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Student walkouts against anti-immigrant
legislation spread across the country last week, setting a new
fighting example in the fast-growing movement for immigrant rights.
The walkouts caught on quickly
from city to city, with little or no central coordination. Everywhere,
students themselves took the lead--a further sign of the deep-seated
anger that has erupted against proposals by anti-immigrant politicians
to brand undocumented workers as felons and criminalize anyone
who assists them.
The desire to take a stand
against this racist scapegoating was evident in mass marches
that brought at least 1.5 million people into the streets across
the U.S. last month. Now the school walkouts have opened a new
front in the struggle.
The walkouts began on the Monday
after the 1 million-strong march through Los Angeles. Southern
California was the initial center of the demonstrations.
In LA itself, an estimated
40,000 students left school, marching through the streets and
blocking freeways around the area. Some schools tried to impose
a lockdown to avoid mass walkouts, but students defied threats
of disciplinary action throughout the week. "[F]or the small
group of students who instigated the walkouts, most of whom hadn't
been politically active, but were well-connected on campus and
online, it was a transformative week," the Los Angeles
Times wrote in an analysis.
In San Diego, schools across
the city were hit by the walkouts, with demonstrating students
gathering downtown for a rally outside San Diego Community College.
The walkouts were organized as students arrived for class. Demonstrators
marched, chanting, through their schools, and then through the
city to arrive downtown--some taking miles-long routes though
their communities and even alongside freeways.
After speeches outside the
college, plainclothes school district security guards tried to
convince students to board busses and return to school. Some
did, but most sat down on the lawn, chanting "Don't get
on!"
In Escondido, just north of
San Diego, high schoolers walked out of class and rallied in
the streets. But this expression of free speech was met by lines
of police who used pepper spray on protesters. At least 24 students
were arrested, and a few suffered abuse at the hands of the cops.
The walkouts continued through
the week across the Southwest. In Las Vegas, hundreds of students
walked out of classes, according to activists' reports.
By midweek, media attention
focused on Texas--the home not only of George Bush but other
right-wing Republicans who are pushing the vicious Sensenbrenner
bill.
In Dallas, students who left
schools across the city came together--traveling by car, truck,
bus and train--for a protest at City Hall. After rallying outside,
the students flooded into the building to disrupt a city council
meeting. Spontaneous protests took place in Fort Worth and other
cities across the state.
In the state capital of Austin,
students walked out at Del Torre High School--and then marched
15 miles, down a county highway and into the city, to rally with
other students from a dozen other schools outside the capitol
building.
The wave of walkouts reached
beyond the Southwest.
For example, on the other side
of the country, in the northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington,
D.C., walkouts snowballed through the week, culminating March
30 in a march through Arlington, Va., for a 1,500-strong rally
at the county courthouse. Students waved flags from their countries
of origin. Those without flags used markers to spell the names
of countries on their bodies.
Reports from activists said
the protests were organized mostly through word of mouth. In
many places, students relied on e-mails, text messaging and the
myspace.com community Web site to spread the word.
"All these politic officials
are trying to make their dreams come true by destroying ours,
AND THEY WILL, unless we do something about it!!" read a
call for a walkout in Orange County, Calif., posted on MySpace.
The appeal convinced more than 1,500 students to leave classes
at Garden Grove High School, according to the LA Times.
Another influence pointed out
by New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzales was an
HBO movie called Walkout that premiered last month. The
film depicts the 1968 school walkout by some 20,000 Chicano students
in Los Angeles against discrimination and racism.
The walkouts had an electrifying
effect on those who participated. "It was great to have
all of us unified, and fighting for something we believe in,"
said Stephanie, a lead organizer of the protests at Wakefield
High School in northern Virginia.
The students drew on their
knowledge of past struggles, but also developed tactics on the
spot. In LA, for example, the students who descended on City
Hall March 27 sat in on the front steps of the building.
They also had to contend with
the threatening presence of police. "Living in a low-income
neighborhood, you just don't have a really good image of the
police," one student told the Times. "People
thought we were going to get arrested. But I told them: 'No.
We are exercising our right to free speech.'"
In the aftermath of the walkouts,
many schools are threatening students with discipline. In the
north Texas town of Ennis, for example, as many as 130 high school
and junior high students were suspended, which bars them from
attending the prom. In Houston, a principal at a school where
88 percent of students are Latino was disciplined for flying
the Mexican flag below the U.S. and Texas flags.
And Steven Graham, one of the
leaders of the walkout at Stoney Point High School near Austin,
says that police who had escorted them to the Thursday demonstration
outside the capitol building the next day tackled them, forced
them on a bus and returned them to school. Some students were
given $250 citations for truancy.
Nevertheless, the protests
have had a huge impact. Everywhere, the protesters were predominantly
Latino, but Ben Miner, a high school junior in Austin, said he
wanted to demonstrate to show solidarity with his Mexican and
Mexican American friends. "It's racism all over again,"
he told a reporter.
Like in other cities, several
teachers were at the protest in Austin outside the capitol to
support their students. "It's pretty ironic--we were learning
about Gandhi all this week," Lacey Glover, a geography teacher,
told the Austin-American Statesman. "Most of my students
either are from a Latin American country or their parents are,
and one of the things we talk about is the need to support our
kids. So that's why I'm here."
Cindy Beringer, Eugene Chigna,
Mike Corwin, Jon Van Camp and Laura Woodward contributed to this
report
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