From sbsun.com:
When Sal Castro looks back on the 40 years since he led historic walkouts with Chicano students in Los Angeles, he sees a mixed bag.
On the one hand, more Mexican-Americans are graduating from college, earning better wages and gaining business and political stature.
On the other hand, Chicano culture and history remain underplayed in the media and in educational texts, he said.
And war still sends men and women home in flag-draped coffins.
“Many of our kids from the barrio were coming home in flag-draped coffins (during Vietnam),” Castro told a rapt crowd of mostly students. “Sad to say, many are coming home the same way from Iraq 40 years later.”
Castro, a former East Los Angeles teacher who was arrested and later exonerated for his role in spearheading a series of student protests known as the “Chicano Blowouts” in 1968, headlined a symposium-style event Tuesday at Cal State San Bernardino.
Titled “Brown and Proud: 40 years of Chicano activism,” the afternoon event drew a student-dominated, multiethnic crowd of nearly 400 with Castro as the headline speaker. The event was put together by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences in part to raise the relatively low profile of the school’s ethnic studies program.
Castro, a retired Los Angeles teacher and U.S. military veteran, drove dual themes - one focused on the Mexican-American contribution to U.S. history and another focused on multiethnic unity.
Tags: art, Business, Education, history, mexican, school
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