Interview of Victoria Castro

This is Virginia Espino, and I’m interviewing Victoria Castro at her home in Alhambra, California. Thank you so much for agreeing to interview with me. I’m really looking forward to this session and the ones that come in the future. But I want to start with if you could tell me your birth date and then we’ll go into your family history, what you know about your genealogy.

Okay. I was born August 20, 1945, here in Los Angeles, and my father was born in Mexico, and my mother was born in El Paso and comes to Los Angeles and meets my father.

Do you know, for example, what kind of work they did and that kind of thing?

Absolutely. My mother worked just about all of her life. She was a seamstress, and somehow her later years, probably when she was about fifty, she started going to adult school, and then she landed up being a clerk for the Broadway, and so that was sort of nice. My father, his family, when they first came to California, they were migrant for a bit and they used to basically work out of Santa Paula. I’ve never verified it. I have a brother that does have all that history. He talks about he moved to Los Angeles and he started working in a furniture factory. So he was a furniture worker till he retired. I think one of the noted things is that for me, anyway, is that when he retired, he had not missed a day of work in forty years. So that was, like, you know. And he was a foreman at the end of his career. So they were always working and providing for us.

Do you have any knowledge of your grandparents or your great-grandparents?

I knew my grandmother on my father’s side, and my grandmother on my mother’s side. I do have a brother, George Castro, in San Jose, who has traced the family tree generations back, and we laugh because if we’re in a city that somebody lived, he’ll go visit the cemetery, he’ll go visit the church. So he goes back. We’ve asked him to do a seminar for us, because we’re talking several years back. My mother was basically illegitimate, and my Grandmother Pilar on her side—actually, I have, like, four or five aunts and uncles, and they have different last names, but we all sort of lived in the same area. I know my brothers have uncles that are younger than them. My mother just had shared with me that her father was José Gonzales, who, when they lived in El Paso, lived in Juarez, and that he was a well-to-do man in that area, and that his family did not accept that they were not married when she was conceived, so they forbid him to see my grandmother. My mother was, I believe, the oldest, so she also had that role of raising her siblings. Then she shared with me, when she was about fourteen or fifteen her mother continued to have children, and she was more or less raised by Uncle Joe. The last name was Chavez. She packs up her things and her grandmother’s things, and they moved to L.A. to live with our uncle, and so she comes on her own and so she’s been working since then. My father, traditional Catholic family. My grandmother, I remember, was one of those “Guadalupanas”, and I was going to be a nun until I was in junior high and I discovered boys. I was the only girl, so I was always attached to her and had to go Mass sometime from six a.m. to twelve noon and this kind of stuff. So, all the traditional Christmas holidays, going camping at the beach and all that, so a very structured family.

That’s interesting, considering your mother was the one who was raised without a father.

Yes, I think so. I mean, you know, there’s an interesting story. There’s three or four sisters, Chavez sisters, and the photos I look at, they look to be like very middle-class, the beautiful little gals, you know, like what you see of that era in Mexico with the pearls. My mother always had that little taste. So they couldn’t have come really from poverty poverty. But I’ve not dwelled into their history. I leave it to my older brother. He can tell you details, who was born where and the background. Very cultured in ways, but I believe my Grandmother Pilar (mother’s mom) was sort of the outcast, a woman way before her times, having different children with different men and that kind of stuff. [laughs]

That’s fascinating. So then your mother meets your father and they stay—

The story is silly. My mother and my father were both attending adult school at—I think it was then Lafayette (in Los Angeles). I don’t know what happened to Lafayette, but it was downtown and there was a Christmas dance. My mother tells the corny story that she was being introduced to my father, and he interrupts and says, “Oh, I know your name. Your name is Mary.” And she goes, “My name is not Mary.” He goes, “Yes, Merry Christmas.”

It’s like, “Oh, Mom, I would have walked away and never spoken to him again.” So that’s a cute little story how they met. Her name was Carmen. So they met, and I think my mother was seventeen or eighteen when they married, and my dad was nineteen or twenty, in that era. So he was two or three years older than her.

And they met here in Los Angeles?

Here in Los Angeles and raised all their children here, first located more in the downtown area off of Olympic, and then they move across the river into Boyle Heights. So then we all sort of grew up Boyle Heights.

So where do you fall in the—

I am the fourth. I have three older brothers, and there’s almost a three-year gap, and then I have a younger brother that’s like a four-year gap. So I’m the fourth child of five.

So what can you tell me about those early days when you were probably in elementary school? Were you in Boyle Heights at that point?

Yes, we were. In fact, we lived mostly on Euclid and Whittier, in that area. As I said, my mother worked, so I always had older brothers that were responsible for me. They were teenagers, and they had to come home and take care of me and my younger brother when we got out of school. My mother was a seamstress, so she had a lot of seasonal work, and so occasionally in between seasons she had a month or so home and then the season would—so she was home, and then she’d work, she was home, then she’d work, so that assisted that.

But being the only girl with four male siblings and my dad, I always say I was raised by five fathers, because my father was very traditional. Girls do this, boys do that, you don’t do this, you don’t do that. But it was sort of fun in the sense of at the family table I was equal in the sense my father started some silly conversation or political conversation and I could contribute. Or he would make fun of the English language. My older brothers were always very supportive of whatever, pushing me academically and things like that, but when it came to being a young lady, the first time I had a brother that saw me with lipstick, he made me wash my mouth. You know, sit up straight. Even at home you couldn’t—then girls wore dresses. You had to sit up, whatever. So I got a lot of that influence as well as their support for many things and endeavors. But I was twenty-one and had a twelve o’clock curfew because that’s the way my dad had my role set. So I always tell people I was involved in the Chicano Movement and I was fighting the revolution with a twelve o’clock curfew. [laughter] It was hilarious. I can’t do that.

That’s funny. The complexity of being a woman during those times when you could see there was a window opening, I would imagine. So how did the gender division break up in the home between your mom and dad? Did they have specific responsibilities?

Oh, yes. My mother was the head of the household financially, provided for us, bought our clothes and everything, and my father was the financial person. He worked. Friday, payday, he’d give her x amount of money, and then he would take x amount of money and enjoy himself Saturday, and then Sunday, sober up. So he was always a provider. We always had a roof over our head and food on the table. But my mother managed the money, to my knowledge, and our upbringing.

If you got referred to your father for—I never did. If the boys did, I don’t ever really remember that happening. My mother also was the disciplinarian. Although I look at my brothers now, he must have had a very positive influence on them, because they all know how to repair, electrical, plumbing. They put in cabinets in their house. So they had to get that from him, where I do recall my mother forcing me to sit on the porch and embroider and knit and sew or do something before I could go play with my brothers. So it was maintained that way. I wasn’t conscious of what my father’s influence was on my brothers, but it had to be there, and his influence on me was more of values of a young lady that had to be carried out by my mother.

So did you enjoy those things, embroidering and sewing and that kind of thing?

Not at the time.

I’m just wondering if—because I remember growing up myself and wanting to be more involved in helping my dad with the car, and that was not—like, if you would have suggested, “I want to learn how to build furniture,” or—

By the time I had a car, I had it the reverse. I had older brothers, so I recall the first time I got a flat tire, I called and one of my brothers comes. So I expect him to change the tire, and he says, “No, I’m going to show you how.” And I go, “Well, what’s this thing about having big brothers who know how to do things?”

Then another brother taught me how to at that time tune my car, the sparkplugs. So they tried, but it was funny to me, like, “I just want you to do it because you’re my older brother.”

They wanted you to have—it was almost like they were giving you power to be independent.

Yes. So when I talk about them being supportive, they were supportive of me almost being independent, and then that was like my mother’s push for education with me was so that I would get a good job and not be dependent on a man.

Did she tell you that?

She actually verbalized that when I was about sixteen or seventeen. She said, “All I want you to do is to have choices and not have to depend on a man.”

Did she talk to you about birth control and that kind of thing?

No, no, no. No sex talks like that.

That’s fascinating.

No, no.

That seems to be something that is not that common for that generation. Even today’s generation, still, it’s hard for Latinas.

Oh, no, I had none of that conversation. In fact, when I broke up with my first boyfriend, he was from Mexico, and his sister got married and I was in the wedding. My parents met his parents and everything, and my father just loved that family.

In fact, I remember I was afraid. My boyfriend, or the boy that was attracted to me at the time, wanted to take me to the prom, and I said, “No, I can’t go out.” But he had a very charming older sister who one Sunday appeared at my door to ask my father if her brother could take me to the prom. She charmed my father and got a yes.

Wow.

So when we broke up and I started to date again, my father told me, “I don’t like that other guy. You wait till Roy comes back.” “Dad, Roy’s not coming back.” But he said, “He will,” you know, because the second choice was not—-it was almost like the opposite of the first one. I was a little rebellious and I was over twenty-one at the time. So I was to marry into a traditional Mexican family.

Seems like your mom would do all the cooking and cleaning.

But she was also very good about all my brothers know how to mop, they know how to cook, and one of them even knew how to sew. So she, in her own way, made us all balance that. I didn’t get the carpentry. [laughs]

Right. But you got a sense that you weren’t restricted because you were a woman, for certain things.

Yes, yes.

Like skills and knowledge.

Yes.

So what about your first school experience? Did you have teachers that you felt were positive role models?

I only had one Mexican, Mr. Rodriguez in sixth grade, and then I don’t really recall. Miss Salazar, who was an art teacher in junior high. And then I really don’t recall being influenced by any Mexican or Latino teacher in high school. It was not there.

But when you were in elementary school, a lot of people talk about, well, just being treated unfairly, being punished for speaking Spanish, that kind of thing.

When I entered elementary school, my mother worked, so I had a Spanish-speaking babysitter. Both my parents were bilingual and very fluent English speakers. But since I had the influence of a babysitter, I entered not speaking English. The teacher—my mother shared this story with me—met with her and told her that it would be a hindrance and for them to only speak to me in English now at the home and to really promote the English. So I did struggle with language. Even as I exited high school, I was not a fluent writer. I hesitated to make a speech. I always had that, I guess, the benefits of not being bilingually educated and all that other—that’s why I always supported bilingual education, because I had been a product of being banned from speaking Spanish by the teacher, in the sense of them telling my parents that it would be a negative influence. And it was a negative influence, but not the way they described it. But my brothers were not cared for by a Spanish-speaking babysitter, and I remember being in kindergarten and that my brother Robert would come to the fence and ask me how it was going. Then I would tell them, “Well, so-and-so said this, and I don’t know what it means,” and he would have to translate for me. So I’d do that.

Then I remember one day telling him or telling one of them, “I don’t know what it means. This girl wants to know the color of my panties. What are panties?” He goes, “Calcones.” I go, “Oh!” So there’s those little memories that I wasn’t a fluent English speaker, but it was like I would have to go to my brothers. “What does this mean? What does this mean?” So I do have those kind of memories.

Did you feel like you didn’t fit in in other ways?

No, because elementary, junior high, and high school were Boyle Heights, and we were already the majority. So I was never a minority in a school. We were always Mexican Americans, Latinos, whatever. At that time, we used to just call ourselves Mexican. We were always the majority. So I went to school. So the first concept of me being a minority, I attended the first Mexican American Youth Leadership Conference, and I heard from other Mexican American students where they weren’t the majority at the school, and how they were treated socially. I was always, like, in that little leadership role and everything. But what I realized after that conference is when I went back, in a class of thirty-five there were only four or five Mexican students on the academic track. Then I remember my senior year, my brothers were in college already, and I was already told by them I was going to go to college, and going to the counselor and that old thing about I had already—knowing that I had a very strict father, I did my homework. I wanted to go to Mills College in San Francisco. It was an all-woman Catholic school.

Oh, that’s great. [laughs]

How could my father say no? How could my father say no? I went to my counselor, and I remember this insecurity on my part. She said, “Well, I think you should go to East L.A. College, and if you do well, then you can transfer to a four-year college.” I did not have the security to still seek out Mills, but I had the embarrassment of being told that, where I had my two brothers in college, and one’s working on a doctorate somewhere. So I lied. I dropped that (Mills), and me and my girlfriend went straight to Cal State L.A., got our scholarship—our application for admission on our own, and I was admitted to Cal State L.A., and I never shared that story with my brothers. And I had done my research. [laughs] How could my dad—Catholic, all-woman’s college.

You wanted to leave Los Angeles?

Yes, I wanted to. So it didn’t happen. [laughs] When I served on the Board of Education, I remember this young lady coming and asking for more opportunity, a Latina young lady from the Southgate area, and she shared the same story. I was just like—

Going to Mills?

No, no, no, no. The thing about being guided elsewhere than into a four-year college. “Go to a community college, and if you do well.” And how they didn’t encourage her. And she was seeking support to go to college. I don’t know who made her—maybe somebody told her, “You should go tell your story.” And thinking that is in the same sense still not being encouraged to attend—

Low expectations.

Low expectations.

Did you find that throughout your education? What elementary school did you go to?

I went to Euclid Ave. , and then I went to Hollenbeck Jr. High, and then I attended Roosevelt High School.

What was Hollenbeck like?

It was majority Mexican, blacks, and Japanese, and a sprinkling still of the Jewish community. So we were very multiethnic in junior high. But by the time I get to Roosevelt, the Jews had left. In fact, we had two Russian Jews, and they were blond, so we thought they were surfers, and they played the part. But they were Russian Jews from the Boyle Heights area. There was still a Japanese influence and the black influence. I think because my brothers were older and had attended UCLA, I always had their expectation for me to go to college. My parents were fine if I got out of high school. In fact, I think my father jokingly once said, “Why are you going to college?” I said, “I don’t know.” [laughs] At the time I didn’t really know, other than it was my expectation from my older brothers.

High expectations. I wonder—it’d be interesting to find out where they got that expectation, because they were going to school in a completely different era than yourself.

Oh, absolutely, and I actually have a brother, Dr. George Castro, who he makes me laugh, because he was the one that really took an interest in my education very early on, who says that attending UCLA and doing his doctoral work out of UC Riverside and some of his research at Dartmouth, that his college education was an insult to his intelligence. And he’s done some noted science work.

So I guess if they were in school today, they would be noted, my two older brothers, as gifted, where I would have been average. So I think that got them through college. Then my first brother, oldest brother, Tony, graduates from high school, goes to work for Sears, becomes a TV repairman, and marries young. Then my brother George goes to UCLA, and my brother behind him, Robert, Bobby—I think they’re maybe only fifteen months apart or something—also goes to UCLA. They used to attend UCLA on the bus from Boyle Heights.

They lived at home?

They lived at home. They lived at home, and they used to go on public transportation. They all have these stories when my father finally bought them a car, and they used to travel, and how it’d break down, and all these funny stories. So Robert, his first year, though, was at Antioch College. Out of Roosevelt he went to Antioch College, but then, I guess, I don’t know if he can’t afford it or to maintain it, he went on scholarship, but I guess all the other expenses, he comes back and then goes to UCLA and joins up with George. They graduated in ’57 and ’58 from Roosevelt. I graduated in ’63. And only five Latinos went on to Cal State L.A. So I can’t even imagine how many Latinos went to UCLA from Roosevelt.

Right. So they were exceptional.

That’s what I thought. I think they were highly intelligent, exceptional, where I was just the average.

And that’s how they were able to open that door for themselves, because they were so exceptional they couldn’t be ignored.

I don’t know the details, but I remember hearing the story that when they were both at UCLA, they, of course, were being recruited to go into fraternities, or my brother Robert was encouraged to, invited to go to some pledge parties or whatever, and he asked to take my brother George, or something. My brother George is dark-haired, more Chicano-looking. My brother Robert is also known as “Guero”, with the hazel eye and everything. So I think that’s where they get that now they’re even in college that there’s that discrimination. So I think my brother George understood my involvement in the Chicano Movement and in his own way supportive, where my brother Robert is supportive of me, but we don’t have those Chicano pláticas, you know, that kind of thing.

Do you think he was passing?

To some extent. To some extent. And going to Antioch, I think it was last year there was an article in the Times about people that have grown up in Boyle Heights have, like, their own accent, even if they’re English speakers. We did talk about this article. He said, “When I was in Antioch, everybody kept telling me I had an accent.” I would say he’s not very fluent in Spanish at all. So he said, “I guess I had that East L.A. accent.” Then some of the words that were shared and whatever, I go, “Oh, I do that. Oh, I say that, whatever.”

Barely

Barely. [laughs]

And “liberry” (library).

Liberry. After I heard George Lopez, I had to cut “basically” from my vocabulary. [laughter]

That’s funny.

I used to use “basically” for everything.

Did your mom and dad name him Robert, or was he Roberto?

He’s Robert.

So on his birth certificate he is Robert?

Robert.

So English was—

His language.

—part of your regular—

Yes. We were actually brought up in an English-speaking household, with only having to speak Spanish when my grandmother was around. Then I’m different, because I had a babysitter that before I entered that only was Spanish-speaking. So I’m the one that’s overly affected. My older brother, though, is the fluent Spanish speaker, even as we were young, and he accompanied my grandmother to Mexico. Even within the family there’s degrees of our cultural roots.

Fluency.

Fluency in Spanish, yes.

So what role did religion play in your family? You said it was pretty heavy.

Pretty heavy because of my grandmother. We were all raised in the Catholic Church, all baptized, first communion, confirmation. All but my brother Robert are married in the Catholic Church, and he marries in a Methodist Church because his wife was Methodist. So that was, like, an escandolo from my grandmother’s point of view, but she attended the services. I believe all of my nephews and nieces are baptized, except for Robert’s kids, in the Catholic Church. And it continues to be.

So things like regular church attendance every Sunday?

My father always went to Mass on Sunday. Even if he didn’t go with the family, he went, and sometimes he took you, because he used to like to go to his old neighborhood and attend that church. My mother was Catholic and brought us up Catholic, but she has an argument with a priest over birth control or whatever. I don’t think there were pills then, but her abstinence or whatever. I remember her saying, “I told the priest when he can help support my children, then I’ll listen to him, but I have five children and we’re struggling to support them, and so I can’t afford to have more children.” So not till her older years did she start attending Mass again. So I would say my teenage years, my mother did not attend Mass every Sunday, but my father did. But my mother sent us to Mass. But that because of a conflict she had with a priest.

How did you feel about that?

I just remember hearing that. I used to have my grandmother and my father, and we were told to go, and we did. So that’s what we did. My mother gave her rationale why it was personal for her with this priest and her beliefs, and so we just accepted and moved on.

That’s radical.

Yes.

The same happened with my mother. Then she goes back to church, but how about altars, like what emerged during the Chicano Movement, the whole cultural explosion of altars and Día de los Muertos. Did you have those kinds of Catholic traditions?

I actually was not part of Catolicos—what was it, Catolicos Por La Raza?

Yes.

But I knew that group and I knew Richard Cruz, and when I heard that he had pulled them at the [Church], I was like, “Oh, my grandmother would kill us,” that kind of stuff. I was aware, supportive, but not involved in that part. That era, for me, was very rich in the sense of there were so many causes, the farm workers, the walkouts, and that I could sort of float among that group, but participate, I did not. I don’t know why. I knew Richard Cruz and I knew of that group, and I think after I might have even protested outside of St. Basil when it opened, in that support. But to go into the church and do something radical like that, I was never asked to, but I don’t know if I could, to be honest with you.

What role does religion play today in your—

It’s more of I’m Catholic and could improve on my practice. In fact, I laugh because I haven’t been to confession in several, several years, and when I went to get ashes this past Ash Wednesday, the priest said, “All I want for you is not necessarily to give up something, but to do something. And if you have not been to confession, make that your—.” And I’m sitting there, like, “Why is he saying this? To add to my guilt?” That kind of thing. [laughs] So Christmas, and I’ll do a Christmas this, or Dia de los Muertos, I’ll do whatever, but do I go every Sunday, no? Have I been to confession? I don’t know. I’m just a bad Catholic, but in my heart I believe in Jesus, I believe in the traditions of the church, and I still try to follow the gospels when I listen and try to absorb it. When I do go, I’m very happy. I just can’t get to confession, and I think it’s because I’m a single woman and I have boyfriends, and if I go to confession and confess that, it ain’t gonna change anything, you know, so how am I going to repent? [laughs]

Do you think those things are wrong, though? I mean, how do you reconcile—

I don’t reconcile, is what it is. [laughs] I do see myself as outside of the church in that area. I’m a liberated woman morally, not in the eyes of the church. I didn’t say “god.” In the eyes of the church. So that’s been a struggle, especially since I never married. That’s probably been the biggest struggle, and then the influence of my parents and my father. You’re not supposed to move out of the house till you’re married. That was a big issue.

In fact, I moved out as a big controversy. As I told you, I always had curfew and everything, and I was already twenty-one, twenty-two, and I still had that twelve o’clock curfew. I come home, and I only lived at home. My father is—I knew something was wrong when I drove up. It was already one o’clock, and all the lights on the house are lit. He confronts me, what am I, a woman of the streets, and this and that. So I leave and I don’t talk to my father for about six months. I go when I know he’s not there, and I visit my mother. But then I had a brother that got married, and I went to the wedding and my father spoke to me, so that, you know, I reentered my relationship with my father. But it was like if you’re not married, you’re not supposed to leave the house. That was the rule for me, not for my brothers. I had a younger brother that used to—oh, it used to irk me. He was eleven or twelve and he had no curfew. I was the only one in the family with a curfew. Boys, double standard.

Did you realize it in those terms?

Oh, yes.

Did you talk about it in those terms as a double standard?

I argued it in those terms, but never won. My mother, later on in life, tells me, “You were too good of a girl. Why didn’t you stand up to your father?” My mother never entered those arguments, but later on when we’re talking about how strict my father was, she said, “If I were you, I would have done this or that.” I go, “Ma, now you tell me.” She would not have encouraged any of that.

So she was a liberated woman in her own right, just couldn’t live out those beliefs.

Yes.

Which she tried to help you not to be—oh, that’s so interesting.

I just remember when she told me is that, “I never understood why you did everything, or you tried to do everything your father said, or meet his expectations of you.” I go, “Ma, now you’re telling me this?” And she said, “It wasn’t my role to interfere with what your father wanted you to be as a woman.”

So looking back, do you think that you gained anything valuable from that kind of strict upbringing?

