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  • Blowout! Sal Castro & the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice
  • Jennifer L. Cullison
Blowout! Sal Castro & the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice. By Mario T. García and Sal Castro. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 367 pp. Hardbound, $34.95.

In Blowout!, Mario García focuses on East Los Angeles educator Sal Castro as a great of Chicano history, since Castro played a central role in the 1968 East L.A. walkouts. With Castro as his co-author in the testimonio tradition, García wraps together almost ten years of interviews to retell the story of the walkouts, primarily from the perspective of the man who acted as an adult organizer and mentor to the student leaders. In first setting up Castro’s life experience, García helps the reader understand why this charismatic teacher wanted students to fight for educational justice and thus how they began the first and largest manifestation of the urban Chicano movement. This oral history of the walkout is the most important since Dolores Delgado Bernal’s 1998 study of Chicana leadership in the events (“Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized,” Frontiers 19 [1998]: 113–142).

By narrating Castro’s childhood and early teaching career, the early chapters of Blowout! document the roots and outcomes of Castro’s activism. Castro, born in 1933 in East L.A., was among the “Mexican American” generation. As a child, he experienced racial discrimination daily and witnessed the 1930s repatriations and the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. In Catholic and underfunded East L.A. public schools (many of which were segregated “Mexican schools”), he and students of Mexican heritage were shamed for using Spanish and tracked into vocational courses, which for most meant being pushed out to Mexican wage labor. Following military service, Castro started college and finally decided to pursue teaching, in order to change the system. From his first years as an educator, Castro confronted the inequities in staffing and student leadership. By 1964, he was at Lincoln High in East L.A. organizing students, while fighting the predominantly white, middle-class staff who were accustomed to corporeal punishment, English-only classrooms, and Eurocentric tracking, curriculum, and assessment systems for the predominantly Mexican American student body.

The heart of Blowout! details Castro’s involvement in the walkouts as mentor and motivator to students questioning the public education system. Since 1963, he had been working to develop ethnic pride and Paulo Freire’s concept of conscientización (consciousness of individual experience within a subaltern sociopolitical context) among students at the Mexican American Youth Leadership Conference. Citing inspiration from civil rights activism, Castro decided in 1968 to organize a walkout with Conference alumni, other local high school and college students, the Brown Berets, faculty, parents, and the emerging Chicano underground press. The “blowouts,” as student leader John Ortiz called the walkouts, commenced on Friday, March 1. They carried through the next week and involved fifteen high schools and middle schools. Though the [End Page 338] protests were nonviolent, authorities labeled the activists “dissidents” and the protests “insurrections” and put them down forcefully. Castro and twelve others were arrested and charged with “conspiracy” to commit misdemeanors, including disturbing the schools. Vital pressure from the Mexican-heritage community eventually caused the school board to respond to thirty-eight of the students’ fifty-five demands.

The last section of the testimonio gives a sense of legacy to the walkout by conveying Castro’s thoughts about modern education. Though some reforms were effected (and some significantly so), for Castro the situation did not change enough. After waiting two years to be cleared of “conspiracy” charges and working for five years to secure his teaching credentials against censure, he settled into teaching at Belmont in 1973. Until his retirement in 2003, Castro was an educational critic of busing and charter schools (which he believed mis-appropriated funds needed for improving the inner-city schools) and of bilingual education (which he found lacking crucial cultural components by the 1990s).

Overall, Blowout! represents an important contribution to the study of the East L.A. walkouts of 1968. It not only is a critical source on the experience of the man credited with inspiring the movement...

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