On Friday, March 1, 1968, students at Woodrow Wilson High School walked out of their classrooms in a spontaneous and unprecedented act of civil disobedience to protest systemic discrimination against Mexican American students. Many of the protesters identified politically as Chicanas and Chicanos and demanded immediate changes to a curriculum they believed steered students into industrial shop and home economics classes instead of college preparatory courses. This tracking system was presented as a form of academic racial profiling that contributed to educational failure, with more than half of Wilson's Mexican American students dropping out of school. Within one week, 15,000 Mexican American students from Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Belmont, and other high schools across Los Angeles joined the protest against social and educational injustice. Student defiance eventually led to important school reforms, though many students were unjustly beaten and arrested by police officers, while others were suspended or expelled. The walkouts became a seminal moment in the history of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, and El Sereno and East Los Angeles still faced formidable obstacles to providing children, including many who identified as Dreamers, with the educational, technological, and artistic skills needed to succeed in the new century as the struggle, la causa, continued.