I think I, first of all, gained my independence. I gained a sense of equality among men. I mean, I never allowed myself to be the secretary in an organization. I was going to be the president or the vice president. When certain duties were relegated to the Chicanas in the group, I either led that or stepped in. I think I had to fight for my independence and that it carried on in my involvement in the movement as well as in my career. I would even sort of sometimes strategize. “There ain’t no girl in there, and I’m going to go in there,” that kind. I have conscious memories of that. “I’m not going to let them do that to me.”

Do you think that that happened early on, like in high school and junior high school?

I don’t think the gender part came in in high school, but I do remember that the Chicana part came in, because I ran for office in tenth or eleventh grade, and at that time you can’t distinguish who the treasurer is from the secretary, that kind of a thing. But I looked who was running, and I picked the one that didn’t have a Mexican running in it, because at that time the Japanese were always in all the classes academically and they had all the offices. And I ran for an office where I was the only Mexican, and I told my Mexican friends, “Come on, support me.” I don’t know if I shared that strategy with anybody, but I know definitely it was my thought on—I don’t even remember what office I ran for, but that’s how I selected the office to run for.

Did your parents encourage your identity as a Mexican, or is that something you came up with?

I was Mexican. I was Mexican. I was Mexican. And we were culturally Mexican. And, as I tell you, my father would lead conversations. I remember conversations about how dumb the “gabachos” were when you have a pickle and you have a cucumber, but in Spanish it’s this and this. He’d always make fun of. My mother being a seamstress, I used to tell her, “Ma, I think you’re Jewish,” because she was “Guera” and she could talk a little Yiddish, because the garment district at the time, all the owners and everything were Jews. So she used to make me laugh, you know, because she would bring back home Jewish pastries and things like this. I used to tell her, “Ma, I think you’re Jewish.” But she was bilingual and played an important role for the Jewish owners in the plants, because she would become, like, lead, and instruct the Mexicanas how to sew and do whatever. So she had a leadership role, and she was also shop steward. So she had that little unionism in her.

In fact, I think I was ten or eleven, and my first memory of being on a picket line with my mother. Two stories. To this day, I don’t buy Judy Bond blouses because it was a nonunion shop. I don’t even know who Judy Bond is to this day. Then I have a funny story. As I told you, my first boyfriend in high school, his mother also was a seamstress and she gave me a pantsuit for Christmas. The first thing my mother did was turn it inside out, and there was no union label. So she told me I had to give it back. I was just like what you did right now. What? “No, I do not want nonunion things in my house.”

Wow.

So I gave it to a girlfriend, and I used to borrow it to wear when my boyfriend came by or something. But the other thing, my mother taught me how to sew when I was in fifth or sixth grade, so I probably made 90 percent of my clothing all the way through high school until I got a job and I could buy a blouse. But I always knew to look for the union label.

That’s fascinating. Was it the ILGWU?

Yes.

Do you remember more about that picket line?

Other than the chant. Other than the chant.

What was the chant?

“Don’t buy Judy Bond blouses.” I just remember that chant, and I know that we’re picketing some store downtown. I just remember that’s my first picket line.

Then I know my father belonged to a union for a while, because I remember seeing a little union membership card. I think it was carpenters—I don’t know—union, and that he had to pay every month or week or whatever his dues. But then he becomes a foreman, and he’s no longer a union member. That’s there. But my father—also I remember we used to live right by Cal State L.A., and the college is expanding, so this is going to be the second time we’re moved for eminent domain, and my father organizes the neighbors and makes like a little committee so that they negotiate with the college that’s buying them out as a group versus individual or sharing. So I do recall those. I was, like, first or second year at Cal State, and the Chicano Movement hadn’t really taken yet. So in my mind, it’s my father’s the organizer. He’s the one that’s knocking on doors. And then my mother gives me this concept of union. So in their own way—then my father was always—I remember this conversation in eighth grade where it’s in social studies and we’re talking about the presidential election. I don’t even know who’s running. And somewhere my father had said, “Oh, John F. Kennedy and the Kennedys are going to run,” and this and that. So I have no understanding of where that is. And in the conversation I tell the teacher, “Oh, no, John F. Kennedy is going to be the president,” this and that. And I remember him rebutting, “Oh, no, so-and-so and so-and-so, and it’s not his time,” or something yet. And I remember that conversation because the teacher told me something different than my father. So I get from that that my father planted a political seed in my mind. I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. I was just repeating something that I sort of took from knowledge from my dad. So he must been having these conversations with us, so I become politically conscious of politics. Then I grew up in the neighborhood where Roybal was our representative. So I do remember conversation of support for Roybal from my father and my mother.

They liked him?

Yes. He’s the only one that speaks up for the Latinos or Mexicans or whatever. But that comes from conversation from my mother and father.

They were involved in civic life.

In some way. I don’t ever remember them going out to any kind of Democratic Club or meeting, but my father had us aware of what was happening politically one way or another. It doesn’t stick with you. You’re just going through your teenage years, chasing boys and what am I going to wear to school the next day, and that kind of stuff, but it’s like seeds being planted, and I think my involvement in Chicano and Mexican American issues comes from those justice ideas that my parents had instilled in us.

Right, because thinking about a lot of people look at union involvement as civic engagement and standing up for your rights in that way might not be the democratic electoral process, but it’s definitely about—

Absolutely, and then that role that my mother played because she was fully bilingual, and she used to say, “I have to stick up for these ladies that don’t speak English.” So then even the conversation somewhere about, “The owner told me to tell them this, but I told him no, because they’re not paying enough or they’re not doing enough or something.” So those little justice causes are lightly shared and you’re, like, listening and you don’t know until later that they helped formulate you and your social consciousness, and in their own rights, they’re justice causes.

But the only thing is that when I’m truly, like, into the Chicago Movement, I do have only one conversation where my father is just like, “What are you doing?” They used to religiously watch that George Putnam news with the American flag and him calling people Communists and those protesters out there. Where my father—I don’t know what leads into the conversation, where he tells me, “I never thought I would have raised a Communist.” And I said, “Dad, it’s actually quite the opposite. You have raised me to speak up when there are unjust causes, and in school I have learned that we’re supposed to be equal under the Constitution.” So he just said, “Well, be careful, because George Putnam’s saying you’re Communist.” Because there had been some Chicano—I don’t know if it was some pre-demonstration walkout, but he calls me on the carpet that way. And I’m telling him, “No, no, no. You taught me, and then school taught me. My uncles fought in World War II, and so they come back, they have fought for our rights, and I don’t see them reflected in my daily life.” So I do remember having that conversation, not convincing my father, but him telling me, “Now, be careful, because they’re calling you a Communist.” I go, “That’s George Putnam.” [laughs]

I’d be really interested to know—I know they’re probably not here to speak for themselves, but how they reconciled the injustice that they must have lived with, not wanting you to be a part of that militant aspect of the Chicano Movement.

Because I do recall conversations, I don’t know if it was with me or I was within listening, where my father says he remember where they used to say no Mexicans allowed, and things from his generation. And then I have some memory of my mother talking about the barrio that she lived in El Paso and where the poor Mexicans lived here, this lived there. So, I don’t know, I don’t have conscious memories of a dialogue, but I have conscious memories of those discussions. And I might have been over-listening to conversations they were having with my tío and tías. I don’t know when or where, but those seeds are definitely there.

You grew up understanding that they suffered discrimination because they’re Mexican. When you were in high school, you talked about that one experience of your counselor redirecting you, but did you have any teachers that inspired you, that cultivated your intellectual side?

I have a memory of a Mr. Thomas who had also been the teacher very close to my brother Robert, who encouraged Robert go on to Antioch and things like that. I’m not too sure what the relationship was, because there’s a four-year gap. But Mr. Thomas, when I’m in his class, he asks me, “Are you Robert and George’s sister? Oh, you’re a smarty too.” And that was his words. “You’re a smarty, too, then,” because he was, I guess, very impressed with their intelligence. Then I remember playing in his room, and I was more the talkative, being sent out of the room for talking or be quiet, and everything goes. But him saying, “Have you thought what college you’re going to go to yet?” And that kind of discussion with him, his expectation and then my brothers’ expectation is very important to me in getting to college.

But other teachers, I’m very aware through my high school years that I’m a minority within the minority, because sometimes I’m in the academic track because of the influence of being told to be in those classes by my brother George, but that the rest of the students are mostly the Japanese students, their teachers’ expectations for them to be there, the college counselors’ expectations for them to be there. And I’m interacting, these are my friends and everything, but I’m quite aware I’m not in that high of an expectation by my teachers as they. They’re going to get A’s. I’m going to work for my A or B, that kind of thing, so I’m very aware of that.

And you did take the college track then?

I did.

They did give it to you. You didn’t have a problem getting into those classes?

And I was always sometimes, like, angry because the other classes looked like more fun. I remember being misplaced once, and I was in a classroom with all Mexicans, and they were hilarious classes and fun, and the teacher was engaging and everything, but I don’t think there was necessarily an expectation academically for us. But I was like, “Why am I struggling when I want to be in those classes?” And not only that, those are the people I hang out with most of that time. So there was that consciousness. I wanted an easy life, but I had to account.

I think George might even have asked me for my report cards. George was the one that had told me, “Select the college and get into it, and I’ll pay your tuition.” So that’s what set me on that I’m going to go away to college like they did, and that’s what set me on that looking for the right college that my father would not—so I think George planted that seed. I did go to Cal State. I always used to tease my friends because I was there before EOP. I said I was a regular admit. [laughs]

You didn’t get in through the back door.

Yes, you know, that kind of stuff. So it was funny.

Wasn’t it new then, too, fairly new, at Cal State Los Angeles?

We started EOP.

Right, but I mean the university itself.

Yes, because I attended Los Angeles State College, L.A. State. In fact, for years I had the sweatshirt “L.A. State College, LASC.” So I went through all the name changes with it and everything. I don’t even think there was a permanent building yet.

I think Roybal had a lot to do with getting it there and building and expanding it.

Yes, probably.

So then you graduate from high school, and you don’t have a boyfriend yet. I mean, what was your social life?

No, I had the boyfriend my senior year. I met him at the first Mexican American Youth Leadership Conference. He was representing Garfield. They took five from Garfield and there were five from Roosevelt. We meet at the campsite, and it was

Hess Kramer.

Hess Kramer, yes. So that’s where I met my boyfriend.

And that was 1960—

Three.

Three. Wow.

Sixty-three.

That was the very, very first one.

That was the very first one.

How did you hear about it, do you remember?

I think a counselor called us in, and they needed five Mexicans to go. [laughs] In fact, it was my best friend, Dolores, who never took to the Chicano Movement, Dee Martinez, who was another active in leadership, and I don’t remember who the boys were. But I remember it was all about us getting on the bus. They picked us up at East L.A. College and us checking out the guys from Garfield and this and that. I remember Dee saying, “Hey, that’s the student body president at Garfield,” and I check him out. Then when they have a big, like, welcome thing, I caught him checking me out. You know how the eyes exchange. We talk about that. So we met there. He’s Mexicano, so he’s not Chicano, so that’s what my father was attracted to, and the fact that his older sister came and asked and did all those—well, those are all things my father loved. So in one sense he was my boyfriend, but it was because it was allowable. I couldn’t bring a Chicano home, I don’t think. I would be afraid to. Then not only that, it would be monitored by four brothers, to boot. Even the younger one was the worst one, you know. So I remember my younger brother, “She was talking to boys today.” [laughs]

They would tell on you?

Oh, yes. So there was no freedom. I maintained friendships with that boyfriend still, in the sense that he lives in Arizona, but I had become a bridesmaid in his sister’s wedding, so every ten years we cross. She has an anniversary party and we’ll go, and this and that.

Do you mind telling me what his name was?

Roy Rodriguez. Rogelio. Rogelio Rodriguez.

Okay. So he was the student body president of Garfield.

Yes.

And he was also at the Hess Kramer camp on leadership.

Right, right.

But he didn’t get involved in the Chicano Movement?

Actually, he never—and it was funny, his best friend in high school and who marries his sister is Wayne Healy, the artist, and so there’s always, like, “Wayne is crazy. Wayne is this. You’re crazy.” He was very structured, goal oriented, was going to get a degree in engineering, and he went to work for so-and-so, and he moved to Kansas. Wayne and I were Chicano Movement and probably took his sister along the ride, unwilling, because they’re very, very overachievers, all that family. But, see, they’re Mexicanos. They were born in Mexico. Wayne and I are born here. Then Wayne Healy, he was in it. So when I was still seeing Roy in college and occasionally they were roommates, Wayne and I would sort of slip in our little Chicano what was happening, that kind of thing. So it was strange. I don’t think Roy knew that Wayne was seeing his sister at the beginning. So it was fun.

He had a younger sister?

Yes. So I think I had to be part of telling Roy, you know, that kind of thing, like, “You go do it.” “Me?” [laughs]

He’s not going to get mad at you. [laughs]

Yes. But then I landed up being in her wedding, so that was real nice.

Wow, what a sweet story. So then you meet at Hess Kramer and you’re in the first group. Who were the prominent leaders there? I don’t mean prominent like well known. I just mean who took charge of those conferences?

Later on, I get that Sal Castro is there, but there was a group of men, mostly, that I recall, that were part of the Human Relations Commission. I know Vince Villagran, Henry Ronquillo, they’re teachers, instructors in L.A. Unified, that are part of that, because there’s meetings after, like, to encourage our leadership, and the Human Relations Commission encourages some of us to come back as peer counselors. Oh, there was an Art Almanza, who I think might have been probation. So I know those men influenced me coming back as a peer counselor. I don’t think it was the second. Maybe it’s the third, the fourth, or whatever, but I know I went back as a college student as a peer counselor to some of the Hess Kramers.

Then I recall meeting Sal Castro, because out of some of those first or second or third attendees to the Hess Kramer, that’s when we form Young Citizens for Community Action, that becomes Young Chicanos for Community Action, that becomes the Brown Berets. I was the president of Young Citizens for Community Action, and I might have been in that transition where we become Young Chicanos for Community Action. I might have been the president, but I know as soon as David Sanchez becomes president, it becomes the Brown Berets. So he’s the leader of that group. But all of those in YCCA were products of Hess Kramer, and then that’s the influence of Sal Castro, and we become VISTA volunteers out of Father Luce’s church, and those were those stories that we were sharing. I remember when we did this here and we did that there. Then I’m not really—I’m older. I’m the only one over twenty-one, so I facilitate a lot. I remember when we opened up La Piranya, because there were coffeehouses and all this other. I’m the only one over twenty-one, so I could sign the lease. [laughs] You know, all these little things. I remember us going to some retreat, and I’m the only one over twenty-one that can go buy the booze. So those kinds of things happened.

So how does your father let you—because when you go to the Hess Kramer, you stay overnight there, don’t you? You don’t go back the same day.

It’s school-sponsored. I learned real quick that if it was school-sponsored, my father would let me go. In fact, I remember asking permission to go to my first dance in high school. I was so afraid to ask my father, but my mother wouldn’t do it for me. “You have to ask your father.”

So it was sort of comical in the sense of I built up my courage, and I said, “Dad, there’s a dance this Friday in high school and I want to go. Can I go?” He said, “Well, I want to meet the boy first.” I go, “Dad, I want to go with my girlfriends.” [laughs] So then he agreed if he could take us and pick me up after. So all through high school, I could go to many events as long as he delivered me and picked me up. So he probably dropped me off, checked that there were adults and that it was legit, and then he’d pick me up.

That’s fascinating.

So it was very—

A little bit of liberation.

Yes. And I learned quick that I could go to football games. I could go to dances. I could go here, I could do there, long as there was a trip slip that he or my mother had to sign something. I never went to a house party. I think I had one in maybe the summer between my eleventh and twelfth, and that was because he knew the families at the house that it was going to be. That was the only house party that I recall. I never went to the beach.

Movies?

With girlfriends, but probably dropped off and picked up. Although I do have memories of us walking to the movie in a group, like, the neighborhood, but they were, like, during the day, but not evening-time things.

I want to continue but—

I talk a lot.

No. But I just finished interviewing David Sanchez, and I think he says something different about the leadership of—so I want to go back and make sure so I can ask you exactly, because he has a different view about a lot of things. [laughs] So it’d be interesting to compare and really get my facts straight of exactly what he said, because I don’t want to miss—

Yes, because I read his book, and then I had—

Expedition Through Aztlán?

Yes, and I had differences. I think he writes a book on YCCA and into the Brown Berets. Years ago there might be a book on or a writing on his, and I differed with it, because it’s like him being the whatever, and that’s actually why I left, is that we were going to open La Piranya, and I recall an L.A. Times writer comes, and I just happened to be there. So in the article, what I recall is I’m quoted, and David has a fit. “It’s not your show and you didn’t give credit.” And so I cautiously make a decision. I had not been attending classes on a regular basis or even gathering any credits. So I consciously say, “I don’t want to be in conflict. It’s not about me. I’m going to return to Cal State and go to school, and, Dave, you are now the president.” Or he was elected the president. I become less involved. But you could talk to Paula Crisostomo. She’s in that group. That’s my recollection. So it’s sort of fun, because when I go to Cal State, I hadn’t been active on campus. There’s an UMAS, and I’m like an outside activist joining in. [laughs]

Oh, like the community—

Yes, yes, yes. So I had, like, a little status, and then it goes to MEChA and all this. So I come in from—I should have been from within, but I was coming from without, so I sort of had, like, already, like, a little reputation as a community activist, and I’m in UMAS and I’m in MEChA. So once again it’s mostly male leadership, but I just, like, step in, because I have this other.

Weren’t you on the Mayor’s Advisory as well?

I wasn’t on the Mayor’s. David and Rachel, Rachel Ochoa, I believe, are.

Okay. Because I think he said that’s where he met you, on the Mayor—that you and Moctesuma were all in Mayor’s and then you morphed into the Young Citizens.

Yes, and, see, I come from Hess Kramer into Young Citizens, and then so he comes out of the Mayor, maybe, too. I don’t recall. Later on, we both work Hess Kramer, and but we did not attend the same Hess Kramer.

You didn’t attend the same Hess Kramer.

I think. I think that would be more I went to the first, and then maybe I’m a peer counselor when he attends as a high school, because I’m probably about four years older than David, somewhere, four to five years older than David.

You’re that much older than, really?

Yes, I think so. I’m sixty-eight. Yes, I’m sixty-eight.

I’ll find out. I have his birth date. You look good. [laughter]

I am sixty-eight. It aches a lot. So I’m older than him, yes. I was aware of the Mayor’s, but I was never a member of the Mayor’s Youth Group.

With Moctesuma and—

No, I meet Moctesuma and all them through Hess Kramer, so it must be me as a peer.

It’s confusing.

Yes. But where we do all mesh, and David and the mayor’s group might have some leadership role in here, and I’m maybe a participant, is when we all go into those VISTA volunteers at Father Luce, and it’s the YCCA group that goes there that have been working at Laguna, had been meeting at Laguna. Then we moved to there. So somewhere I become closer to Moctesuma and David and Paula and Rachel and everything, because we’re moving, we’re working out of Father Luce, and I’m the only one with a car, so I have to go pick up everybody. I’m the transportation. So when we had to go to a demonstration or whatever, I make them laugh. I says, “I had a route. I had to pick you all up,” and who got picked up when, wherever. So it’s mainly because I have a car.

Right. I don’t know, I was going to say, “and obviously cash,” because you had to pay for gas and all that kind of thing.

Yes.

Excellent. Well, I’m going to stop it here.

But our working comes together out of Father Luce’s church.

Okay. I’m going to stop it here. [End of February 22, 2013 interview]

This is Virginia Espino, and today is March 1st, payday, and I’m interviewing Victoria Castro at her home in Alhambra. Today I’d like to start with backing up and talking about your experience at Camp Hess Kramer. I’m wondering if you have any more recollections about some of the workshops that you took. How did they plan the day? Did you do any hiking and any physical type of thing?

I do recall, first of all, that we were picked up at East L.A. College, and there were five students that went from Roosevelt, and we hooked up with Garfield and Wilson. They were L.A. County schools and they filled a bus and they took us. Then there was a welcome, and I don’t recall who did the welcome, but then there was a social, meet different people and everything, and that’s where I met my first boyfriend. [laughs] Then we went to our lodging, and then in the morning there was breakfast and then we had another. I don’t remember any of the substance of the workshops. What I do recall is that as a group from your school, you were asked to put on a skit, and it was a little political or something that would reflect what’s going on in your community. At the time, I think she was running for City Council or something. I knew very little about elections, but I remember we did a little skit about electing—I think it was Josefina Sanchez, and she was running for something. One of us was Josefina, and we made signs and everything. That was like the big thing that we knew that was going on in our community that reflected about Mexicans or Mexican Americans. That’s all I remember.

I remember the hikes. I remember going to the beach. I remember us, like, listening mostly to each other, because I was so absorbed with students outside of the Eastside talking about probably racism, where they were isolated or it was a little more dominant. That’s where I came up with I never knew I was a minority, because I had gone to elementary, junior high, and high school where Mexicans and Mexican American students, we were always the majority. So I had no concept of being a minority. And prior to that, I didn’t know any signs of discrimination, but then when I went back and I saw what was in my school, I become aware of injustices in my school such as why are there only three or four Mexican, Mexican American students in the algebra class? Why are we the only ones that are college bound? We’re the majority of the school. Why aren’t we reflected in student body officers? Why aren’t we like the privileged group? Because the teachers, in my analysis, favored the Japanese students. So after that conference, I became conscious of that and I say that I discovered my voice. Prior to that, I would have never complained about anything at school. I was always a little goody two-shoe. I would have never stood up for someone that I saw that was being mistreated because of possible preference or racism. After that, so I discovered my voice and I became aware that I was a minority and that there were injustices. That’s what I got from that conference.

You never felt like, for example, economically that you were disadvantaged or—

No, because I think the whole community was, you know. Most of us had working parents. My parents were both working. It was one of those eras where if you were poor, you didn’t know it. There’s always rice and beans and things. I wasn’t aware of any of the struggles.

