Breaking the Fast: Liberation through Education, Militancy and mobilization by the Mexican community in defense of Chicana & Chicano Studies at UCLA in 1993

UCLA alumni Marcos Aguilar and Minnie Ferguson who participated in a hunger strike in 1993 said at an event Tuesday they faced racial and cultural barriers as indigenous students.

The Eagle and the Condor Liberation Front, a student-led organization that promotes the unity of indigenous peoples, hosted an event to honor the 14-day sit-in and hunger strike in 1993 that led to the creation of the Chicana/o studies department. Indigenous peoples are those who first inhabited a specific area, despite any groups that have since settled in, occupied or colonized the region.

The event featured panelists who said they were frustrated that the university administration did not approve student proposals for the creation of a Chicano/a studies department in 1990.

In the spring of my sophomore year at UCLA, the administration threatened to close the Chicana/o Research Library. Chicana/o students planned an act of civil disobedience—a take-over and sit-in at the campus Faculty Center. I was eager to join, but was scheduled to work that morning. I asked my boss for permission to miss work to attend the rally. She looked me square in the eye and said yes, on two conditions: Don’t get your picture taken. And don’t get arrested.

A school threat received by school administration turned out to be a hoax.

The Hunger Strikes of 1993 are part of a legacy of Chicanx student resistance, one that secured spaces for Raza to be included. Many times this institutional and historical memory leaves us; for the dignity and respect of our Elders who participated in this time of tension, we mustn’t forget. As a community struggle, Raza students took it in their own means to propose what sustaining Xicana/o Studies would look like. It was a time where Chicana/o Studies stood at the edge of being cut completely, as well as its resources on the UCLA campus. The spirit and dedication for direct action was needed to put pressure on administration, to remind the university that they serve us -- the people.

"As the 25th anniversary of the hunger strike approaches, 200 students are enrolled in the major and 300 in the minor. Perhaps most impressive, more than 30 are pursuing Ph.D.s. These students, the academic leaders of the future, are a powerful sign of success for a department that nearly disappeared." Thousands more have taken classes over the last quarter century. The power of this movement was in our five-year process as undergraduate students of reframing Chicana/o Studies as a search for, and affirmation of, native knowledge as Indigenous Peoples - not Hispanics and not Latinos. This was a spiritually militant movement - connected to a community and guided by elders. Those who fasted and those who protested and those who were arrested in 1993 became catalysts for the foundations we had established exhausting all bureaucratic barriers Chuck Young and his cabal placed before our community and the decades of movement before that. However, we did not defend what existed (the NACS sanctioned version of ivory tower scholarly minutia) - we sowed and defended a vision of what Chicana/o Studies COULD BECOME...a center of community-based millenarian Indigenous scholarship.

IT'S PAST TIME FOR A CHANGE...American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) graduation rates have been on a downward trend since 2008 and analysis of the socio-economic reasons driving it is ongoing. As The Nation recently found, “Punitive discipline, inadequate curriculum, and declining federal funding created an education crisis.” CALIFORNIA IS NO EXCEPTION! IN CALIFORNIA PUSH OUT RATES FOR AMERICAN INDIAN STUDENTS ARE OVER TWICE AS HIGH AS ALL WHITE DEMOGRAPHIC GROUPS.

Pointing to their history, some descendants of Genízaros are coming together to argue that they deserve the same recognition as Native tribes in the United States. One such group in Colorado, the 200-member Genízaro Affiliated Nations, organizes annual dances to commemorate their heritage.

Semillas Community Schools is happy to announce our partnership with After-School All-Stars, Los Angeles on the 21st Century application. If successful, this award will allow us to provide our students with a comprehensive after-school program at: Anahuacalmecac International University Preparatory of North America K-12 a State Board of Education authorized, autonomous, public, community-based charter school.

Anahuacalmecac World School featured in IB World magazine Special Issue: “Semillas instigated a revolution in LA.”

The National Urban Indian Family Coalition (NUIFC) http://nuifc.org/ HAS RELEASED a national paper on Urban Indian Education including Anahuacalmecac World School.

The NUIFC is releasing a national paper on Urban Indian Education written by Dr. Joe Hobot and this webinar is kicking it off! If you can't make it, it will be on Youtube after it airs on Thursday. Please join us as we celebrate and recognize indigenous educational resistance across the continent. Anahuacalmecac World School Semillas Community Schools has been highlighted in this upcoming report on education and Native Americans/Indigenous Peoples in the US. Thank you Janeen Comenote and Chrissie Castro !! PLEASE NOTE: 11AM PST (2PM EST)

On Monday, as people across the country celebrated the controversial Columbus Day holiday, young Native Americans in Los Angeles marked Indigenous Peoples Day for the first time in their city.