will do.
“Instead of making illegals criminals, we should be able to think of other ways to solve the problem.”
A perfectly peaceful march, the effect of the orderly political pep rally was amplified because of the time of day. At 10:30, the arrival of hundreds of shouting students was a jolting kick to the solar plexus of Downtown, which always is rubbing the sleep from its crusted eyes at that hour.
Intended as the student response to last Saturday’s unprecedented rally in downtown Los Angeles that may have attracted three-quarters-of-a-million marchers, this edition was raucous enough. And like the L.A. rally, the Culver City marchers made good behavior a priority because they knew, or hoped, many were watching.
School District Answers Students
Late yesterday afternoon, the School District issued the following response to students who walked away from campus to participate in a political rally:
Several hundred students from Culver City High School and Culver Park High School today took to the local streets to protest federal legislation that calls for building a seven-hundred-mile long wall along the Mexican border and making felons of illegal immigrants.
While the School District has always condoned and supported freedom of expression on its campuses, we do not condone students leaving campus.
Throughout the day on both campuses, History and Social Studies teachers have been discussing the issues surrounding the proposed legislation and exploring students’ opinions and concerns.
The students who chose, instead, to leave campus missed this important dialogue.
The School District is proud of the many ways in which it offers its students an opportunity for freedom of expression on campus. In fact, many students participated in a protest today on campus in the Culver City High School Peace Garden. On Friday, high school students celebrated Cesar Chavez’s birthday with Spring Fest on the Culver City High School campus. Later this week, the Black Student Union and Latinos Unidos will he holding a joint assembly at Culver City High School to promote diversity.
The School District urges students to explore these avenues instead of leaving campus. We remind parents and students that our teachers and administrators have an open-door policy, and we are always willing to work with students to express their views.