Then being the only girl in the family, my mother was a seamstress, so I always had pretty dresses, and I always had ruffles, and I always had bows in my hair. And if I needed something, whatever—so in that sense, a lot later do I figure out how much clothing costs. My mother worked in the garment industry, so she was always bringing remnants that were left over from some job or whatever, and she’d make a little blouse. I learned to make blouses. So it was just—and as I said, both parents were working, and then my close friends, their parents were working. And my closest friend, Dolores, her mother worked, her father worked, and we were sort of the same. So I didn’t have that conscious of poverty.

Were they talking to you at Hess Kramer as Mexican Americans or just as students?

No, as Mexican American. It was actually the first Mexican American Youth Leadership conference, and it was countywide. So I was just, like, blown away when people would say, “Well, you know, in our school, the Mexican students stay in one little spot. We don’t integrate, or we don’t talk with the “gabachos” or if they do, we have racial fights.” I was just like—I never heard of racial fights. I just, “Why do you say that?” [laughs] So I was very naïve up until that point.

How did you view Anglo society or whites that you encountered? Because there had to have been teachers who were white and maybe some students.

Teachers were teachers, and I just remember after catching a couple of incidents where I saw the female P.E. teachers might be a little rougher on cholas, but that was after the conference. I never noticed. Or more strict with them. So my teachers were actually very encouraging, to some extent. Maybe it was the counselors that did that. As I told you, by the time I’m graduating, there had already been the exodus of most of the Jews from Boyle Heights. So there were two Russian Jews left in my graduating class, and at that time that was Soupy Sales and surfers, and they played the part, and we thought they were surfers. They lived as far from the beach as I did, you know, that kind of stuff. So I was very fortunate when I was in junior high at Hollenbeck, it was very multi-culture. There were Japanese; there were Russians; there were the old Russians; the Jewish; there were Mexicans; and then there was the FS students, which were foreign students from Mexico. We used to call them the FS students, and they were isolated from us until they mastered English. Then they were brought into our classes. Now, see, if I was one of them, they were like sort of isolated on campus till they mastered some degree of English.

But “FS” is not a derogatory term.

Yes, they were called foreign students, and they were learning English. Once they had enough, they were put in your classes.

They weren’t looked down upon as inferior?

No, it was just a matter of isolation, and I say “isolation,” because I can visualize the two bungalows that they had the majority of their classes in. But during nutrition or P.E. or whatever, they were just part of us. I wasn’t very fluent Spanish, but many of my friends were, so at lunchtime or at P.E. or at dances, there was a relationship with them. They were just learning English.

That’s interesting. So was your experience at Camp Hess Kramer the first time you’d been to the beach and hiking?

Not the first time I’d been to the beach. My father and his family, we used to do camping there. So, no. But I was making reference to those surfers. They weren’t surfers. They didn’t go to the beach to surf. They just were blond, blond, very white skin, and they wore their hair in a flip, and they dressed like what you saw on TV as surfers, so they were a little more—you know, they were playing the part. So that’s what I meant. They had the same opportunities that we did. They weren’t surfers.

Oh, okay. So it’s not like they were middle-class, upper-class kids, surfing, spending their summers surfing at the beach, or their weekends?

No, no. It’s just that they were blond, blue-eye, and very white. And we accepted them as they were probably surfers.

Interesting. But what about preparing for that kind of camp? My son was just there. They still go there, kids still go there, and now they have like a ropes course where they do all these incredible things.

I think it was their first one, and so there was—

Like hiking boots, you wouldn’t have that.

No.

Or tennis shoes?

No, no, no, no. I remember just walking some trail and falling or slipping into some little river, not on my rear, but just like sliding in. So it was fun. But I had been to camp before. We had student body little trips here and there. L.A. Unified has a camp. I don’t remember what the name of it is, and we used to go there once a year with the youth group or something to that effect. So the experience, in that sense, it was really the exposure to kids out of East L.A., because I think at Garfield, Roosevelt, we were just the dominant kids. We didn’t know. At that time, I laugh because the Garfield-Roosevelt football game from the fifties was very famous for being big rivals, and then those were the two predominantly Latino schools, so we used to call it the Taco Bowl. Now it’s the East L.A. Classic, but we were going to the Taco Bowl, because we knew once we went there, everybody was going to be Mexican or so. I’m talking ’60 to ’63 in high school. It was a very—I’m not really aware of gang activity, but the worst I ever heard that guys from the gang did was maybe smoke marijuana and maybe they had fistfights. There were no guns. Then towards the end of my high school days, the Vietnam War is breaking out, so some of my friends are leaving high school and enlisting. So that was more of the trauma that was going on, that becoming aware that so-and-so joined the army and they were being shipped out across. Then that’s when I’m starting to listen to politics more, because of the war, and we’re not officially in war yet. I think we’re in Laos or something, because I remember Kennedy would always say it funny. John F. Kennedy, the way he pronounced it, I thought it was funny. So either I was or my group of friends or all of us were quite naïve as to politics outside of our barrio.

So what were the expectations for you kids coming back? Did you have goals? Were you planning on meeting again as a group?

Well, what they did, that’s how Young Citizens began. That was, like, in April of my senior year, and I do recall it was Laguna Park at the time, that there is a young man, I don’t remember his name at all, but he’s from, like, the Jewish Federation or attached to them. I guess that’s like a bunch of community organizations, and he was like an advisor to us in organizing. He called for all of us from the Eastside to start meeting on a regular basis at Laguna Park. I would say at first the numbers were like ten, fifteen, and then we dwindled and dwindled. But then that’s where he or we—I don’t recall—decided to start an organization called Young Citizens for Community Action. And that’s when I was elected president, and then maybe like year later when we become a little more—this is, like, now I’m in college and we’re becoming a little more aware—we become Young Chicanos for Community Action. Then I don’t think David Sanchez has joined the group yet. I remember Becky Reza and—oh, gosh, his name is Hidalgo. Actually, no one from the group that I went from Roosevelt stayed, and so I think I’m the only one that stayed.

Then that goes on for a few years until that little decision for me to go back to Cal State because of that little difference with David Sanchez. Then soon after, the group’s name is changed to the Brown Berets and it takes on a little more militant stance. But I always stayed, I think, in good terms with David. I just sort of gave him his space, and I was getting pressure to go back to school full-time, so this was like a good exit. A little chicken. I was a good chicken. [laughs]

A good excuse. It’s hard to—because the books will have different dates and then the newspaper is something that doesn’t reflect everything that happened during the sixties, but I have that 1963 was the first camp.

Yes.

Is that correct in your mind?

Yes. It’s April 1963, and that was the first Mexican American Youth Leadership Conference sponsored by the L.A. County Human Relations Commission. I definitely remember how even April 7th, only because, I told you, I met my boyfriend there. So you know how women put those little dates down, so I definitely know that.

And then you graduated that June.

That June.

In 1963. Okay. Then I have that Young Citizens formed in ’65, and I have that all of you were the founders: you, David Sanchez, Moctesuma Esparza, Ralph Ochoa, Rachel Ochoa, George Lincon, John Ortiz.

I just saw John Ortiz too. I have a feeling that maybe there’s meetings before we formally found the organization, because I do remember other people meeting at Laguna Park. That’s where I met Becky Reza, who I think she became a social worker, and then I meet up with her at Cal State again. Then I know his name is Holguin, and I just saw him at UMAS MEChA reunion. I think I have his card. I think we’re meeting. See, because Moctesuma and majority of those that are named were not at the ’63. They go to Hess Kramer a couple of years after, because I believe then I come back as a peer counselor, and that’s how I meet some of them. But there’s a group meeting at Laguna that might not have formally taken on an organization and a name. And then once we do, we identify, and that’s when David and Rachel and Paula and others that come in, too, but I think it’s because it’s after their experience at Hess Kramer, and that’s more like ’68.

Sixty-six, it says. Then I guess there was also this conference at Casa de Mexicano. Do you remember being in attendance at that, where education was one of the key—

Like a hearing more or some.

Oh, was it like a hearing?

That’s what flashed in my mind right now, yes, like a hearing more.

So people could voice their concerns.

Yes.

I’m going to pause it for a second because I need to get my pencil. [interruption]

Okay, we’re back. So in ’66, a lot is happening, the formalization of Young Citizens, but you’re meeting even before this time. Do you remember what you were concerned about when you were meeting at Laguna Park?

There was this young man that was assigned to us, I think to help us filter our thoughts from the conference. My first recollection are attendees to Laguna Park from the first Mexican American Youth Leadership Conference. Then there might have been a second or a third. That’s when Paula or Moctesuma come in, because they’re now, like, being exposed to the conference and the influence of Sal, and they’re, like, brought in. How that happens or why or who, I don’t have any—and then that’s when I think the term “Chicano” started to be accepted. But at first we were just Young Citizens for Community Action, and there were other individuals involved. Then they get looped in, and then there’s more of a consciousness and the acceptance of the word, and that might have been initiated by David Sanchez, because he was more militant, or he was more into than justice causes. He had more of a directed purpose, maybe.

How did he strike you when he first came to the meeting?

He was always very articulate and dominating and had a big presence. But he also had a younger sister and he would sometimes bring her, so I was able to see the family part of him and so that softness. There was a retreat that we were taken to in Santa Barbara. I don’t know who took us. There’s, like, a “plática” among ourselves way into the night, and David would impress me as in the sense that he was on a different mission. In fact, that’s where—I don’t know how to say this without being—he had a different vision of himself and his purpose much more as a savior leader versus I was an organizer facilitator. So I saw that in him. I don’t know if we had been drinking or whatever, and he shared, and he, like, startled me a little because he said something like, “You know, I’ve had conversations with god,” or something, “as my destiny,” or whatever. And we might have been drinking, you know, whatever. But I always looked at him as on a different mission, or I don’t know what to label it, where I was just always trying to facilitate, work on justice causes, what has to be done, let’s get it done, and things. Maybe I wasn’t the idea person, and maybe he was. He had the visions.

He seems from the photographs really handsome, tall.

Absolutely, and he was from Mayor Yorty’s group. But I think there’s two people that when I first meet them I think I’ve never met anyone so articulate: David Sanchez and Al Juarez. They just impressed me with their ability to handle the English language. I just even have those moments of first listening to them. So I had not been exposed to that.

But even with your brothers, your older brothers, did they remind you in any way—

No, no. They were just—

So they really stood out, is what you’re saying?

They did, and it was their ability to manage the English language. I still to this day consider myself limited in English, you know. It’s true. When I was on the board of education, I remember David Tokofsky especially would just master English and have this, and I would just be, “I’m just, like, I’ll just tell it to you like—,” and I think that’s what made me a good teacher, that’s what assisted me, in that I could explain things in a much simpler term to parents and things. I’m always fascinated with a master of the English language, and I don’t mean it just communicating or could write books. I’m a mathematician by nature, you know, so I never looked at that as one of my own skills.

At the time, like even today, any cause, you want to be able to articulate your position in a way that’s going to have an impact and that people are going to listen to, and I think David—what you’re saying is he was able to do that.

And draw that attention. Now, to implement some of his visions and his ideas, he needed somebody to work with him like me, that could break it down, and we have to do this, this, this, this. So I was more of that type of an organizer.

He talks about being in a gang when he was in junior high, high school. Did he have that vibe to you?

I never caught that. He might have been with a rough group, but I never thought of him as the typical Eastside gangster. I just didn’t see him that way.

What about, like, street smarts and that kind of aggressive male type of gang member—

Possibly, yes. I think aggressive leader, but definitely from the neighborhood, definitely that. Maybe I meet him, like, his senior year, so I don’t know him as a gangster type. He was definitely less fearful than I was of the system. Remember, I tell you to a sense I’m a goody two-shoes and I follow the rules up until I get a little more aggressive in college.

Maybe that aggressiveness or his ability to be more—I’m less than him in the sense of being—what’s the word I want to say? He could challenge the system in a rougher manner than I could. I might have still been of the mental ability that you can change it from within, you know, that kind of thing. There must be a way, or there must be a legal way to do this, or my constitutional rights will tell me to do this,” where he might have said, “All of that granted, we’re going to do this,” so he was much more assertive than I was and aggressive.

Confrontational?

Right. I would never have thought of taking over Catalina Island. That would not have been one of my thoughts. [laughs]

And he was like that from the beginning when you first met him?

Yes.

It’s not like he evolved into that in the years?

No, that was probably his specialty or his gift.

So then when you guys were first meeting as the Young Citizens, how did you determine what your focus would be? Did you have a leader?

I think there’s a facilitator and that we’re only going to concentrate at that time initially on educational issues and opportunities. Then I think when David come in, he adds on the police brutality. So then when we’re Young Chicanos, we have two main issues: the educational and the police brutality. And I leaned more toward the educational, and he was willing to take on, in his aggressive style, many of the brutality that was going on.

What about some of the other members? Do you remember what they brought to the group?

I believe Moctesuma was educational. I know Paula Crisostomo was educational. Rachel Ochoa was educational. George Lincon. I think most of us were. And David brings in a new element of people. I think so. He brings in a more militant group.

Almost would you say they were, like, his followers?

Yes, yes. That’s why he was the minister or whatever this is of the Brown Beret, and they’re like his army.

So he started that before he formulated the Brown Berets, having this cadre of—

I think so. Yes, I think so.

Do you remember feeling that that was a good strategy, or did you feel like it weakened what you were trying to do?

No, I don’t think it weakened. I just thought it was different than what I was trying to do, because I was always centered on educational opportunities and better schools and more Chicanos going to college. That’s always been my mission.

So the Piranya coffee house was—actually, I have more memories of Rachel Ochoa. We’d go in, we’d clean. She was very artistic, and I remember her painting the tables with mushrooms and doing this and that. We did that kind of stuff. For some reason, I remember Rachel more in the opening, working side by side to her, where the others are all involved, but Rachel had a key role. And then I think it’s George Lincon that comes up with the name La Piranya, so I sort of remember us having those conversations and formulating it. None of us ever were bright enough to say, “Hey, the Highway Patrol is next door. Do you think we’re under surveillance?” [laughter] You know what I mean? But that was part of the naivety. It was, and that fact that we rented, the owner was an ex-policeman. So I go in because I fit the appropriate look to do a lease agreement, and I’m the only one over twenty-one, and we want to do a youth coffeehouse where we’re going to bring and do nice things in this coffeehouse. Actually, it did serve a social purpose too.

So La Piranya comes before the talks about the walkouts or the talks before you start going in—okay. What about the survey? Does that come before La Piranya, when you create a survey to evaluate?

I think so. The walkouts and the surveys, in my recollection, come when we’re all working out of Father Luce’s church in Lincoln Heights. I do recall, see, we have to be Young Citizens already or Young Chicanos, because I don’t know if it’s David or someone gets the contract where they recruit us under VISTA volunteers to work out of Father Luce’s, and that’s where Sal Castro comes and talks to us, and that’s where we were exposed to Cesar Chavez. We were exposed to some other leaders, but those are the two that stand out. So that was part of our training as VISTA volunteers. We were a small stipend. So all of that’s coming out of the Church of the Epiphany in Lincoln Heights, and then La Piranya comes later.

I see. What was that like?

That’s my recollection.

Yes, that makes sense. That makes sense, because that’s where David says he first becomes politicized. He gets opportunities through Father Luce to do all these things.

Yes, that’s mine too. And we’re sort of a little bit of conscious of what’s going on in the world. Coffeehouses are happening here and there, and we need centers where young adults can go and gather and talk about—you know, or have books available and chitchat. That was the original conversation for La Piranya. But I’m almost sure it’s George that comes up with the name.

Okay, so you’re meeting. Was that also the time that they were putting out the La Raza newspaper?

It coincides somewhere in there. I actually recall Risco in the basement, and Raul Ruiz in and out, and things like that. So, many things came out of Father Luce’s church. So there were parent groups, too, and then there was us, and there was the newspaper. So, truly, if I had to say there was a center of the Chicano Movement, it was Father Luce’s church. It was a fabulous personal wonder that this man gave us a location to blossom and develop and actually challenge your thoughts and let you organize towards them. Other than that, there was no other—Casa del Mexicano was very much centered around issues about those from Mexico and issues about immigration, perhaps. All I remember is that meeting with these older men that ran the Casa del Mexicano, and their number-one thing was if someone from Mexico died, to have the money to ship them back to be buried in Mexico. Those are the things that I recall from them.

Those were the big issues for them.

Yes, yes.

Kind of like bread-and-butter-type issues.

Yes. So I don’t see us relating to them. They didn’t have a youth Civil Rights Movement person. They were service oriented.

There were some other organizations or locations where people met, like, for example, the Euclid Center.

The Euclid Center sort of begins with there isn’t an organization, educational issues in the community, and I don’t recall whether it’s formed before the walkouts or after the walkouts, but we’re, like, members of that group too. And that’s where I know personally I met those that work with L.A. Unified on community issues in the school. Henry Ronquillo, Vince Villagran, Pete Martinez, they already have served as teachers in the district, and they’re like semi-administrators. They work with a group called the Human Relations Office, and they’re trying to handle our issues and our complaints. So if you had a complaint about a school or a principal or this, you go to them. And they would also attend the EICC, and we met at the Euclid Center.

Then there were—who else was involved that were leaders of the older generation? Tony Hernandez [phonetic], Reverend Tony Hernandez?

Not Hernandez. Tony—

Rios? No, that was a labor leader. Quinones?

Quinones. I remember—

Horacio Quinones.

I think Quinones, and he has the Center on First and Mission. What was it called? Not the Urban Center.

Cleland, the Cleland House?

No.

Cleland House?

No. It’s First and Mission. And actually, later on I found out that it had been funded by LAUSD, the rent or something. The Urban? But I know the Reverend Quinones is in charge of that Center. And what I recall is that there’s more—that in my mind I equate that with more parent participation. It’ll come to me what the Center’s name is in a bit. But I know exactly what building. It was on First and Mission.

First and Mission. Is it still there?

No. They built a high school just within the last five years. The Urban Center or something like that.

Yes, his name comes up but not that often.

I just remember Reverend Quinones. Yes. So he has more of a parent group, because they used to have classes there for parents, not only to learn English, but other services for them. Knowing now what I know about the district, they must have had, like, organized classes for the parents out of the district, and then that’s how the rent is paid, because later on in life I thought, I said, “I didn’t know we paid for that.”

So how did your parents feel about your involvement in these issues?

I actually didn’t share a lot with them, purposely, because I didn’t think they could relate. I think what they learned about things that I might be involved with started with the news media picking up maybe some event that I was at, and then them asking me about it. But my mom and dad, I probably had very little conversation about my actions. They must have been somewhat aware. Then I’m starting to take my younger brother with me. He’s three and a half, four years younger. So I think maybe that action. I don’t think they would have—I probably could articulate to them, but they have also been those that planted the seed in organizing unions and being leaders in their work. So if I was not so worried about them curtailing my activities, I would have shared. And my older brothers are out of the house now. They’re away at college or married. So there’s a lot of independence going on.

Before we started recorded, we were talking a little bit about race, and you were saying that you grew up feeling like you were white.

Yes, white, that I was Mexican and I was white. I probably have no recollection of anybody asking me if I was white. It was not an issue that I was aware of. You were Japanese, you were Mexican, and you were Russian, and the Russians were white, but we weren’t. And there was a black element. We weren’t black. We weren’t white Russians. I was mostly Mexican.

Do you think your parents would have been offended by the nationalism of what you were doing, by the embracing of Mexican, Chicana identity?

I don’t think they would have been—that wouldn’t have been the issue. The issue would have been was I doing something that was illegal. That would have been the issue. Or could get me in trouble or could cause me problems later in life, that would have been the issue, because I think they were very much spokespersons in their own way. As I said, my father would make commentary on the presidential election, local elections, you know, support Roybal. So I think in the political arena I would have been fair and accepted. The issue of is it something I should do as a young woman, is it something that could possibly be illegal, that would have been the part that they would have been more restrictive of. So for that reason, because I think we—sometimes I was aware of picketing the police department. Maybe that’s not the same thing my father would want me to do.

So he might have a critique of the police treatment, but he would never approve of—

His daughter. Maybe a son, but not his daughter.

Fascinating.

Because he had very negative opinions about the police department because he had been arrested as a youth. He was an original from Clanton, you know. He was a man of the streets, got into some brawls at bars, talked about being beat up by the police, and I remember very negative comments about Chief Parker at the time. So that must have been the police chief during his era. So he would not have been a fan, but it all goes back to the role of his daughter, not of her politics, what does my daughter do, a young lady, those gender issues that my father had.

So that’s what you were negotiating those years that you were involved. There’s a quote in Sal Castro’s memoir or oral history—I’m just going to call it an oral history—that you talk about a time when you’re at Roosevelt and you get escorted off campus.

That was the day of one of the walkouts, and I think it was the first day of a walkout. I’m on campus because I’m assigned to Roosevelt, and I run into my ex-leadership teacher, Mrs. Carmen Terrazas, who was probably one of the first Mexican teachers I ever had. In fact, she was Miss Macias in my ninth and tenth or eleventh grade, and then she marries and becomes Terrazas. She spots me on campus, and I’m sure the administration is aware of all the possibility of a walkout, and she says, “I’m going to walk you to the gate.” And she walks. “And I’m going to escort you to the gate, but if I see you on campus again, Vickie, I’m going to have to have you arrested.” So I, “Don’t arrest me. My father will curtail me for sure.” You know what I mean? [laughs] So I went to the gate, but then I think I would go around, and that might have been when I decided to do something else. But that did occur, because she recognized me as one of her ex-students.

Was she mean? Was she mad? Disappointed?

She did it very firmly, very assertively, like, “I’m giving you this break,” and I knew because I had respect for her. “But, Vickie,” she gave me the warning, “if I see you back on campus, I will have you arrested.” Me fui. [laughs]

So I could do everything but break the law. Or it’s almost like I tell people, growing up, that I wasn’t the best of students, but I knew that I could do whatever in school as long as it didn’t mean someone was going to pick up the phone and give my parents a complaint. So I could ditch. I knew how to forge my mother’s signature. I could take off campus, but I knew how to clear it up so that there was no phone call home. So I knew how to survive under the radar that was on me at all times by my parents.

So you did cross the line in some—

Yes, yes. [laughter] But I was always very aware of what systems were in place and how to maneuver it. In fact, Mrs. Terrazas, because we were student government leaders that had a little stack of permission slips, and we were on the honor system. If you had to leave class for something, to fulfill your duties as a student body, you take one of those and you get your teacher to sign it. I think I used to do that because I would go to visit my boyfriend in Garfield or I would go to the beach with my friend. But I would always have the little signature, so I was never—I knew how to manipulate the system, but that’s out of survival under that strictness that went in in my house.

Some people talk about the schools at that time were like prisons. They would lock you in. You couldn’t leave. Did you feel like you were closed in at Roosevelt, that you couldn’t—

No, because I was on that little group, that little privileged group. Then I do have memories of—I don’t think after the sixth grade my mother ever signed a report card or asked to see it. Long as there was no phone call home, I signed all my report cards. I signed my illness. I don’t want to go to school, sometimes I just stayed home and watched TV all day, but I wrote the illness thing and I signed. I think my mother’s signature appeared somewhere, it probably would be thought of as a forgery. [laughter]

So then tell me the story of how the walkouts—and also did you use the word “walkouts,” or did you use the term “blowouts” when you were first—actually, let me back up. Let’s start with the survey.

What I recall is that Sal Castro comes to talk to us when we’re at Father Luce’s as a group, and we must have been Young Chicanos at the time. He’s very upset about some article in the Time magazine that described East L.A. of smelling as wine, and they just depicted us very negative and challenging us, what are we going to do? He already had the mission of improving schools, so somehow those get mixed. And I think he plants the seed of a big demonstration, and then I don’t know who, it sounds like something I would do, like, say, “We have to have evidence.” And I say that because I recall working at a school at the time and having access to a mimeograph machine. So I think I’m even the person that types that thing on that blue thing and runs the thing, that machine that you get ink all over yourself. And I remember I had those surveys for a long time, and that we were gathering information to present evidence to the school board or to the superintendent at the time—I don’t remember his name, Ingalls [phonetic], or that was the principal or whatever. So we’re going to present evidence. Then I don’t remember how or what. We’re going to have this big demonstration, and I think it’s Sal who planted that seed and we’re to organize it. So that’s how I remember my involvement.

How did these questionnaires get distributed and who collected them?

Young Chicanos for Community Action would mostly go to Teen Posts. They’re part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, were youth centers and they were called Teen Posts. They were places for young teenagers to hang out, and they were all over the city, and they were spread out through the Eastside, Lincoln Heights, and where ever. We would go and push that we wanted better education, better schools, and we needed your input. There were questions on there like, you know, have you talked to a counselor? Have they told you about going to college? Do you feel like they pushed you out, if you’ve dropped out? Very just direct questions, and we were gathering evidence to show whoever we were going to present these to in the school district, “Look how you do not service our community. Look how we’re not encouraged to go to college. Look how we don’t have classes to attend college to prepare us.” So we were gathering that kind of documentation. That was the purpose of the survey. Also, too, then the survey, sometimes we would appear at a high school and just say, “Hey, we need your input,” or things. So there was a series of collecting them, and the purpose was to present evidence, that it wasn’t just a few kids that were misled and talking trash about. “We have five hundred surveys that say, ‘Here, you provided no college counseling. You provide no burritos.’” [laughs] It went from that extreme, from college counseling to do they ever feed you ethnic food. So it was a variety of questions, but it was a form of providing evidence.

Do you remember how those questions were generated?

Just in a group discussion. “And what about this?” And somebody writing them down. And I think I just went and typed them.

So then the dynamics of the Young Chicanos—you say that you guys are the Young Chicanos now.

Yes.

Or do you think it was like a collective, or did you have hierarchical leadership or, like, specific people—

I think we had hung around as a group that there was—you know how you fall into acceptable relationships among friends, like this friend is always going to be the one that does this, and this friend is going to be the one that goes and does that. So I think there was an acceptance of whatever roles we were doing, and we were more actually of common purpose. So we didn’t really get into—I don’t remember conflicts. I remember Moctesuma being very articulate and saying we have to do that, and then we did it. Then David saying this, and then we did it. Then we said we’re going to do these surveys, and then we did it. So within that group, I tell you, I don’t remember much conflict till—I don’t personally consider any conflict until that incident with La Piranya, and by this time I’m up to here with the influence about going back to college.

Then the person who did, like, the secretarial work, was it always one person specifically, or did that rotate? Like, for example, who would take notes when you were generating—

I don’t even know if notes were taken.

So basically you just remembered—

Now, remember Young Chicanos and the walkouts influenced other people, and then within the schools they have, like, little committees, and we’re like an outside group to this. So we’re expanding or having affiliates to say—and maybe some of them—because I know when Moctesuma was making that film on the walkouts, that—what’s her name, Mita, she has a journal from being at Garfield. She starts opening the journal and reading things, and I go, “I never took notes. I never did this.” So I’m not aware of any note-taking on our part or any formal—so it was more on a cooperative level and whoever could influence the group more.

So you felt like the power was evenly distributed?

Yes, of that original group.

Yes. Because I did interview Mita, and she talks about distributing the questionnaires, getting them, distributing them. Then Raul talks about the influence of La Raza and how they were out in the schools organizing and help passing out the magazine. They were also politicizing.

Right. I tell you, from my memory, Sal plants the seed, and we might have been one of the very influential groups, but he must be planting the seeds elsewhere, too, and then we’re starting to take on roles as different organizations, as different outreach is happening, because this is going to be a big event.

But you’re getting this documentation in preparation for a big demonstration? Is that how you thought in your mind?

I think some of the conversations with L.A. schools is already occurring and maybe not moving as quickly, or there’s resistance, or it’s more like they’re trying to just appease us, but Sal has this vision of a massive walkout, so regardless of if they’re moving, not moving, whatever, we’re going to do this.

Do you recall being in meetings with Dr. Nava, with Dr. Julian Nava? He would seem the likely person.

Yes. I think a couple of times we go to him and we’re telling him what we’re doing or what we’re expecting. He must be sympathetic, but not leadership, so he’s absorbing but there’s no changes coming. I think we probably gave him the strength later to be a spokesman on the board. Now, once the walkouts occur and everything, and he’s the Latino on the board, he’s like, I would think now has been empowered to be our spokesperson, because he runs the first time—in fact, I have the photo—citywide. Somebody just shared—

Is that you?

Yes.

Oh, my god.

This is one of the groups. We were Youth for Nava or something like that. So I don’t know who this one is. This is Rachel Ochoa. His name will come. He lives in Spain now. His name I have somewhere. Myself and David Sanchez, and I don’t remember her. But we were Youth for Nava, and that’s the first campaign I’m conscious of us working on.

This is priceless.

Look how young we were. [laughs]

It’s beautiful. I love your hair, too, the way it’s poufed up like sixties.

I know, I was very sixties. Oh, and I was very sleeveless. [laughs]

But you’re not hippie. It’s, like, more yuppie.

Yes, all of us. All of us.

Even before yuppie was a term.

Look it, does David look militant to you at all?

No, not at all. That’s what’s so interesting. He does look mild-mannered, but you say that he did have—

He had that presence. Let’s see. What did it say here? So I got this from Conrad, who was finance chairman for Nava for the board, 1967. So, see, we’re already Young Citizens or Young Chicanos.

And what does it say?

It just gives the date of probably the campaign.

Munatones [phonetic].

And he was a teacher at Roosevelt.

Okay. Then you said you were Youth for Nava.

Yes.

That’s what I was going to write down.

Yes, we were Youth for Nava.

In 1967.

Yes. It says, “For Nava for board of education, Third District, 1967.” Vickie, David—what does this say? And Rachel. He doesn’t know the other two. I know this guy’s name. It’s just—I have it. He’s on Facebook. But he lives in Spain, and every once in a while I get an email—you know, a notice from there.

Okay. Gosh, how did you keep all of these different issues straight? [laughter] Because what else is happening? That’s already after the—

So we have access to Nava, obviously.

Yes.

And I remember he ran citywide and it was a big victory for us, because this is before the Voting Rights Act and you had to run, and Latinos didn’t win citywide. So we handled, as youth, our campaign, we handled the Eastside. I remember doing that old campaigning in trucks with microphones, and driving up and down streets. Now I think it’s hilarious. But that’s how we campaigned.

The real grassroots and face-to-face. But how did you get involved in that campaign? Because today with the Internet, everything you get from the Internet.

That’s why I think either Young Citizens or Young Chicanos is already formed, because this is a—I’m sure Rachel might know who this is, and there’s a Charlotte. We’re already meeting as an organization and we take on this issue of Nava.

And then when you meet him later on with the—you give him the questionnaires, correct?

I think we give the questionnaires to whoever the superintendent is that oversees the Eastside, or we gave him the results of it, and then later on we might present them to Nava. I’m not sure of that, because I do remember tallying them, listed them. [laughs] What did they say? So I remember I must have been in college already and had a statistics course or something, because I remember counting and tallying.

Making a report, basically, of your findings.

Yes. Then I remember us going to at that time near Hazard Park [phonetic] there’s a regional office. There’s actually two regional offices, one where Bravo [phonetic] High School is now, and one part of the park that was given back to USC. There’s two locations, and the superintendent for that region is at one, and then that Human Relations group is in the other building. And sometimes they helped us formulate our language that we have to go talk. They played a dual role.

So they served as mentors as well. Fascinating. And were you disappointed in Nava’s role or his reaction or his—

I don’t recall. I don’t recall.

Some people were.

Our purpose was to hit the press and make an issue that our educational system was not what it should be, and that was accomplished. So I think I’m starting to be more—maybe trying to go to school. So I think after the walkouts, I concentrate a little more on school and then participate more with MEChA and UMAS, that kind of stuff, and keeping us—because I remember I had sort of like a privileged standing in UMAS and MEChA because I’d come from community involvement versus just if you’re a college student, so I could play it off.

Right, right, right. You had your street cred, as they say today. [laughter] Then can you tell me how you remember La Piranya forming? So this is at the same time that you’re dealing with the educational issues, passing out the surveys, getting them back.

And I think we’re all working out of Father Luce’s time, and so that’s like our summer job. So I think it’s one of our projects, to have our own center. I remember renting the facility, and then we’d go in and we’d clean it up. Then I remember we had to go paint, and then we used to have to try and go get donations for tables and things like that, and Rachel being the artist and making everything look hippie-ish, you know, that kind of era.

Like the Flower Power type of thing?

Yes, because I remember the flowers and the swirls and everything on the table.

It wasn’t Mexican?

No.

Or like today what you would think of Mexican style painting of—

No. Other than we did have—I think it’s Benny Luna who paints a mural on one of the walls, and they must have been—I don’t know if they were Aztec or Mayan gods. So there was a big mural. And where La Piranya was is where Tamayo’s [phonetic] Restaurant is now, so they had to have painted over that. When you go to Tamayo’s Restaurant, there’s the main restaurant, and then there’s like a little side section where they do maybe private little gatherings. That was the Piranya. It was all one building. So in one sense the Piranya still exists. I remember the first time I went to Tamayo’s, and they had painted over Benny’s mural.

So it’s under there.

Yes. It’s been painted under. But then they put—Diego Rivera paintings are all over the place too.

Right. But they didn’t paint a mural over a mural.

No, I don’t think so. No, no, no.

That would be interesting.

I think they have the actual paintings up on them.

Do you remember it being a pet project of any one individual having the La Piranya, or was it something that—

I think it was one of those collectively again, and then that’s why when I’m startled with David’s ownership of it.

Yes.

So I was startled with it, and I’m not into conflict. Then I had to go back. I had that pressure to go back to college.

And was he starting to take more of a dominant—

A leadership, yes, yes. That was his style. I remember him being just as active on the police brutality issues. I’m not part of that police brutality issues, and so I think that’s much more serious in the sense of violence that’s occurring in the community. Then I remember there are some other groups that are doing that, too, and so he’s interacting with them. I’m not doing any of that interaction. So he’s taking on a lot more than I am, a lot more than I am. I’m solely on educational issues.

But the walkouts still start. Still, La Piranya becomes a place where people, students from Roosevelt and—I’m not sure—Garfield? But, yes, Garfield. Isn’t that where students from, Garfield, not Roosevelt?

Yes.

Come to start organizing. That’s how it’s portrayed in the movie.

Yes. I don’t recall meeting. I don’t recall where we met. I don’t know if we met at Father Luce’s church. Did we meet at EICC? Was it the Piranya? Was it all three? I don’t remember “a” location. So I just don’t have a memory of that, where. It was, like, lots of locations.

Right. And, like you mentioned, you had the affiliates of the different high schools who are your organizers, so to speak.

And I’m a college student. Maybe I wasn’t full-time, maybe I was only taking one or two—so I’m a college student, so I’m still working the college group too. I’m still working UMAS at the time to be part of the walkout.

Oh, okay. Can you talk to me about that? How did you get involved? Were you a founder of the UMAS program?

I don’t think I was a founder. I think Phil Castruita was the first president of United Mexican American Students at Cal State L.A., and I’m more involved in YCCA or outside, but I’m always taking at least a couple of classes or one class, and UMAS is forming and I’m starting to attend. So I’m part of the group, but I have no leadership in it. I never had a leadership role in UMAS or MEChA, other than maybe a committee, but I was never a president, vice president, or secretary or anything of that nature, although very much a member.

Do you feel like you had a voice, that they would listen to you?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And I told you I got that status because I was a community activist.

Do you remember Lillian Roybal being in that group?

No, but I know Phil makes reference to her, because we have this little group going that’s going to have a UMAS-MEChA reunion, and we’re going to have it at my house.

Excellent.

We’ve had some at different places. We laugh because the meeting is like 80 percent remember, remember. He was the UMAS president, so he has more interaction with—I don’t remember her as a community activist per se. Maybe she was on the college level.

I did interview her, because we tried to interview her mom, but she was—

Very ill.

—unable to talk. And she remembers being involved in UMAS at Cal State Los Angeles. So you’re trying to get them involved in education—

And having a role at the walkout.

What did you think their role should be?

Monitors. Monitors mostly, not necessarily issue oriented, but we needed someone to protect high school students and to help lead the line, make sure that they were following, that they weren’t going to be hit by police and all that kind of stuff.

Were you afraid? Because this is after the Watts—not too soon after the Watts uprising, or rebellion, some people call it.

Out of naivety, I was not afraid.

And Kent State. Was that before or after? The kind of repression that was coming down on students.

We were going to be so organized and we were going to—you know. I think Sal was probably stressing that with us, that there wasn’t—you know. So the purpose overshadowed even the idea of—but we knew that we had to have monitors and that there was some other militant—not militant. There was some kind of Pinto program where they were college students, and they were going to help us so that we don’t get into problems with the police. So there was this consciousness that there had to be organized and that we didn’t. What blew and caused this, I think, is the fact that Wilson went and they weren’t even in the original plan. And then that sets off the other schools. So part of the organization and structure and all of this monitoring and whatever sort of just became reactionary to what had to be done for our purpose.

David remembers that you were looking at June.

Yes. Wilson, was it? To my recollection, Wilson High School wasn’t even in the original plan. It was Garfield, Roosevelt, and Lincoln. Wilson was still predominantly Italian or something. So they threw off the whole plan. And after that, we became reactionary, and then I think that’s what allows for violence to occur.

Do you remember feeling angry or resentful that they took that decision to walk out without—

I remember being confused, and I don’t think I’m at the meeting where it’s discussed do we go whatever, like you see in the movie. I don’t recall any of that, other than being told we’re going to do this, or we need to be out there. I do recall calling or being at an UMAS-MEChA meeting, which we are, and saying, “I need x amount of monitors at Garfield,” or, “I need x amount. Who’s going to be there in this?” So maybe more of a liaison from whatever was—because I have limited time that I can be involved because of the strictness going on at home and curfew and things like that. So more of like, “Call me. Tell me what you want me to do.” And I don’t even know who’s calling me. [laughs]

Then what was your role?

Facilitator more. I know I was assigned Lincoln High School, so I remember my job was to tie up the principal so that when the organizers call for the walkout, I’m supposed to be interviewed by the principal for a teaching assistant’s job. So I am in his office. He does begin the interview with me. I think I scheduled it for 8:30, 8:45. But he’s going in and out, because I’m sure he’s getting rumors. And then finally he comes in and says, “I’m sorry. I can’t meet with you.” Then all hell breaks out, and so I take off. I do remember that role. So, see, that’s once again, going to I didn’t look threatening. But then I remember Joe Razo leading the words, “Walkout, walkout, walkout,” going up and the halls. Joe Razo was probably the first person, when I walked out of the principal’s office, that I saw, that I recognized. So I do recall that role.

But then from there, probably because I attended Roosevelt, I get in my car and I drive to Roosevelt to see what happens. First of all, there’s not only one walkout. There’s more than one day walkout. What day I’m where are all mixed in my memory.

Oh, okay. So then when you’re at Lincoln, do you remember it feeling violent and scary?

No, no.

Or peaceful?

Peaceful.

The students are walking out and—

Yes, the students are walking out. I think Sal had did his internal—you know. It was known that he was going to walk out. He had other teachers, and they led students. So there was no violence at Lincoln. The violence occurs at Roosevelt, and that’s because they try to stop the kids.

So then you go straight from Lincoln to Roosevelt.

That’s what I recall.

Then what do you remember witnessing there?

I remember getting on campus and everything is, like, locked tight. But I guess they had a different walkout time or it’s a different day. I don’t know if we walked out on the same day. I don’t recall. But I remember that the gates are locked. There’s security. Kids are starting to—someone’s called for walkout inside, because I’m on the outside now. I’ve been escorted. And that’s where I think they ask me to roll up my car to see if we can pull a gate, but I think I don’t pull the gate. I think the gate breaks before I pull it. So, those kind of memories.

Then I remember the LAPD rushing in, and then I remember I have visions of kids running on the field and being hit and this and that. Then the worse memory I have of getting very frightened is the next morning after that encounter, I’m driving to Roosevelt early in the morning, and I see Evergreen Park, where I used to go to the pool, and it’s a recreation, and it’s a command post for LAPD, and it’s tents. I look and I see the patrol cars parked. I see the motorbikes parked. Just, oh, my god. I think their response to the violence the first time at Roosevelt is spontaneous, but I remember seeing that if there’s more violence at Roosevelt, they’re organized.

They’re ready.

They’re ready. It’s a real ugly memory.

Because you worked so hard to stay out of trouble, how did you feel at that moment when you see the police coming in and the chaos and the—

Probably more committed that there’s no violence and that whatever happens, we have to do it organized. But also now having witnessed, much more aware of the possibility, it’s probably one of being naïve again, that you can handle this, some stupid thought. [laughs]

You didn’t want to run and hide and stop?

No, no, no, no. I never have. For my personal, my worry was always what was going to happen at home. I think that’s when my father gets the news on TV, and he has an awareness what I’m working on, and I think that’s where he has that conversation with me, because George Putnam’s telling him we’re outside agitators and that we’re Communist-linked. And he sits me down and says, “I never thought I’d raise a Communist.” Then I have to tell him, “I’m not a Communist. I don’t even know what that means.” [laughs] I think that publicity that was going on on TV is what really gives my parents some idea that there’s danger.

They never forbid you, though, did they?

No. They’re real curfew oriented. They’re very curfew oriented. That’s all. So that’s my time. Whatever participation I had, I had to do it within the family rules of when I could go out, when I had to be in by ten, eleven, twelve, whatever it is.

Fascinating. So when you see the police cars, you said that was a really ugly memory.

That’s the first memory I have of putting a vision to the word “police state.” I probably had heard that, but I didn’t know what it meant. But when I saw, that was a military camp. I’m not talking small. The whole field, there’s tents. There must be fifty cars. I see all the motorbikes. It’s just, like, shocking. That’s what police state means. And why? Because they’re going to be ready to go attack whatever happens at Roosevelt. So that’s the reality of the violence to me that can occur. And I don’t remember—and I think that’s maybe the second or third day of walkouts, and then they do go on campus prepared, and that’s where you get more of the violence and the conflicts between the police and students. We might have broken some windows or broken a gate or pushed kids out, but I don’t think the police response was ready, and they were divided. There was no violence like that at Lincoln, and I’m not aware of what’s going on at Garfield. That would have been the sheriff, so I don’t know what the—I’m just, like, concentrated on Roosevelt.

So you think that the leadership, the police leadership at Roosevelt was responsible for—

Absolutely. They were determined to crack down on any possible disturbance at that school, but that disturbance, that walkout, was going to occur, the second ones that followed.

How did you regroup after that, after seeing that initial violence? Did you come together that afternoon or evening and talk about what you were going to do next?

I recall there was always debriefing meetings. I think we just changed strategy from walkout. Those words that Sal says, “If it’s not in the press, it didn’t happen,” and that we kept saying it was happening, not because we were militant or troubled kids, but it all was happening, the message, because we wanted a better education. I think once that was heard on the TV or whatever, then we changed tactics and go to board meetings and things like that. [interruption]

So the walkouts go from March 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and then in the spring at that same time, there’s an UMAS convention at UCLA. Did you attend that?

No, I didn’t. Like I tell you, I attended UMAS meetings for the purpose of facilitating the walkouts. Many of their issues I don’t get involved with.

Like the academic Chicano Studies and that kind of thing?

Chicano Studies, yes, because I remember being on some Mesa Directiva, and I represent MEChA in interviewing the professors that were going to be hired for the new Department of Chicano Studies.

Oh, excellent.

I remember being part of that panel, and how I got there or whatever, but I remember being there. I always remember one professor. Oh, god, what’s his name? He’s passed away.

Ralph Guzman?

No. Ralph Guzman had a very important role because he was teaching at Cal State L.A., but he was in the history department. Carlos Penechet was one of these young men that was being interviewed for a Chicano Studies professor, and everybody got on my case after because he was very handsome. I said, “Are you married?” [laughs] It just came out. And everybody, you know, “What does that have to do with it?” I remember the criticism after. I said, “Well, I just wanted to know,” because he was so handsome.

That’s funny.

It’s Carlos or Jeff, they’re twins. So now I get them mixed up. I think it might be Carlos Penachet. But it was just like all these heavy questions, this, that, or whatever, and I do remember asking him, “So are you married?” [laughter] Real heavy, real militant.

Well, you got to the point, frank. [interruption]

Okay. We’re back.

So that was sort of a good memory being there. I remember interviewing those professors.

So that’s my question, was that something that you were—because you talk about education, about going to college, but were you interested in curriculum that related to—

Chicano, yes, because I knew nothing of my past as a Latina, as a Chicana, and I remember the protests and the demands. [interruption]

So that’s occurring, and now I’m becoming a little more active on campus, and it was for the Chicano Studies, it was for naming that building Salazar Hall, and then also camping out, asking for more Chicanos on campus, which is the root of EOP. I do recall, too, that they said, “Okay. You have fifty slots. Go get kids.” We had no criteria we were going to be allowed. I remember being in front of Lincoln High School and just saying, “Who wants to go to college?” type thing. And we actually got fifty kids to enroll. And I believe that’s the beginning of EOP in California. And I remember us camping out, and it was more of a social, funny thing, taking over the lawn area. We had tents. We partied. But we were making a statement: we wanted more Latinos on campus.

That definitely came up during the walkouts when students in high school were asking for Chicano Studies or education. Do you think that came from Sal’s influence? I mean, he seems to present himself—

He made the statement that we have to ask for improved school and more opportunities in college. So then it just goes naturally that many college students were recruited to assist at the walkouts in different roles. Then that comes from follow-up on our part as that there’s a few of us here, we want more, and meeting with the administration and demonstrating and then finally saying, “We’re going to sleep here till you meet our demands,” type thing, for increased enrollment. I wasn’t part of the negotiations with the college president at the time, but I do recall saying, “We have fifty slots and now we need to go get fifty kids,” so that part. And all this time I work for L.A. Unified, so I’m an insider and an outsider at the same time.

Wow. How did you manage your day and still get home by curfew? [laughs]

I never went to class. That was the problem. I seldom went to class. [laughs]

So you didn’t find anybody at Cal State that you found inspirational that was teaching?

Guzman. Guzman, I did take his course, and I remember it was very difficult for me because it was maybe a senior or junior, and I was not there academically. But he also was very mentoring and often took a group of us to speak as to the issues in our community and our concern, because I remember traveling to Utah with him to be on a panel at Brigham Young, I guess, on the Chicano Movement.

And I recall him introducing me to the Farm Workers Movement, and I remember I had to write a paper or research De Colores. He just put words on the wall. “You go find out how they’re attached.” And then that’s when the farm workers had one of their songs. So I remember that. So I think Guzman is my first and only professor that I had, because I was a math major originally, and then after Chicano Studies is formed, it’s an easier route, and I could B.S. my way through, because there was no Chicano Studies curriculum yet.

That’s right. You were creating it.

You were creating it. And then I was by that time working as a work study, and one of the early professors that’s hired is Bert Corona, and I get assigned to Bert Corona. So that’s just a fascinating experience. Bert would make things happen. I got exposed to his whole organization and just having those dialogues with him. He used to get very frustrated. I remember we used to do things by mimeograph, still, and the Chicano Studies didn’t have their own machine. We used to have to go to the science department, and he got tired that I didn’t have the stuff. So he just gets on the phone and orders one and has it delivered, and then he says, “Take this bill to the president of the college.” And I’m like, “Oh, shit.” But I learned that bold action. I learned bold action from Bert. I just do it and pay the consequences later. I remember when I was principal, starting to use that, and I had a real conservative budget person. She said, “Miss Castro, you don’t have enough money in that account.”

I said, “Order it. God will provide.” So I think I got that from Bert. I think I got that from Bert with that, “Just get what you need for the kids. We’ll figure it out after.” So that, I think, really helped define my leadership, that I was willing to bend the rules to get what I needed within L.A. Unified.

How would you compare his leadership to what David was trying to achieve?

Oh, we’re talking generation of experience. David’s ego and personality guides a lot of his, where Bert was truly an organizer. Having read Bert’s book now, where he criticizes the Chicano Movement of the sixties because we’re not attached to labor, so now I get that. He’s a labor organizer. He’s a community organizer. So he has a bigger picture than David, so there’s no comparison. Bert is way up here, and David is just on a different track than many of us were and just as talented as many of us were. Then I had later on the privilege of working for Dionicio Morales, the Mexican-American Opportunity Foundation (MAOF), and I equate him and Bert as truly inspirational, their backgrounds, what I learned from them, being really the—oh, what’s the word that I want to say—legends that I wish I had been exposed to early in life and not later in life, because there was so much to learn from these gentlemen and being very privileged that under different settings I had the opportunity to work with these two individuals.

Right. I think Dionicio so far has not received the credit. I’m not too familiar with that all. He’s got the book. I’ve read that.

Oh, yes, yes.

But Bert Corona is definitely is looked at like a legend, like you say.

And they both come from the Labor Movement.

Yes, they’re from the same generation.

And I think I had conversations with Dionicio about Bert and his admiration for him, but Dionicio was really more about community investment and empowerment, where Bert was more a labor leader and organizing common folk to speak for themselves.

What about the question of justice?

I think that guided each and that they were the first to look into manipulating the system for that justice. Very, very, very, very strong-willed men.

And your role with Bert Corona was a teacher’s assistant, did you say?

Yes, a work study. I was under a work study program, which means to get my scholarship or whatever loan I was, you had to work x amount of hours, so I was assigned to Bert, first to the Chicano Studies department, and then Bert comes on, and they said, “Okay, you’re going to do his work.” Then when I elected to the Board of Education, I need a job, and it had to have flexibility, because on the Board of Education you receive a stipend. You don’t receive a salary. And I left the salary of a principal to be a board member, and I think it was $1,200 a month stipend or something. So Gloria Molina facilitates me getting a job with Dionicio, who gave me quite a bit of flexibility for a while, but then I have the privilege of working for him.

Much later when you’ve had more experience in the community, teaching, and leadership role as a principal, this came after your gig?

Yes, I was a principal.

Before, right?

Before I ran for the Board of Education. Then I need a job to supplement my income, and so I go first to work for Bert. Then I start teaching Chicano Studies or in the Department of Ed. I was always hustling work. Then I’d go to work for a group that is now called Great Minds in STEM, STEM being Science, Technology and whatever, as a consultant, to improve kids’ exposure to the sciences and mathematics. So I become a consultant. So I was always hustling a second job.

That happened more in the eighties when you were—so when did you—

I was elected in ’93, and I leave office in 2001.

So that would be good to have your résumé to have some of those dates in my mind. I’m going to stop it here, and then we’ll continue next week, if possible. [End of March 1, 2013 session]

This is Virginia Espino, and I’m interviewing Victoria Castro at her home in Alhambra, California. Today I wanted to back up and go over a couple of things that we talked about last time, and if you could reiterate, because I listened to the interview and I didn’t hear that you specifically told me how and why you left the Young—the YACC.

I left because we were just about ready to open the Piranya, our coffeehouse, and an L.A. reporter stopped by. I happened to be there and I think Rachel Ochoa was there, and so we answered his questions. So there was some article, and I think it was an L.A. Times reporter; it was a reporter. And an article appeared and I was quoted in the article as to maybe the purpose or why we were doing this. And David Sanchez took some exception, like, you know, like was I the spokesperson for the Piranya, or maybe implying that I took more ownership than the group or something. So I reflected on that, and I was also being pressured at home by brothers to return to school to be a full-time student. So I just said, “You know, this might be an easy out for me. It’s going, it’s happening,” and so then I returned to school. It might have been we might have already had the election and maybe he was already going to be the president. I don’t know. So maybe that’s why he took exception for me being the spokesperson. So I just didn’t want to live in that conflict, and I needed to get back to school, so I just sort of stepped away.

Was that typical of him to challenge people like that when he disagreed?

Actually, it was not. I had never really been in conflict with him, and it was quite personal for him. So there was no intention of mine to upset him, to take ownership. It was always a group. So I was, like, “I ain’t gonna get into this, because this is personal for him. So there’s no need.” [interruption]

Okay. Sorry. Okay, we’re back. So you never, in all of your meetings in the YACC, you never had a conflict with David?

You know, nothing that wasn’t resolvable. We all had different ideas, but, like I said, we became very family oriented and we hung out with each other for a whole summer on, like, a daily basis from morning to evening. So you know family structures. There might have been differences, but they were resolved, or another person gave an interview, because if you reflect, there’s some big personalities in that group. But I personally just never felt challenged or that I would work—by nature, I’m a facilitator. So I said, “I ain’t facilitating here, so I might as well get back to school, and so let it be.” I’m thinking now that he was already going to be president, because there must have been an election or a turnover, because I think I was only the first or second year.

The president of that group.

Yes, of that group.

Where did you want to take it when you were the president of that group? Do you remember a direction you wanted it to go into?

For me it was always about improving education. So that’s why I was part of the pre-planning on the walkouts, involving us in the walkouts, and improving our scholarship opportunities and things like that of that nature. So I never got into too many other issues.

Then I think you did talk a little bit about this last time, because you said that David was really interested in the police abuse question.

Yes. There were two strands that we were involved in: educational issues and also police brutality. And David was also very involved in that as well as the education. I didn’t have any need to be involved in that. I was never confronted by the police until after those kinds of things, after the walkouts.

Was it hard for you to leave that group?

No, because it just seemed natural. He wanted to take leadership. And I think it must have been right around registration time or something. It coincided with, like, a natural departure.

Was it like a relief, do you think?

Yes, because I was going to relieve myself of pressure from the family. I was going to get back to school. So that was the relief.

Because when some people talk about the time that they left, there’s a lot of emotion around leaving important organizations for them.

It was just like a transition, because then I went to Cal State and there was already an UMAS and a MEChA, and so I sort of wove myself into their activities.

Well, let’s move into that then, the UMAS, and then we can go back again to the walkouts, because I also want to reflect a little bit on some of the individuals that were involved, and I have some names, just to see what you remember. So, actually, since I’m already talking about that, we might as well just go into that. Let me show you the list of names that I found, and maybe some of these will jar your memory. So this is actually the first EICC attendance list.

Rudy Acuña I know because he’s a professor. Sal, the walkout. Esteban Torres, I probably don’t remember him as much as involved there more than till he becomes an elected official. There’s names underneath them. Horacio Quinones. It was the Urban Center on First Street. Then Antonio Hernandez I don’t recall. Father John Luce, absolutely, a great influence on all of us. Sal. Do you want me to just go through the highlighted ones?

No, I highlighted them.

For another reason?

Yes, for another reason. Just if you can—anything you can [remember].

Enrico Sanchez, no memory. Frank Cruz. Is he a reporter?

Yes.

Yes, he’s a reporter. Then Esteban Torres was, I guess, active in the community. Parents, absolutely Julia and her husband and the daughter, Tanya Mount, was very active walkout leader at Roosevelt. Ben Carmona, I remember the name, and I don’t know why I smiled. He must have been a pleasant person. Ben and Kay, no, I don’t remember them. Sarah and Tom McPherson, absolutely. Sarah was an educator and her husband was a probation officer, and they were very active community members, and I kept in contact with them. In fact, Sarah still sends me a Christmas card every year. She still lives in the same house. They lived in the community. Ed Romero [phonetic] I don’t remember. Freddy Resendez I remember as a high school— Paula Crisostomo and I are still very good friends. Margarita, I’ve become more friends with her since the filming, so I knew of her at Garfield. Maria Balleza was very active in UMAS, and UMAS was already organized at Cal State L.A., and I think she was an officer in UMAS. Pat Bojorn, I remember the name. Phil Castruita, I think, was the president, the first president of UMAS at Cal State L.A., and so they were already organized.

Moctesuma Esparza, I knew him as a student at Lincoln, as well as he was a member of YCCA, and I don’t know if he becomes a Brown Beret. I think so. I don’t know, but I know he’s one of those that got indicted and I still keep in contact with him. Raquel Galan, I don’t recall the name at all. Henry Gutierrez, I remember him, and then I think now he’s into films or something. I remember the name very well, though. Carlos Munoz, who’s now a college professor at—is it Berkeley? I think he’s Dr. Carlos Munoz. He’s now a college professor of Chicano Studies, I think, at Berkeley. Then Monte Perez, who’s now a president of a community college, and I remember him very well from Cal State L.A. Then Susan Rocha, who’s a filmmaker. What was it? I think the last time I ran into her, she was filming. I also remember her as a Folklorico dancer at UCLA when she was a student. Oh, god, they did a film on the film industry. Her and Nancy Santos worked together. Raul Ruiz, absolutely, Cal State. Juan Gomez Quinones, professor at UCLA now. I remember that in the Brown Berets, David Sanchez, Carlos Montes, and Ralph Ramirez. Ralph was also a Roosevelt grad and a member of YCCA. So Ralph, Carlos was not, Montes was not a YCCA member, but David Sanchez and Ralph Ramirez continued on as Brown Berets. But they’re still around.

Impressive list of activists.

Characters.

Yes, and then we go and move on to—

And a lot of them made a name for themselves in some field that Chicanos and Latinos were not in.

That’s right. Pioneers, that’s for sure.

Yes.

Well, tell me about—I don’t see your name on this list.

Oh, that’s true. [laughs]

Yes. Isn’t that interesting? Were you at the meetings after the walkouts when they would meet around Sal’s?

No, I don’t think so.

I believe that’s what this meeting was about, after Sal was—and also the Reverend.

Yes, and that was the Education Issues Coordinating Council, so I was in and out of that, and so, yes. I wasn’t really active in EICC, but I did go to the meetings occasionally. I was trying to behave and be a good student.

When you say that, what did you think of their decision to take over the Board of Education? Were you aware of it when it was happening?

I was aware of it as a second tier. I wasn’t in the group discussion about it, but I remember going and I remember being supportive. I don’t think I talked, but I remember being in the audience. Then they stayed overnight, and I wouldn’t have been able to stay overnight, so I probably left at ten. [laughs]

Do you remember when that decision came down that they were going to—because that’s a really interesting moment where people had to take their allegiance, were they going to stay, were they going to go.

Yes, yes.

Some people politically, they didn’t want to stay. Some people politically, they did want to stay. Other people had family responsibilities; they couldn’t stay. There was all these different issues. Do you remember?

I don’t remember any—I remember the event. I don’t remember being part of the pre-conversation. I just remember being there as support of it, but having to leave and then maybe come back a follow-up day or something like that. But I’m supportive of the event. That’s all I recall.

Does anything stand out to you from those meetings, maybe someone’s leadership, maybe a parent’s concerns, somebody coming forward?

Paula’s mother was very influential with us, and there were a group of parents that might have been, like, the Julia Mount super leadership in the parent movement. There was another woman. Gosh, I can’t—it was more like faces flashing than names.

What about—you mentioned Sarah and Tom McPherson. Did they have children in the school?

I don’t believe they even had children or maybe they—I don’t recall them having children, but I knew they lived on Bernal Street. That’s in City Terrace. Sarah was a teacher in the LAUSD system, and her husband was a probation officer. So they were professionals in the community that were very supportive of issues. I think her husband was also a writer, like for the Eastside Sun, or some publication, his own. But he was very active in MACA, the Mexican American Correctional Association. So I remember that. I’m going to excuse myself for a second.

Okay. I’m going to pause it. [interruption]

Here we go. But let me know, because I’m really happy to stop anytime you want to.

No, let’s go. I love these sessions.

Well, I’m interested in hearing, then, how you—because you said that you remained friends with the McPhersons. Were they like mentors to you?

Well, I interacted with Sarah, mostly, after—there was an organization, the Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) [interruption]

First of all, I had friends in college. You either went into teaching or you went into probation or you went into social work. That seemed to be the three tracks. So I had friends that went into probation, and they were active in MACA, which was the Mexican American Correctional Association, and they would have social events. So then I would go to there, and then I would see Sarah. Then Sarah was a teacher on the Eastside and later became an administrator and, I believe, active in the Association of Mexican American Educators. She was Latina. She was Chicana.

So, professionally we would run into each other, and even when I was on the Board of Education, I had to work part-time and I supervised student teachings at Cal State L.A., and then I found out when she retired that that’s where she was at. So they would have quarterly meetings with us, and then I would hook up with Sarah. She’s one of those that writes a nice little story at Christmas, and so I still have her address. I think they lived in City Terrace, and I don’t think they ever moved. I know her husband passed away about five years ago, and I guess she wrote me that he had been ill and passed away. I didn’t even recall till right now that that’s probably when I met her, those days on those issues. So I consider it community activists. Then Julia Mount, I stayed more in contact with their daughter, who was also LAUSD employee, and so as a teacher or as an administrator, Tanya worked—the last time when I was principal at Hollenbeck, she was—I call her the ticket lady. She registered all the kids on the federal lunch program. So when I found a kid without a free lunch application, “Go see Tanya. Go see Tanya.” I think on Facebook she’s my friend, and every once in a while we’ll correspond or something like that.

And I believe it’s not a secret, I believe it’s out in the open that her family was associated with the Communist Party.

Yes, they’re very—that was always the rumor out there, especially her mom. Her mom was very, very progressive, and her mother runs for office, too, I don’t know even on what ticket.

From East Los Angeles, for something unique to an office that represents East Los Angeles.

Yes, and then she also ran whatever last community she was in. I know it’s not East L.A. Maybe it’s El Monte or something east of here. I’m on the Board of Education, and I get a call from Julia, would I endorse her, because she was running for, I think, a school board position. Of course, based on my memory, “Absolutely use my name,” you know. [laughs]

So you weren’t intimidated or apprehensive about their relationship to—

No, there’s just no—I don’t know. I was not a labeler, and if I had a good working relationship with you, it continued.

I think that the other group would be—well, Margarita Peron’s [phonetic] parents were also associated with the Communist Party.

You know, I didn’t know Margarita other than some slight memories of being in the same place with her during the walkouts or visual contact, and it wasn’t until they held focus groups for the making of the movie Walkouts, that in the focus groups I was just so impressed with her and her journals and her memory and this. So I probably made more of a friendship with her via the focus groups on the film itself. And she was Garfield, so I was still centered mostly on Roosevelt.

That’s right. That’s interesting. Those ideologies were swirling all over the place, like communism, socialism, and Marxist ideology.

Yes, and then like I tell you, my father thought I was a Communist, so those type of labels just sort of like, you know, like water on a duck, just slid off me because I just knew I was doing things as justice struggles. Or else so-and-so, you see them, and so what if they have that possible Communist thing? I just saw them doing good work for the community. And it could be just the naivety too. I didn’t live through McCarthyism or anything like that, and it was sort of also in the air, all the Civil Rights Movement and the different groups involved.

Were you drawn to any of those ideologies?

No. I was a Chicana. I’m just a Chicana from East L.A. who is trying to improve education. So I never really studied anything like that.

Some of the groups, they did, they were doing that as their blueprint of activism.

Yes. In fact, I’m very good friends with Teresa Gonzales [phonetic], and her brother was a real activist at Cal State L.A. and sort of tied with maybe communism, progressive. He now lives in Chicago, and I ran into him at a family event with Teresa. His name is Nacho Gonzales. “Nacho, I remember you calling all the Latino organizations on campus.” At that time, I was dancing in the Folklorico, and they were afraid to go to this meeting because we were going to be told about how we weren’t being our role in the revolution type thing. So I told him, “Nacho, you had the best line. You went committee by committee and gave a critique of how we weren’t participating in whatever revolution we were doing, and that I was representing the Folklorico, and you said, ‘And what, you guys are going to dance your way through the revolution?’” or something. I just thought it was so clever, it stayed with me. I don’t even remember the purpose of the meeting, other than we weren’t being militant enough getting our demands and things like that. Then all the other Folklorico dancers were afraid to be present at that kind of a meeting. They wanted to be dancers and be Folkloricos, so I said, “I’ll go. I’ll go.” So then he—in my mind, I chuckled, you know. What am I going to do? You go for it. [laughs]

So it didn’t affect you in a negative way, that kind of pressure?

No, no. No, no.

Because some people comment about how that was hard for them.

I think I could always stand in my own integrity in the sense of, like I said, I came from being a community activist to a college activist, and so I could wear that badge, sort of, and defend myself. I, for whatever reason, had a good positive image as to a person that struggled for justice causes and tended to be on the same side as many of the critics. And if they were critical of me, it didn’t affect me. I just always felt I was in integrity. So I was very, I don’t know, naïve. I don’t know. Maybe people did have criticism of me, but it never really motivated me. Like I said, I think somewhere I always was a good listener and tried to resolve things. That was my nature. So if there were two groups in conflict, I probably went back to the Folklorico and said something about, “If there’s a protest or there’s an issue, we probably have to be present more,” or something. “We can’t just dance our way through the revolution.” I don’t even know what revolution. To this day, I don’t know which revolution. Were we taking over the government? Were we taking over the university or whatever? But whatever it was, we weren’t doing enough as Folklorico.

The literature on the movement talks about the differences in the so-called Mexican American generation and people that were maybe not quite your parents’—well, maybe your parents’ generation, and how the sixties was more of a militant direct action, kind of. How would you situate yourself in the politics of the sixties?

I think that we were influenced by the Black Movement, not that we were trying to recreate that, but we were influenced and we realized—at least for me, I realized that much of the civil rights protests that were going on, the issues were in my community. So I was stepping up to the plate to do my part. Others were interacting with Black Panthers and David and his group, and they would come back and share those relationships. A lot of the Mechistas were involved with other cities and the event in Denver and all that kind of stuff. So I just maneuvered it in my world my way, type thing.

How would you define your politics, if you could, at that time? Because I’m sure now you see things differently as—

I know. Sometimes I even see things conservatively. [laughter] I think I always liked that word “activist,” and so whether I was going to be on the left, from somebody’s perspective, or I was going to be too conservative or whatever, I always saw myself as liberal, very Chicano.

I was just recently criticized because of the mayor’s race in Los Angeles. Someone said, “Well, who would you vote for, Wendy Gruel because she’s the woman, or Eric Garcetti because his mom is Mexican?” I said, “I’m going to vote for the Latino. I’m a diehard for the underdog.” So I said, “I still look at the ballot and I still look for the Latino name, and that’s who I’m going to vote for.” So I’ve always been consistent that way. I guess I don’t know what label that is, but I’m consistently pro raza.

The United Mexican American Students, when they were formed at Cal State Los Angeles, you were part of that organization. Did you feel like you were able to voice your opinion—

Oh, absolutely.

—that they heard what you had to say?

Absolutely. I tell you, I had this extra privileged membership because I was also looked at or I looked at myself as a community activist that now was trying to become a student activist, but my roots were in community activities and participation and being members of EICC and In and Out, the YCCA, having gone to Hess Kramer. Those were my credentials.

Right, and you had leadership training from those different—but then were you familiar with what was going on at Cal State University, Long Beach with their UMAS and then the Chicana Feminist postion?

No, I pretty much stayed within Cal State L.A. and occasionally, occasionally would go to—you know, they used to have MEChA’s Central or they had the Plan de Santa Barbara. I didn’t participate in those things.

You didn’t go to any of those things.

Probably because I wasn’t allowed to. [laughs]

Yes, because you would maybe have to stay the night.

Something to that effect.

Yes, because there was the March on Washington that some of the Brown Berets attended. You didn’t attend.

I didn’t do that.

Then there was the Denver Youth Conference with Corky Gonzales.

I didn’t attend that.

Then there was the Plan de Santa Barbara.

Right, and I didn’t attend that. Now, close friends of mine attended and whatever the action plan that came out of those, the Plan de Santa Barbara or Denver, I absolutely embraced.

What about Corky Gonzales’ poem Yo Soy Joaquin? Did that have an impact on you?

I think I identified with it, and I remember it impacting me and giving me vision, and I think I even used it in one of my Chicano Studies classes or maybe shared it with somebody. I don’t even remember what the poem is really about, but it’s about identity, and so I probably embraced it.

What about the gender aspect of—

The gender aspect, I think I recall Corky Gonzales being a speaker at Cal State L.A. or L.A. State, whatever we were, and I remember some remarks that he made that were very anti-woman or upset me as not feeling that he embraced women, Chicanas as equals. So I was, like, startled and, like, stepped away a little bit from that. I think later on, probably Comisión or whatever took issue with him formally or something to that effect.

I want to come back to that. You’re the second person to comment on that. Most of the other people from Cal State L.A. who I’ve interviewed don’t remember that.

He gives a speech or something. He says something that was just offensive. It was offensive. Maybe Comisión was or was not formed yet, but I remember them also sharing anti-Corky Gonzales feelings because of his views of women. Maybe we’re supposed to be home pregnant and barefoot or something. I don’t know what.

“One step behind.” I think he said something like the Chicano woman’s place is one step behind.

Right. Something to that effect. I don’t remember what the quote was then. It was, “What are you talking about?”

Was that the first time that you had that feeling? You don’t remember that happening in other situations?

No, no other situations, because as I’ve shared before, I was pretty much mentored by men, you know, being able to work for Bert Corona. He surely wasn’t an anti-female in any sense, and even Dionicio Morales, later on in life he just promoted women and promoted women.

Then I would never allow myself to be in that role, whether it was at YCCA, whether it was at UMAS, or whether it was in MEChA, those are the three organizations—I never took—like, I’m not going to make the sandwiches. I’m not going to be the secretary. And I would tell other women, “No, let’s go. Let’s do this.” And I didn’t see myself as a feminist, because within my family structure I was surely not allowed to be the—I had that dual role. There was my mother that was making sure I had all the feminist qualities of cooking and sewing and being a housewife, but then I had the influence of my brothers and the engagement of them—I pretty much held my own with them.

So you feel like you were given adequate leadership opportunities or equal leadership opportunities as the men when you were in those organizations?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

I’m going to pause it for a second, because I want to ask you something. [interruption]

I wanted to ask you about the sexual revolution was also occurring at that time. Some of the people that I interview talk about the love-ins that they would attend with the hippie culture, the white hippie culture. You’re coming out of this very patriarchal family where you have strict curfews and rules. How did you negotiate sexuality and those kinds of issues when the Pill was going to be—well, no, I guess the Pill wasn’t available yet in the early sixties.

In fact, being a virgin was a big issue for me, because I had been brought up in a Catholic environment, and, you know, your virginity was to be salvaged until you got married. And I obviously didn’t marry, and I became very sexually active with a partner. So, of course, I thought I was going to marry him, and so it was very devastating when the marriage didn’t occur, and I had issues personally with that for a while.

But, luckily, I never had those kinds of conversations with my mother. They might have suspected or whatever, but just like much of my involvement in the Chicano Movement was outside of the house, I think I was a virgin till twenty-three or something to that effect. So I had to struggle with that for some years. I do recall a close friend becoming pregnant and working with her. At first she wanted an abortion, and then she didn’t, but then we were going to have to go tell her parents. She was a high school friend, a very dear friend. And hearing about abortions, it was before they were legalized, and you went to Tijuana, and they used clothes hangers and put them up there, you know, all those ugly stories. So you were very cautious. I do recall going onto the Pill, and then I even had a IUD put in, or whatever it was, and that’s why I never got pregnant, that kind of thing. So I guess I lived through the liberation of women, but not without guilt or questions to my morality and those kinds of things, because they were so embedded in me. So I struggled with it.

Even though it was becoming acceptable across the country and people were looking at that as a liberation, you didn’t feel it would be liberating to—

Not at the beginning, not at the beginning of me becoming sexually active. There was lots of guilt. There was lots of guilt. In fact, I probably would say that when I lost my virginity I probably cried for three days as a tribute of that moment, but also as a moment of very—it was, like, an awful experience, because I wasn’t going to be a virgin when I got married. So that had been embedded in my mind that you had to do that.

What about, looking back, do you have different views now?

[laughs] I’m going to share a funny story with you. There are a group of about four or five girls—women, women, and this is maybe ten years ago. And we’re driving to a conference and everything, and so you know how you bring up a group conversation. “So how old were you when you lost your virginity?” Somebody brought the conversation, so it goes around, fourteen years, sixteen, whatever. So then I’m driving, and so I jokingly say to them, “Whores! You’re whores. You all of you are whores. I was twenty-three.” One of my friends tells me, responds, “Vickie, we can’t help it you were stupid.” [laughs] So I thought that just like put it in perspective very well, from their perspective. It was just the way I was brought up. And they were brought up the same way, but they violated their upbringing earlier.

Yes, because that’s the whole idea of the movement, is to rebel against those values of your family. So what you’re saying is you did, except for that. That was something that you also believed.

Yes.

Did you raise your daughter to have those same values?

She was adopted, and so I tried to, except she got pregnant at sixteen. She got pregnant at sixteen, so like the good mother, I sat her down once we found out she was pregnant, and I gave her all her options. “You can keep the child. You can give the child up for adoption. I would even be supportive of you if you wanted to have an abortion.” I actually favored the abortion.

And she responded, “I can’t have an abortion.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Oh, that’s morally wrong.” I go, “Oh, but having sex is morally okay?” So it was sort of a chuckle inside of me, like, “Oh, okay.” So she landed up having the baby and keeping the baby, and I supported her through that effort.

Wow. Sixteen.

Yes.

How long had you had her before she was—

I adopted her when she was seven.

So a good amount of years.

She was a handful.

So if you would describe the agenda of the Feminist Movement, primarily the white feminist movement, at that time looking back, what would you say their big issues were?

One would be—let me reflect on that, because I’m feeling right now it was not a part of me, so it’s something that I’m watching. I think the most I might have ever participated in is I think I tried to go braless. [laughter] I remember the test. You were supposed to get a pencil and put it under your boob, and if your boob held the pencil, then you shouldn’t go braless. There was some rule. So I think I couldn’t go braless because I might have been too big or something. [laughter] So it was like I feel like I’m watching a movie and then I’m trying to participate, but I obviously then took access to the Pill and things like that, so I grew into liberation.

So what you’re saying is the idea of sexual liberation was one of their prime issues.

Yes. I don’t equate it so much with social justice, as gender justice or equality. And then as I moved up in my career, I sure saw that there wasn’t even within the educational system. I become an administrator by a court order. So there was a suit against L.A. Unified, and there was a consent decree that by x amount of day they had to have so many women administrators, and I came under that consent decree. So I remember there was a little sarcasm of men like, “Oh, she’s a consent decree.” But once in those positions and given the opportunity, I think myself and many of the other women that entered administration proved ourselves to be just as strong administrators as any other male. Then I recall—here’s that little strategy again. I’m a middle-school principal, and there’s not that many women, still, but they have an organization, and they had never had had a female president. It was still the ol’ boys’ network within the middle school principals organization. And for some reason I told the girl next to me, “Nominate me. Just nominate me.” The election was going on during the meeting, and it was towards the end of the meeting, and so then they voted for president, and before the vote, they said, “And whoever gets the second highest vote will be the next president-elect.” They were stunned when I got the second amount of votes. So I inherited their lack of wanting to devote time at the end of the meeting for election properly, and so then I became the first female president of the middle schools principals organization.

After the results and my name was on the board, I saw in their faces, the male white—I don’t even know. No, there might have been a Latino president. But I remember the fright. They’re like, “Oh, shit. What have we done for the haste of not wanting to do this election position by position?” And I had a hard time the first few months trying to control these white males that were just throwing jabs, like you could just feel it, and it was because I was female. But then later I held my own that year as president, and I think I did some innovative things. Then it’s not too many years after that, I run for the board and I get elected. I remember going back to their meeting and getting their support.

What a victory.

I know. I don’t know what made me say, “Nominate me.”

Was that the first time you had run for the leadership, the president?

Leadership within the LAUSD network of organizations. I had been very active in the state organization, the Association of Mexican American Educators, and I was president of the East L.A. chapter, and then eventually worked my way up into the state presidency. But it was ethnic. It was ethnic. So that was the first. Then I felt, “Oh, wow, I’m going to lead these white men. I’m going to be leading these white men.” [laughter] Some took to it and some didn’t have the problem, but others, you could see the old white guard of LAUSD was in that organization.

Oh, my goodness.

But I had much more than many of them, because I had strong organizational skills. I had been YCCA, I had been state president of an association with then, I think, forty chapters, so I had strong parliamentary procedures. I knew how to run an organization, so I could hold my own and even, I think, in the sense of an organization had stronger leadership than some of those men in that group.

And all kinds, because you’re talking grassroots, community, as well as university.

Right.

What was the first presidency or the first director, sort of central leadership role that you had? Was it after you were in the work field?

After YCCA and MEChA, I become active as a teacher in AMAE, Association of Mexican American Educators, and then by default I become president, because at the school that I was at, the East L.A. chapter had sort of dwindled, and at the school that I’m at, there’s three or four men that had sort of let it dwindle and not taken leadership. So they sort of somehow make me president, and I remember they hand me also the treasury report, and we owe the bank $37. So I took that opportunity and called upon a lot of teacher friends that I knew, and we built up East L.A. AMAE at that time into the largest chapter in the group, and it had also been the founding chapter. Then I went and became active on the state level as their treasurer and worked my way into being the state president.

What I liked about that is that that’s what introduced me to issues, statewide issues that were affecting Latino children, mostly language acquisition issues. AMAE was a leader in the bilingual program, even before CABE comes around. Also they took a big lead in Latinos becoming administrators in Los Angeles and in California.

AMAE?

AMAE, yes.

When did you remember hearing first about bilingual education?

When I was in migrant education—not migrant, when I was in Teacher Corps, and we worked with migrant kids. AMAE was actually very influential in coming, and it’s noise and discussion in the educational world. Where it first hit me, is after I leave Teacher Corps, I come to work at Hollenbeck, very limited Spanish speaker still. I’m, like, shy of speaking in Spanish. I always understood what was going on, but I never led a lecture in Spanish or anything. The principal comes to me and says I’m going to be the bilingual math teacher, and there was no bilingual credentials at that time. I go, “Me?” He says, “Yeah, I need you to.” So I remember I had a group, maybe one or two classes, where all the kids were from Mexico. Okay, I read. I knew how to say sumar, restar. I took the basics. But I had so much fun because most of the kids that come from Mexico and I taught math are pretty advanced in math. So I was really teaching vocabulary, and then they were teaching me vocabulary. So I was a fun teacher, and I had games and things like that. So I had enough Spanish to facilitate their math, but I never had a real struggling student where I had to analyze things at that time. Then I remember I was real lucky. They had this math book that on one side was in English and one side was in Spanish, so I could go back and forth that way.

I’m going to pause it for a second, because I hear some background. Let me just stop recording. [interruption]

Okay. Did you want to finish what you got started—

So I was sharing that I was startled. I had my credential to teach was in mathematics and social studies, because I had been a Chicano Studies major, I had to become social studies, and then I had been a math major, so I had more than enough units to get to be authorized to teach math, and I became a seventh-grade math teacher. So then the principal approached me, I think my second year of teaching, that he needed a bilingual math teacher, and I told him, “My Spanish is not good enough to teach math.” And he said, “Well, you’re the only one I have.” So because of my Spanish surname and my limited Spanish, I became the math teacher. But I had fun, and I had good relationship with kids. At that time it was not formalized. Bilingual education was not formalized, and they were pushing for teachers to teach in Spanish. Strangely enough, there’s these five teachers from Cuba, so some of them did teach math, but I think they taught, like, the algebra, and I got, like, the lower level. That’s why I had fun in the class, because it was more fun. But it was probably a disservice to the kids, reflecting on it, but at the moment, I was what was the best available, so I think I was a very good teacher, somehow with limited Spanish skills, and later on I go and study in Cuernavaca and become a little more fluent in Spanish and that kind of stuff.

But is that the first time that bilingual education was brought to your attention?

Right.

You didn’t talk about it in the early days of your Chicana activism?

I think it was probably mentioned as a demand, especially cultural classes, but I never visualized myself as that teacher. I might have thought—because I do share the story that I entered elementary school speaking Spanish because I had a babysitter and then I’m told not, so I always reflected about, god, if it had been able for them to develop my two languages. Then I had also colleagues and friends that were just fluent in Spanish and fluent in English, and I wasn’t that person. But I think it was because of my education, that I had been denied access to developing my Spanish as a child. So I believed it would have made a big difference in my career and I wouldn’t have to have struggled to learn Spanish.

You mentioned that your activism is UMAS was about college recruitment and bringing more kids. Did you also have—or do you want to say something?

I want to say that was reflected from my experience. Remember, I had been discouraged by my counselor to go to Mills College, so I graduate from Roosevelt High School, which is by that time predominantly Chicano, Latino, and only five of us go on to Cal State.

I remember the first day walking on that campus, and it was as white as could be, and my first thought was, “Where did the Mexicans go?” I had already been to Hess Kramer. That was the first time I was a minority. Remember, my elementary, my junior high, and my high school, I’m the majority ethnically, and when I go to Cal State, I now get what it means to be a minority and go to a math class and not only are you one of the limited females in the class, you are probably the only Latina in the class, or there’s maybe one other Latino in the class. It was a white school. So it was a shocker. That was, “Okay, now I get what a minority is.” So that was also, “This is not right.”

When did you start or did you start advocating for Latinos or Chicanos in math?

An actual advocate was more when I’m on the Board of Education in math, science, and technology.

How did you choose that for your—

Because of my brothers, my older brothers. One’s a chemist, a research chemist for IBM, and my other works in the aerospace engineering. The influence of their leadership in those fields, and also Rick and I seen that we weren’t—I came to the realization that I started to look at things in a much broader scope as education in the United States, we don’t produce enough math and scientists. And then when you look at Chicanos—and my brother George had received some award from the Hispanic Engineers National Achievement, an organization that recognizes scientists and mathematics of Latinos who have made a contribution to humankind. And I had worked with the president of that organization as a playground director. We had co-coached. We used to joke, he’d see my brother more than me, so then I start that relationship with HENAAC which is now Great Minds in STEM, which promotes Latinos in science and technology, engineering, and math.

That’s something that seems only recently starting to become a cause.

Yes. And I became aware of it because of my brother being a noted scientist, and then my ex-friend, who I worked on the playgrounds, he put out that Hispanic magazine on engineering, and so that’s starting to influence me. So by the time I’m on the Board of Education, I’m quite aware of the lack of Latinos in those fields. Then I need to work, went on the board, and he offered me a consultant position. So I was able to bridge those worlds, and then later on when I retire, I assist. They get a grant from the Department of Defense to promote science, technology, engineering in Boyle Heights, K through twelve, so I’m a consultant on that program.

Oh, that’s really exciting.

I get to help write the curriculum, give them direction, and it continues today.

But by that time, you had already had a lot of experience teaching—

Yes, teaching, administration, right.

—working in the community. Oh, wow, that’s exciting.

So I really do have the expertise to be a consultant in that field.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. If we can go back to your time at Cal State, you start—I forget the year that you actually start going—

Sixty-three.

That’s right. You start in ’63.

I graduate in ’73.

That’s right. With your bachelor’s?

Yes.

Not your master’s in teaching.

And in Chicano Studies, not in mathematics that I had started, because I needed to get—I was fighting the revolution, I never had time to complete a course, or I’d always drop out for this reason or that. But I actually expedite my graduation, because I broke up with a boyfriend and I needed to get out of town.

And you were with him all these years, all those years that you were at Cal State?

Not the beginning. I was with my high school sweetheart for the first four years, and then he graduates from Cal Poly and he becomes an engineer, but he moves to Arkansas or something. Then I was with this other man for those years, and we’re boyfriend and girlfriend, and one of those where he starts dating a friend of mine, and then she—you know, that whole—and I also felt like we were a well-known couple at Cal State, and so it’s like I kept thinking I was going to open the college newspaper and see an article on us, because it was good “chisme”. So I applied for Teacher Corps and got a job in Salinas. So what happens in Salinas, he convinces me to come back and marry him, and when I leave Salinas to come back and marry him, and the friend that he was dating with me shows up pregnant. So there goes another [Spanish word]. I have juicy, good stories now, but trauma at the time. So he had gone and asked my dad for my hand in marriage, we’d set the date and all that crap, and then I have to go tell my parents I’m not getting married. So it was a good novela.

That’s painful, because he obviously loved you, but he had—

And then he lands up getting divorced, and then he tries to reenter my life, and I could see the trauma that he was going through. I told him, “I’ll be your friend, but I’m not going to be your girlfriend or anything.” But he lands up getting cancer and dying.

Oh, wow.

So it’s a good novela. I have a good novela. I have a very good novela. But there were other men in between.

Right. But was he the love of your life?

I actually think my high school sweetheart was the love of my life, but he had a different agenda. He entered the Anglo world, wanted an Anglo wife and still has all that kind of stuff, although he had different issues. He was from Mexico and he was an engineer. So you get to see their cultural conflicts, too, entering an Anglo world. Then I guess Raul Henderson was my second love of my life, but each one had traumatized me for different reasons. So I took it out on all the other men. [laughs]

Is that why you never finally got married?

I don’t know. I don’t know why. I think my career became—up until I retired, I always had a boyfriend. Then after that, I decided to focus on my grandkids and things like that, and then it’s like they sort of still come back in your life some way, so I just decided I’m friends. [laughs]

You must be really easy to be with having grown up with all those brothers.

Yes, and I’m not demanding. I think that might have been the core, because I do recall one breakup and it’s because he started dating two women, and we both know, and he decides to marry the other one, and I ask, “Why are you marrying her?” And he goes, “Vickie, you really don’t need me.” So somewhere I got that, you know, “And she needs me.” I just was stunned. “I need you, but I don’t know how to demonstrate that you’re the man and I’m the damsel in distress,” or whatever they want, you know, that kind of thing.

Oh, jeez.

So that’s interesting.

Yes, because on the one hand, you’re so comfortable with strong men and you’re not going to say, “You’re not giving me leadership, you’re not allowing me to be—,” but then on the other hand, they are saying, “Wait a minute. You’re not weak enough.” [laughs]

Yes. Then I was hung up. I only dated Chicanos. I wouldn’t date out of the race. That’s not part of my principles.

You mentioned about Raul that you met. You met him at Hess Kramer.

No, Roy Rodriguez, the first one, the high school one.

You met him at Hess Kramer, but he doesn’t embrace the Chicano Movement.

No. He’s Mexicano, and he doesn’t embrace it because he’s got his culture intact. He’s Mexicano, and he’s entering an Anglo world. So he has enough to, whatever, to overachieve what it is. He doesn’t have any conflict, like identity conflict.

How would you define your views back then, not today, but back then, of the whole what was called, like, the gabacho, like the gabacho question, like being whitewashed or associating with Anglos?

First of all, through high school I’m never exposed to any Anglos, really. I went to a majority—and the only time is the workplace, and I met a man somewhere in there, in those days somewhere, who asked me out. He was Mormon, and so he was very fluent in Spanish but very gabacho-looking and everything. He takes me to an event at the Mormon Church, and I blew it. I answer the question someone asked me there, and I said I was Catholic, and I think I ruined his reputation. I think that’s the only Anglo I ever went out with.

How about looking to them as the enemy? That’s what I mean by, like, the gabacho question, is that their racism has created the situation that Chicanos—

I think more in the workforce. I think that’s where I get we’re not in control. We don’t get to say. So I never really interacted with gabachos until the workforce, when I become a teacher, and then I start to see the institutional racism, for me having to become a consent decree to become an administrator and lack of promotion, lack of opportunities and things. So it’s not until the workforce that I started to see the influence, and it’s still there.

You were talking about being on a committee, a hiring committee for Chicano Studies once it was established at Cal State Los Angeles, and you mentioned a name. It didn’t sound like a Latino name.

Penichet?

Yes.

Yes, they were from Mexico, so they also—

So he had Mexican—

Oh, yes. No, no, very, and his mother was a doctor, a medical doctor, and they were very well educated, and he was quite handsome, but very fair-skinned, light. The Penichet brothers became, both of them—I guess they come to United States and they both become very active in the Chicano Movement. He’s a professor at Cal State, and I think he teaches literature.

Even to this day?

Well, he passed. Jeff Penichet passed away. And Carlos becomes a—and I get the names mixed up. It might have been Carlos that was the professor—they were twins; that’s why I get mixed them up—and becomes a publisher of bilingual material. So you still interact with him. The Penichet brothers, yes.

Do you recall the establishment of a Chicano Studies—was it a department that was formed?

At first it was some courses, then it’s a department, and it’s part of the MEChA struggle that we wanted cultural classes. It’s part of demonstrations. It’s part of us sitting in on somebody in the President’s Office. So that’s how it comes about.

You mentioned before that you were in MEChA. So when did you leave? Did UMAS turn into MEChA?

Yes. The conference in Denver I didn’t attend, but I think it might even be Corky Gonzales who calls it. Many organizations from colleges are sent delegations, and they adopt the MEChA, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán. Then their direction was to come back and change all organizations, so there’s no more UMAS, there’s no more MASA, all the different—we all become MEChA. I recall the internal struggle from those that never want to leave the word “UMAS” to those that have been liberated at this conference. “But I belong to UMAS. I don’t belong to MEChA.” So it’s a little more progressive, a little more to the left. UMAS is prior to EOP, so you get regular admin people in UMAS, where MEChA comes and then we become EOP and you get a little more leftist because you’re bringing in more Chicanos and more different struggles. They weren’t always academically prepared, so there’s all these courses that have to be developed in the system in their study skills and things like that.

Do you remember who was in the leadership at that time?

UMAS, I know that it was Phil Castruita who’s the first president, and Maria Baeza is—I don’t know if she’s vice president, but she’s the Latina there. And Felix Gutierrez, journalism. Those are the people that I remember in that.

You don’t remember Carlos Munoz?

For some reason I put Carlos Munoz with MEChA, maybe because of his politics. So he must have been a leader in the transition.

Yes. He was president of UMAS at one point. Maybe it was after Philip was president.

Oh, yes, because Philip’s the first one.

Then he talks about the hiring in his book, Youth Identity and Power, and the hiring of the staff. Do you remember the controversy around Ralph Guzman?

Ralph Guzman was in the history or social science department, and he’s pre. He doesn’t go through us hiring him. He’s already hired. He’s, like, the first Latino professor on campus during UMAS and MEChA. So we don’t have a committee that hires him, because he comes from UCLA, and he had already done that research on the Mexican American. For me, he’s already hired before Chicano Studies even exists.

Munoz talks about in an episode—and it’s sort of similar to what you mentioned about the difference between the community activism and the student university activism, how you came in with all this status. Well, apparently they viewed Ralph Guzman as, like, a professional academic, not community, and they wanted—

And I can see that, because he comes from UCLA, he’s done his huge, like, the first study on this, and he comes with those credentials into the social science department. There’s no Chicano Studies yet. And he only teaches a graduate course on community, the Hispanic community, or Latinos or some course. I remember it’s a 400 Series, because I’m like an undergraduate. Some of us are trying to take Ralph’s course and be aligned to him.

Then Phil Castruita becomes very close to him and even follows him up to when he goes to UC Santa Cruz. So he was a scholar that was accepted in the academic world, not necessarily the Chicano academic world, but he opened the path.

Well, how do you feel about that kind of judging that was taking place at that time?

It was stupid, stupid, because he was my mentor. I never saw him say a word that would lessen our struggle. Actually, he gave us the academic rigor. He was not kind to me. My first few Chicano Studies classes, I got away on my reputation. I could write about some of my activities. I could talk in the class about some of my activities. When I took Ralph Guzman’s class, I had to do research. I had to produce a paper that was academically par to the other students in class, where in Chicano Studies the first few years, you could just like B.S. your way. That’s how I looked at it. Chicano Studies as a—whatever you say, an academic department was being developed. So I was a part of the initial—

Did you ever grapple with curriculum questions, like, for example, thinking about the kinds of classes you would like to teach?

I was always going to be a math teacher. [laughs] I just had that ability. But I was interested, and then also when I was in Salinas, since I had been in the Folklorico, I taught Folklorico.

Oh, how wonderful.

So I was in Teacher Corps, so my credentialing program had to be in math, and so I had a master teacher and I taught advanced algebra. Then we had other courses that we could create, because they were for the migrant kids. So we were acculturating them, and we could do Chicano Studies, and we were given a free rein.

And Teacher Corps, that’s not anything like what we know today as AmeriCorps?

Yes. It was very advanced. We were supposed to be the cream of the crop—it was during the era of Peace Corps, Teacher Corps, a lack of minorities in teaching, so it’s sort of like Teach for America, but it was geared to bringing Latinos into education as teachers.

That was when you received your bachelor degree and you go to live in Salinas.

Yes. And Teacher Corps is in migrant camps or migrant cities. It’s also in, like, Juvenile Hall, so there’s like a social need as well for teachers of minority background in those areas.

How did you find that kind of work as compared to—

It was fun. I had supported the United Farm Workers. I had picketed Safeway markets. I had collected on food drives for Cesar Chavez. I had been trained by Cesar Chavez on organizing, but I had never seen a migrant camp. I had never lived in a migrant rural community. I remember in Teacher Corps some of the teachers, mostly all of them came from migrant backgrounds. They had been migrant students, and they want to make some extra money, and they’re going to go work the fields on Saturday. I just sarcastically said, “Hell, no. I’m calling my daddy to send me $40 more,” that kind of stuff. [laughs] I had never been a migrant.

So this is like bringing in all of the support I gave to the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, this is putting a reality picture. I mean, I remember having students and it was strawberry season, and some of them lived in Watsonville, and seeing the infection from handpicking the strawberries and the pesticide in their hands, and the nurse becomes their medical care. I remember visiting a migrant camp, because part of Teacher Corps, we had to make a family visit every week and had to report on it. So, like, I have never been in a migrant camp, and I remember this one in Watsonville I go. It’s a very humble house, like a three-room house, and a family lives in it. It’s artichoke at Castroville. I had to go visit a family, and the father asks me if I’d like some artichokes, and I said, “Oh, sure,” you know, whatever. Then hearing [demonstrates]. He went outside and picked them and then brought them in. So I had never been exposed to really the struggle behind Cesar Chavez. I was supportive of it, but I had never worked with migrant kids and seen them coming and then knowing—we were very privileged. We were allowed to create curriculum that they could take with them, because you knew that when the crop changed, they were going to leave, and the next season that they come back to Salinas. So I remember making modules in math, and if they could complete them and then come back and test, I could give them credit for it. So we were very progressive and we were really treated well, because we were given instructional accounts, personal instruction, so I could go buy whatever I needed. Then you were given a professional development, so you could go to conferences.

So when I come back to L.A., I get recruited to work in L.A., I go to my principal and I want to know what my instructional account is and what is my professional development account. I thought all teachers got that. He goes, “What are you talking about? You have to do this.” It’s like, “Oh.” [laughs] So I was very lucky, very privileged credentialing program.

Did you want to stay?

No, I was coming back to get married.

So you would have stayed.

I might have stayed.

I hear from people who have spent time up there in the San Joaquin Valley that they just love it, that they just love the family feeling.

The two closest friends that I made in Teacher Corps—one was my roommate—we made a pact when we finished that we would get together every year as friends, and we have kept that. We probably get together more than that. But they were migrants and they stayed in Gilroy, and the other one stayed in Visalia. They never left the migrant community.

When you came back, what did you notice that was different as far as the community closeness?

There was poverty, but it wasn’t as deep poverty as the migrants. I go to work at Hollenbeck in East L.A. I know my kids didn’t work after school. I knew my kids didn’t have to work on the weekends and that maybe they worked in a factory with their parents or something, but it wasn’t migrant work. And I don’t think the degree of poverty was as serious. They didn’t live in camps. Maybe some of them lived in a housing project. But the opportunities were a little—then these are schools that were predominantly Latino, 99 percent. So being migrant in Salinas High School, which is predominantly Anglo at the time, so it’s a safer community for them.

So you were teaching at Salinas High School?

Yes. I was teaching at Alisal High School, which was in Salinas. At that time there were only three high schools: Salinas High School, Alisal High School, and they had just built a new high school, North High, which was part of North Salinas. We were specifically recruited to teach the migrant kids in those high schools.

How did you find the racism in the community? Was it nonexistent?

The faculty actually voted our program out of their system. When the contract ended, they influenced the board not to bring the migrant Teacher Corps program back, is what I understand. So we were the last cycle to be specifically to work with migrants. Talk about moving into a community. There was a book-burning event. Salinas was also Bible Belt. So there’s this evening where in front of Alisal High School this group of parents come in and they take all these books off of the library shelves. I don’t necessarily believe they’re all Chicano Studies. They were books that were banned from the religious community, and they burn them in front of the school. So it’s a trippy scene for me. I lived in Steinbeck country, Salinas, so it’s like moving into a book of his, of things that when you read some of his novels and he describes the community, I’m now living in it. So it’s weird.

Plus the whole other conflict was I had always been United Farm Worker pro and everything, and at the same time the Teamster kids and United Farm Worker kids are in your classroom. You cannot be pro one and not the other, so there’s this union conflict going on. It was an exciting time.

Yes, but it sounds like there were so many different issues from the urban. That’s what I’ve heard, that there are different kinds of Chicanos [unclear].

And, as I told you, my credentialing program, we had the luxury of working with the migrants and doing whatever we wanted, really, with them, but to get my credential in math, I have a master teacher and I’m teaching advanced math, Algebra 3, and a parent challenges my qualification, and I’m called into the principal’s office to show I have the math units that show that I have the college classes that work towards the credential.

Why did the parent do that?

Because I was Latina.

Wow.

She wanted to make sure.

She didn’t want a Latina teaching her child advanced math.

Yes.

Did you experience more racism in that time that you were there in Salinas than you had in growing up in Los Angeles?

Direct racism. Now, remember, I don’t think of me facing racism, but reflecting on my education and the lack of opportunities then, the encouragement to go to college. I had chemistry class in our lab, and we never had a lab because the sinks were clogged or things like that, so that kind of stuff. But open racism where the people are not afraid to challenge your credential, and I can’t believe I’m being called into the principal’s office and to bring my transcripts with me. I thought it was just something routine that they have to see. There’s a parent there, and the system principal, Mr. Kimball [phonetic], I remember he’s a very kind man, showing the mother where I had all these math classes and that I was capable of—and Mr. Paven [phonetic], the master teacher, had been a principal and all this kind of stuff, and so he knew how to—believe me, it was strange.

It sounds like it was humiliating too. [interruption]

Okay. Can you repeat that, what you just said?

I said that instead of being—I was surprised at many of the challenges or the open racism that I found in Salinas, but reflecting now, I think it all strengthened me so that if I was going to be challenged, I knew I was qualified. If I knew this, I knew I had the same credential and I could perform. Just because of the color of me or my background, you weren’t going to—I was qualified.

Do you feel like the principal backed you up, that he was on your side?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

That’s a good feeling.

That’s why I remember his name, Mr. Kimball, because I think he even probably said some apologetic words to me after, like, “I’m sorry you had to go through that, but I knew that you would hold your own,” something that encouraged me and validated me.

What about when you were taking all those math classes at Cal State L.A.? Because you said they were predominately male, predominately white.

I even recall a professor. There were two women in the class, myself and another woman. And that he just said, “You two ladies, are you here to lower the class average?” Something that crazy, and I didn’t even know what that meant at the time. It’s not till later on. But math people are a little strange people. They’re very introverted. So I actually say I welcomed Chicano Studies classes come because I was very social, so they brought a balance to me. I used to suffer in math, first of all. because you know how in classes you used to team with someone. Sometimes you couldn’t find another Chicano or another woman to team with, and they had study groups, and I just couldn’t get into the little Anglo study group. So when Chicano Studies came, I blossomed because I had people to interact with, but I was very fortunate that it was my math ability and my math credits that got me my teaching job.

How did you keep going in those math classes if it was—

Why do you think it took me ten years to get through it? [laughter] I looked for anything to socialize with. They were hard.

That’s impressive that you finished, though.

But don’t forget, I have older brothers that are math majors, chemistry majors, and this and that, so I had a family reputation that was going to keep me in that classroom.

Were you carrying that all that time?

Yes. Lucky I was a female and my parents didn’t have an expectation of me.

To be a math whiz and to be at MIT.

Or even a college student. My father even asked me, “Why are you going to college? You’re just going to get married.” Then I just said, “Because my brothers told me to.” [laughs]

It seems like at that time the doors were wide open for you in any field, because they wanted you to succeed at some level. Maybe not the whole establishment, but, like, you told the story last week about having fifty slots. So it was a different climate than today.

Absolutely. I think the administration—we had camped out. We wanted more Chicanos, Latinos on campus, and we wanted open admission. So they said, “Okay, here’s fifty slots.” I think they thought we weren’t going to go get fifty kids to come to college. So I remember standing in front of Lincoln, “Hey, you want to go to college? Come here.” And some people responded, and we got some characters and a half. I remember this one, Tomas O’casitas, and he was from the streets. He later became a probation officer, but I remember him being at a MEChA meeting after, because that was part of our recruitment, and he’s talking about his financial aid packet. “That’s all they’re giving me? I make that much money on the streets in a week,” something to that effect. So we brought in some characters that would take an opportunity.

What was the basic qualification they had to have?

EOP.

They didn’t have to have a high school diploma?

Well, they had to have the high school diploma. They had to be graduating from high school.

It didn’t matter their grade-point average.

No. And educational opportunity, you didn’t have to have the whatever Cal State was asking, the 3.0, or you didn’t even have to have the academic courses. But then we found out we have to have tutorial to assist them, and I don’t know what percent made it the first few years, because there was no criteria. And then EOP gets developed not only at Cal State but throughout the system.

Did you follow these kids when they first were admitted? Were they assigned mentors and that kind of thing?

Not necessarily. I think they were requested to be members of MEChA. I think that was about it. Some of them, I don’t remember their real name. There was Howser, Wooser, Howser, somebody, you know. Then a good friend of mine, later became a good friend, Licha Hernandez, she had been a Brown Beret, and she was graduating from Lincoln. So she came, and she would openly in a classroom say, “Hey, what’s the answer to number four?” [laughs] So they were like characters, characters, you know.

Did she finish?

No, but when her daughter made her confirmation, I became her “madrina”, but she was a Brown Beret and so you could connect. She just had that personality, magnetic. [interruption]

Getting them involved in the walkouts and making sure they were on committees and things like that. [interruption]

We’re back. Could you just repeat that first part? Because I didn’t have the recorder going.

I said I sort of recall the transition from UMAS to MEChA and them coming back, and we have to change the name, but that my real involvement was getting them involved initially in the walkouts and then helping them maintain involvement in the community and then being part of the development of the need for Chicano Studies and more Latinos on campus. So those are the kind of issues that I recall working with mostly in MEChA and my fellow Mechistas. ESPINO You also said you were involved in Comisión Femenil.

Yes.

That was on campus, you said.

That was on campus, and I was a member mostly because most of the women that went there were also in MEChA, but they found an identity in the Women’s Movement. So I probably went because I was friends with them, and then stupidity. We were visiting prisons and tutoring the women’s prison. I don’t know what we thought we were going to achieve. I got more scared than anything. [laughs] I had never been exposed to the criminal world, and now we were going to go make college students out of them.

Is that what the goal, the goal was hoping they would—

Yes. [laughs] We were going to save the world. And I’m sure we did good, but I think we really didn’t analyze. Maybe we could have been a little more effective if we had been not so global in our approach.

Who can you remember as the leaders of Comisión at that time, at Cal State Los Angeles?

I can’t remember her first name, but Bojorquez. It’ll come. Frances Bojorquez. She was the president. Then there was Diane Holguin and Martha Polacio, because I still see them.

Francisca Flores?

Francisca Flores was, like, not on the college level. Francis Bojorquez, I think she was, because she was married to David Bojorquez, she was, I think, Comisión Femenil on campus. Francis Flores, I think she was, like, not related, but she was outside of the college level, I think, wasn’t she?

Francisca Flores.

Flores, okay. There was a Francisca. I’m getting the names mixed up.

She was one of the founders of Comisión Femenil, the older generation of Comisión members.

Yes, yes.

And then Francis Bojorquez was the—

Francis Bojorquez was the president of the first Comisión Femenil at Cal State that I recall.

Oh, the very one, number one.

I think so. And then there’s Diane Holguin and Nena, and then there’s Delia, beautiful woman. I can’t remember her name, last name. But those women were really the Comisión, and then I just sort of, like I told you, I floated here and there.

Well, in the different organizations, let’s talk about from the time that you’re in the YACC—

YCCA.

—YCCA, and then you go to—

UMAS—

—UMAS and then MEChA.

And then there’s still EICC occasionally. I frequent those meetings, not like a member member, but like when issue oriented. So, yes, those are before. Then after I go into Teacher Corps, then when I come back I really get involved in AMAE. So AMAE is the professional organization that I developed in.

So pre that time, what were the aspects that you felt more passionate about of those different organizations? Because they’re all so different.

Mostly access to college, access to college and Chicano Studies and courses especially, and it still has not been realized. There are not that many high schools that offer a good Chicanos Studies program. But access to college, scholarship to college, opportunities, and they still are the issues.

Did Comisión try to address those as well?

Comisión more was more not quite the Women’s Movement, not like NOW or any of those things, but with a Chicana flair. I don’t remember who the four were, but they were the four leaders of Comisión Femenil, and at the time the Los Angeles had a football team, the Rams, and their front line was called the Fearsome Foursome. So I remember the Chicanos, when they would see these four women coming, “Oh, shit, here come the Fearsome Foursome,” because they would take their machismo issues and those kinds of things. I do remember that part. But those Fearsome Foursome, I thought it was clever. [laughs]

You were part of that group that felt the need to—

Affiliate. Occasionally I went to their meetings, occasionally I participated with them. They hosted some conferences, and I think I went and I might have facilitated registration with them. I was really very privileged in that I could go to different groups. Look at the Folklorico, look at Comisión. I could go to MEChA. I could go to the Brown Berets or could do this. I don’t know what it was, but I know that where I saw it come together for me is when I ran for office. I called upon all these friends from all these different arenas, plus the parents at the school. So I think that’s what got me elected.

So David Sanchez, that would be like the one conflict, sort of conflict that you had?

Yes, that was it.

Then even with him you—

Maintained a really good friendship, and our lives would cross, and when I was teaching, I might be at a community event, he was there. I remember one time I was working for Dionicio at Mexican American Opportunity Foundation, and I had to monitor his childcare centers, and I go to a center he had in Hazard Park and this is like I’m already on the board, so it’s in the nineties. Here comes this little troop of Brown Berets marching through, and there’s David Sanchez in the front. He goes, “Oh, we’re making some demands on the housing unit.” And we just hugged, “Hi, David.” If I were to see him now, we’d hug. Like I told you, about four or five years ago, I’m at a Garfield-Roosevelt game, because he went to Roosevelt. Then I look over and go, “I’m sitting next to David.” So we enjoyed the game together. At least I never felt any hostilities. Then I remember Carlos Montes. I’m on the board and he’d come tell me this issue. Then I become principal after I leave the board. He’d come to my office and say, “Vickie, I need fifty copies for this protest.” “All right. Give me your things,” and I facilitated at the school. “What else do you need?” “Can I take a ream of paper?” “Here’s a ream of paper.” Then I remember he was working on the establishment of Esteban Torres High School, and Carlos would call me, “How does this work in the system? How do we do this? How do we do that?”

“Carlos, I think you have to do this, this, and this.” So, like a mutual respect. Even though we’re in different agendas, the big umbrella is still education for me. So on different levels I work with different... Like I tell you, I think I work at that too.

Yes. We have to, with all these different personalities, because it’s really easy to build a wall around.

I ran for the Assembly against Gil Cedillo, and Gil Cedillo wins, and most Latinos, when they run against each other, there’s these [camps]. You know that the Polancos don’t talk to the Molinas for ten years or those camps. And not too long after we ran, Gil Cedillo and I were at a panel at Cal State L.A., and everybody, “Ooh, ooh, they’re going to be on the same panel.” And some Chicano gets up and starts digging into Gil on some issue, and the principal came out on me. I said, “Wait a minute. This man has earned his credentials. He’s been a labor leader. He’s been a this or that. When you’ve walked in his shoes, you sit in the audience and you yell at him, but right now you’re a college student, and so you don’t have that right yet.” So then after that, Gil and I became friends, and I remember getting calls later, “Is it true you defended Gil?” You’re in the political world, you know, in the political world. [laughter]

“Is it true?”

“Is it true?” I go, “Yes, I would say that.”

So I earned his mutual respect. I was very honored, I went to opening campaign—he’s running for City Council, and he says, “And I know I’m doing the right thing, because Vickie Castro’s here.” I tell him, “I’m very proud of your work.” But the only thing I won’t accept from him is that they always introduce him that when he first ran for office, he won against all odds. I go, “I was not all odds. You had the this. You had the that. You had labor. You had this.” So I lost. [laughs] So I play it that way. But I just never wanted to be in that camp of, like, you don’t talk to the other person.

Wow.

It’s just not my nature, because you know why? Because later on you never know when you’re going to need ‘em. [laughs]

That’s true. That’s so true. And Gil is not an easy one to stay friends with. Did it get ugly, that campaign?

Oh, very, very. We were from the same neighborhood. We split friends. Friends were hoping we wouldn’t run against each other, because they had to choose, and then when you heard so-and-so was working on his campaign, I was like—and I’m sure he felt the same there. So it was a rough race for many of our friends. Then we also ran in the only election under 208 where you didn’t have to have a Democrat and a Republican at the time. They later overturned that initiative, so it was like anybody could vote for us, and we weren’t on one ticket or the other. It was two Democrats running against each other. So we split labor. That was a hard election for our friends.

Did people try to convince you not to run?

I look at it is as more people tried to convince him not to run, because I was an elected already. I think it was even Richard Alatorre, “She has first call.” But he had labor. He was very close to Antonio, who was the Speaker at the time. What I didn’t know about politics is that the Speaker of the Assembly has such powerful clout. The Speaker endorses you for the Assembly. You’re pretty much in, because he provides you money and resources. I was just like to myself, “I’m going to take this guy on. I’m the elected.” We ran a good race.

And Alatorre, he endorsed you?

Alatorre stayed neutral.

Wow.

I think Gloria Molino probably was the strongest advocate I had. [End of March 7, 2013 recording]

This is Virginia Espino, and today is March 14th. I’m interviewing Victoria Castro at her home in Alhambra, California. We were talking about, before we started to record, what it was like for you to negotiate with the different personalities during the movement time, and I’m wondering if you could repeat your perspective, because you came across a lot of very strong personalities, and it doesn’t seem like you had any big falling-outs with anybody in the different—in UMAS or with the YAC—

YCCA.

Yes.

I think there might have been points of fallouts and everything, but I always tried to—and maybe that might have been my winning formula with people, is that I tried to leave personality out of it. What was the issue, what is the cause, and can I avoid a personality conflict, or can I maneuver that personality conflict? And if it wasn’t worth us—I never thought of myself as duking it out, either mentally or physically, with somebody. There has to be a way, because if we’re engaged, if we’re interacting, we have to have similar beliefs or we have to have a similar belief. And I always used to put terms of things of a justice struggle. So if I can avoid your personality conflict, I’m going to do it, but if I can engage you or engage with you on the cause, that was more important to me. Sometimes I just walked away. “If you want to continue, if you want to be the big honcho, if you want to have the limelight, if it’s all about your personality and your dominance and everything, you know what? I’m probably going to find somebody around me that has the same belief or reason for the struggle and move forward.”

So I don’t know, maybe because I’m trying to connect why, where I got that, maybe because I had dominant five fathers. I tell you that I had to maneuver my life among five males, and most of the people that I engaged with are leaders in the Chicano Movement originally were males. So maybe I had that gift from the family. I don’t know. But I’m sure I had those that wanted to differ or did differ with me, and that’s just the way it was.

Did you ever witness that kind of battle, internal battle in your organizations where you would see people differing on personality issues, differing on, say, ideology, not looking at the cause like you were focusing on, but looking at a different ideology to achieve the same—because it seems like everybody wanted to achieve the same thing but had different ways. Well, maybe not exactly.

I don’t remember the specific differences, but I remember specific males that were very dominant. Raul Ruiz, once he had his view and whatever, and he articulated it very well, but there was no maneuvering him. David Sanchez was pretty much that same way. I think the only issue I ever remember where I saw more males in the debate is when—and it’s silly. It’s when after that Denver conference and one of the charges was that all the different Chicano organizations were supposed to accept the name MEChA, and then there were those that were males attached to UMAS. It was more like an emotional—and I remember that was like a big debate at Cal State. It’s, like, why is this going on? Let’s just do it. We’re in unisons, you know. Let’s just change the name. It wasn’t worth seeing these friends mad at this friends because one’s fighting for the name and one wants to move on and change this. What’s the issue? So that’s the only time I think I ever saw males at it. Usually you could—every once in a while you would just run into those kinds of—

Because some of the people I’ve been interviewing, they’re a little bit older than the classic Chicano or Chicana Movement person. They were like Julian Nava, Rudy Acuña. They’re of a different generation. And when it came to changing the name from Mexican American to Chicano, they had real trouble.

Yes.

So it’s definitely something that permeated that period. Do you remember when you started to embrace the term “Chicano” or “Chicana”? Or I don’t know if you embraced “Chicano” or “Chicana.”

Chicana, or when I was asked, and to this day when I’m asked, I’ll stay say, “I’m Chicana.” I think it was a part of the understanding of the political awareness and self-identity. I do remember that census where I think your choice was to be an American of a Spanish Surname, and the joke was, “Oh, you’re an ASS.” So that’s where I got where you have to have your own identity. So it was important and symbolic for me to say, “I’m Chicana.” I remember my parents, “Who told you you were Chicana?” [laughs] Especially, I think my mother said, “Isn’t that like lowlife or something, like a cholo?”

“No, Mom,” and you have to explain it. But I think that explanation helped me educate others as to why. It’s because we have to have our own identity. We have to embrace that identity, and that’s the identity. I’m not Mexicana. I’m not Mexican. Maybe I’m Mexican American, but it didn’t have the political connotation for me as Chicana as an activist. So that’s part of the struggle of the late sixties. I would say I embraced the word “Chicana.”

It was part ideology and part identity, is that what—

Yes.

What ideology do you think you were articulating with that term?

I guess an independence, an independence and also that equality and that I was fighting to live the American Dream, and it was for those that grew up like me and those that came from the same neighborhood as me, that went to the same schools. We have a right to the American Dream. So I think that’s what drove me.

It sounds very patriotic.

[laughs] You know, when my father asked me if I was a Communist, “Dad, I’m just trying to be as American as I was taught in school. I have rights. I have privileges being an American, and that’s all I’m trying to do. That’s all I’m trying to do.” He was, like, so funny. I said, “I’m just trying to be super American, maybe, equality for all.”

Wow, that’s beautiful. That’s a question I ask, that comes up a lot when it comes to the Vietnam War, because traditionally Mexican Americans, very patriotic, very pro military, not in the sense that we understand it today—

The pride. The pride and the pride of service.

But doing your service, yes, pride of service.

I had to struggle with that somewhat, because I did have uncles that had fought in World War II, and then when the whole moratorium and all that happens, I have a brother that’s serving in the military. He was in the navy. So I didn’t jump into that issue. I didn’t know quite where I was. But I do recall the first time I embraced that. I had listened to Al Juarez, who had just come out of the military, and he put it in a perspective for me, sort of the American Dream again, in that we fought for these rights, and, “I served in the war for you to have these rights.” Then also articulating how we’re on the front lines and we’re dying faster, and we’re over-represented in the death rates and all that. I always say that what turned me against our participation in the war was Al Juarez. I had, first of all, never heard a Chicano so articulate and so clearly and so passionately, and I can almost even visualize him, where for some reason I’m at East L.A. College, I never even attended school there, and I’m at some rally. And he just hit me and put it in perspective.

Wow.

So the dynamics of individuals, you know. And then the moratorium comes, and I don’t know how I dealt with it with my brother. He’s my younger brother. But I think he probably wanted out of the war, too, so that kind of thing.

How about your parents? Were they opposed to the war as well?

I don’t think I ever had any conversation with that, and I never really got into any conversation with my uncles that served. I had a cousin that was basically the same age, who, when he came out of the service, did attend Cal State L.A. and just, like, fell into the Chicano Movement right away. So that made it good for me.

Well, then getting back to the Cal State discussion of MEChA as an identifier versus UMAS as a name identifier, do you remember what their loyalties were on both sides?

I think it could have been personal. “I did not help form UMAS. I didn’t go to the Denver conference. What is this word ‘Chicano’?” I’m trying to think of some of the individuals. So it might have been the term. Maybe they weren’t quite into the Chicano Movement yet versus they were there for the Mexican American struggle. So it was an emotional battle.

Did you think some people viewed it as more militant than they were comfortable with, like it expressed a militancy?

Yes. That’s a good way of putting it too. United Mexican American Students is not as threatening as Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán. And I always laugh because later on when I was elected official, there was some Latino rally or some kind of unity, different people and everything, and it was just that real “up” feeling, and I was one of the first people to open the statement. I just looked out, and I always wanted to—after that war where they say, “Good morning, Vietnam,” I said, “Good morning, Aztlán,” just to be just helpful and cheerful.

Later on, those real conservative people that disliked racist, they used that and quoted me in all their little Ku Klux Klan stuff and this and that, that she’s committed to Aztlán. I was go, “That was just like an emotional moment.” But those are those little conservative right-wingers that have that little hate still.

Latched onto that.

They like to bring in you were a Mechista, you said, “Good morning, Aztlán,” and everything. “Oh, yes, yes, we’re in Aztlán,” that kind of stuff, put it in perspective. What I thought in college and what I have—but this is before [unclear]. They are different, you know.

But those things, and many people I’ve interviewed say, “Come back,” and they try to—

Well, look at when Cruz Bustamante ran for governor and people brought up the fact he as a MEChA member. I joked, I said, “That just means he was passionate and committed.” But they wanted, like, some kind of overthrowing the government.

It’s almost akin to red-baiting. Did you feel like that was happening to you when you were—

I had occasions where that would come up, and probably the worst one is I was serving on the Board of Education and there was a principal that was in conflict with his community and his parents. He was Jewish. He was Jewish, and he was assaulted early in the morning, at six, before school. Supposedly it was because of some racism from some Mexican attacked him, whatever. I was interviewed, I think by the L.A. Times, and—what was his name? I can’t remember the reporter. He said to me—I thought he asked me, “Do you think all principals should be, like, Latino or whatever?”

And I said, “No, I don’t think so.” I said something to the effect of, “But I think they should maybe be Spanish speakers. If you’re going to work with a community that’s 95 percent parents that speak Spanish, you should know some Spanish or take some lessons.” “Castro says principals should know Spanish.” And I got hate mail from Ku Klux Klan, the Jewish Defense League. I had to be put on some kind of security watch. There was threatening letters sent to the Board of Education. They’re going to do me in. And all I just said, “I thought it would be helpful if they could speak Spanish,” is my intent. I’m not sure quite how he took it out of context, but it said, “Castro says principals should be Spanish speakers,” which implied to many that they should be Latino. That was not my intent. Not practical. But I surely could see that this principal, who all his parents speak Spanish, it surely would have made his day easier if he had some basic Spanish, and that was my belief. How do you work with people you can’t communicate?

Right. Absolutely. And that’s a little bit different than actually being red-baited, I think, because the media has a tendency to take things out of context and highlight the sound bites versus the whole text of what you’re saying. But then your reputation as someone who’s an advocate for Latinos, Mexican Americans, other Latinos, was that something that caused you problems when you were running for board?

I ran in a predominantly one of those districts where the odds were in favor of a Latino being elected, and I was running against Larry Gonzales, another Latino. The only thing that ever haunted me in that is that someone equated YCCA with the Brown Berets and them taking over Catalina Island. I remember it was at a forum, and someone, like, threw that at me, “So were you part of the group that tried to recapture Catalina Island and everything?” I chuckled, but then I realized he was very sincere or very whatever. I remember I responded, “Well, I guess, you know, once an activist, always an activist. So I’ve been struggling for Mexican Americans for a long time. Maybe I’ve gone down the wrong road once or twice, but I’m absolutely an advocate for my community.” But it’s sort of like when you start to see their perspective, you know, try to take it serious, but it also sometimes causes you a chuckle, like, ooh, like “Good morning, Aztlán.” I did it for the humor, and, whoa, did that haunt me.

Antonio Villaraigosa comes across that same thing. I’m not sure of some of the other political officials, but definitely the idea that you’re advocating for—because that is in some of the rhetoric and especially with the Brown Berets. Aztlán was something that they wanted to have.

Establish it once again, yes.

At that time were you comfortable with that idea?

Well, I thought it was embracing in the sense of if history had gone a different way, this would have been Aztlán, you know. It could be, or something. I didn’t look at is as threatening, more as emotionally embracing, that we’re one. This was just at a different time in history, this could have been something different, you know.

Then you think of Aztlán and the rich culture and the contributions, so I just took it mildly and more embracing and uniting. I didn’t think I was going to overthrow the government and recapture all the states and return them to Mexico and that we would relive the myth of Aztlán. So it was just more embracing, and there was a comfort level there.

Because it was something you identified with the culture?

Yes.

I was going through the Plan de Santa Barbara, and I just see a lot of the symbolisms are very male, the indigenous symbols of the Aztec god and the warrior. Was that something that you embraced at the time?

I don’t think I ever really got into that. I didn’t reject it, and I just accepted it as that was some perspective. Monte Perez is more or less the writer, or took a big part of writing the Plan de Aztlán. I didn’t attend that conference, and I don’t think I’ve even ever really read it, even though the Board of Education was supposed to read the Chicano Movement and that was supposed to be my points.

Your Bible.

My Bible and everything. [laughs] So I didn’t do that. But it was just another symbolic, symbolic, symbolic, and I always looked at it as symbolic in the sense of struggle. This is going to get us to where we should be, and that was about it. I couldn’t even really quote anything from there right now.

Yes, I’ve never really read it myself, and I’m a student of Chicano Studies and Chicana Studies. I just found it online, and I thought I’m going to print it out, and I didn’t realize it was over 100 pages and the printer just kept going and going and going. [laughs] But it’s a very interesting document.

I remember being on the board, and saying, “You know, I probably should go read that document, because you’re probably symbolically probably carrying something.” But I never read it. I think maybe when it came out, I might have been more in an arena where people discussed it, but I don’t think I ever sat down and read it from page to page. And now that I see it, I don’t think I have the time now. [laughs]

It’d be interesting to go back and figure out how they decided who was going to write what. There’s no names.

All I remember is Monte Perez, who’s a community college president somewhere.

Yes, out in Mission Valley, I believe.

Yes, whatever. Through the grapevine I remember him being one of the main writers.

Of the Plan de Santa Barbara?

Yes.

And I also heard that Juan Gomez Quinones was one of the—

Could have been. See, they were like the intellectual Chicano Movement people. I was a math major. I wasn’t into literature and writing. [laughter]

Oh, that’s funny. Yes, because it doesn’t say anything about the sciences. Probably if you read a document like that today, you definitely would talk about the sciences and math for Latinos.

So in my mind, I always equate the plan with Monte Perez. It was that simple.

I guess I wanted to ask you, after speaking with some of the other activists, they’ve now embraced the whole idea of indigeneity and of their own indigeneity, finding their culture, and so the concept of Aztlán doesn’t make sense to them anymore because they realize that the Tongva were here before, and that there were other tribes, Apache. So I’m wondering if at that time, like, for example, the African Americans or Asian people or, I mean, was there ever a time where you had to debate the concept of Aztlán with someone who wasn’t in the Chicano Movement?

Never, never. And I wasn’t truly a person seeking my indigenous roots. I was like sort of living in the now, trying to respect the past. So it was more, like I said, a warm feeling of unity for me when I heard the word “Aztlán” and that we were there. So I never really looked for the indigenous roots and all that. And I could never get into remembering who was the god of this and who was the god of that, and not even who the god of education was. It was warm and fuzzy.

As a board member—we’re kind of moving forward and going back. But as a board member and as somebody who’s committed and dedicated their life to education, what do you think about some of the new schools that are—like the charter school that’s in El Sereno that’s—

Semillas?

Yes.

Semillas. I think they serve a purpose, and knowing—his name is Marcos [de Leon]. I don’t remember his last name. He used to live across the street. I always recall I was on the Board of Education when he came to present his concept, and it was the beginning of charter schools. So I always wanted, in my mind—I was open to the idea of a brown school. That’s how I guessed in the Chicano Movement that we would embrace where we could teach our culture, our language, and everything. But he was so indigenous and Mexicano. I can still visualize the group that came into my office to share with them, and I just thought, “You know, these youngsters, they all look like they just came out of UNAM.” They had their “trenzas”, their dress or whatever. But the sincerity and I just said, “Well, you know, you have some big hurdles to come through,” and I think I referred them to who to go talk to, to start their charter school. But talk about a dedicated visionary person, Marcos and his wife, and they presented that. I loved their term—what is it? Del Semillas del Pueblo. They were committed. So I equated them with, gosh, back in your days, you talked about creating a brown school where bilingual education wasn’t an issue, that kids grew up with a strong identity. So then I always felt bad when his school would be in conflict because some evaluator from the state, and they weren’t making their test scores. But I think I also found out that if you were Latino and you wanted to put your child in his school, if your child was an overachiever or gifted or whatever, he would dissuade you. He wanted to take truly the struggling student and work with them. Patricia, my co-madre has her sister-in-law whose child was—I don’t know if they use the term “rejected,” but not accepted because he was advanced. So that he wasn’t looking to be elitist or to have those high score; he wanted struggling kids to be in his school. So in that sense I respect him, and he’s living his dream.

And I think of the charter schools that I had seen developed. He’s probably one of the few that took the culture and not necessarily, “We’re going to make advanced students. We’re going to have a person that could live in this world,” and that’s part of his philosophy of binational, and that they could survive in that arena. So I totally always embraced that concept with him and supported it. Maybe the others, I get into conflict with Moctesuma Esparza, because I struggled so much to—or worked so hard to get the bonds to pass to build new schools and now they wanted the charter schools to just get those schools. I said, “But I still have overcrowded schools here, and how I can be giving up space?” As I told Moctesuma—we just had that debate, our little discussion long ago—I think it’s personal versus it’s just my opinion and not as a board member. I might have to look at the issue deeper. But on a personal level, I just haven’t gotten there yet, when I still see overcrowded schools and having to give some facility up. He goes, “Well, what do you mean, giving it up? You’re giving it to students.” I go, “Oh, I know.” But then it’s that whole thing that there’s still charter schools that take the elite. They’re not like Semillas del Pueblo. They take the elite. They take the parents that are going to drive them that extra mile versus the neighborhood school. The neighborhood school is still struggling. They need every inch of space to make those teachers have the flexibility they need. So I think that’s where I go on that issue.

I just said, “Moctesuma, I’m not on the board anymore. This is a personal view now. This isn’t a policy. Maybe if I had to think of a policy and see how it relates,” I said, “my gut tells me I still wouldn’t give public school space up that easily without you struggling more. You chose to have a charter school. You chose to be different. You chose to have that, and now you want me just to—I’m not there. I’m just not there.”

He’s involved in a charter school effort?

Yes, he has a charter school, or I think it began on a performing arts type basis.

High School Number 9, would it be?

No. It’s already been running for about four or five years. I can’t think of that—that Patriotic Hall that’s downtown, I think it’s based in there or it started in there. I did tell him when he was going to middle school, that I would call the principal—I had just retired—and offer my experiences as a middle-school principal. And I did contact her and called, but she never called back. She didn’t want my influence. So I don’t know. I wouldn’t discourage a charter school if I understood their mission. If it’s just to take away the cream of the crop from a regular public school, then I have problems, because you don’t have the—that might be the principal in me talking. I still have to take all the Special Ed kids. I still have to do my best with them. I still have to take on those that you don’t want.

So that’s my problem with charter schools, that they can be a little selective in their enrollment, even if it’s—I’m not really aware how they handle those children that misbehave, that are problems. Do they just force them into go back to the public school? I’m not sure. I haven’t followed it. Whereas a public school principal, you take all that comes to you and you do your best with it, and I don’t want you to have privileges that I don’t as a principal.

But do you think that’s a way, like, for example, for those students who want to keep their identity in a profound, everyday way?

You know what swayed me to be more open-mind about charter school? And it was very silly. I was having my nails done, and there were these two little young ladies that were probably about fourteen, fifteen, and they were having their nails done, whatever. I’m sitting there, and we’re all drying our nails, and you have to all sit at that same little counter. So I just got into conversation about, “How old are you? Where do you go to school?” Then they told me they went to a charter school, so I picked their brain. They shared with me their perspective. “I get more attention. People care about me.” So I got from them they felt more nurtured, and so that was the first time I was open-minded to charters, because they were Latinas and I saw in them where they could be real—because we were doing our nails, and they were being silly and just talking freely, that, you know what? They’re blossoming in this charter. I asked them, “Wouldn’t you rather have gone to school with everybody that you went to elementary with?”

“Yeah, you know, but you know how you get lost in the numbers,” and this and that. So, the smallness of charter schools. So I did want to, in my mind, qualify it to where they were being nurtured. So, of course you have to accept that. But I think they were the first conversation that I had where I became more open-minded and then I looked to the quality of the school.

From their own testimony, their own personal experience.

Yes.

Well, looking back at the activism at the high schools in East Los Angeles and the walkouts and the Plan de Santa Barbara and all the demands of the Chicano Movement, do you think that it succeeded in achieving some of its goals?

I absolutely think that in the sense that probably the biggest achievement was making college more a reality and actually promoting Latinos to go to college. As I said, when I graduated from high school, even though we were predominantly Latino, five of us went on to college, or something to that. So then I could see teaching and being a principal and the board that we had college counselors and we had much more information on scholarships and this. Although it never came to be at an acceptable level for me, it still has to be pursued and pushed. I remember chairing some meeting on the Board of Education, and these Latinas come to give testimony for more counselors, and what they were describing twenty, thirty years after the walkouts was the same condition. They weren’t being motivated. They didn’t have counselors that encouraged them to go to college and everything. And I’m sitting there, “The issue is the same.” Maybe in some schools there’s more evidence, but obviously in their school it doesn’t exist. So it was like the struggle continues. There’s still a lot to be done.

But I also know that there’s been more encouragement in some schools to go into science, technology, math, and things like that, and that that’s where the jobs of the future are. I’ve seen and been part of that effort. But nowhere, no way are our schools at par where they should be in promoting kids, and especially Latinos, in the L.A. system of the accessibility and the preparation to go to college. Now, the debate went to the point of making every kid take on the curriculum to be college-ready, where now the statistics are showing that that is not a reality for all and that there’s a higher dropout rate because of that. “I don’t want to take those college preps. I’m not interested in it.” And we’ve backed away as a system into vocational, where kids, out of their own reality, just want a good job after high school, and in our quest to make everybody college-ready, we sort of didn’t service the reality or provide the curriculum for all that we should have, the fact that you’ve done that and you’ve caused kids to drop out more because they’re not interested in just taking all those college prep classes which is mandatory now.

Do you think that that struggle for equality and social justice for African Americans, Latinos—I’m not sure Asian Americans were part of that struggle, but that that led to the dismantling of the vocational aspect?

I think, yes, absolutely. There should have been more of a balance or an understanding that we should have a high school, that you always have to go the next step. You have to go the vocational step. Maybe we should have been prepping kids more of your education doesn’t end after high school. Whether you’re going to go to a vocational school, a community college, it doesn’t always have to be the four-year degree. It could be you have to be prepared to go to the workforce, but that’s going to take your education beyond high school. I don’t think we did a good job in formulating that, or we’re still not doing a good job in formulating that if kids are turned off to be college prep. It doesn’t have to be college. It has to be years thirteen and fourteen, and that you should be looking towards that in your vocation.

Right. Because there’s so many professions now that where there are people who just like to work with their hands and are really good at it.

Exactly. And vocational education through the twelfth grade has been really dismantled.

My understanding was part of it arose from the budget cuts.

It was in place before the budget cuts. It was that college-ready and that we made algebra a high school requirement. There are kids that are just never going to get through algebra, and so instead of thinking of alternatives for them, no, we just give it to them again and again and again. And if you don’t pass algebra, you don’t get your high school diploma. So if you can’t get through algebra, what are we going to do? You have to be a worker in the society. What alternatives do we have? No, we’re just going to tutor you. We’re going to give you the support, and you’re going to get bored. And kids are pretty good. Once they get turned off, they get turned off.

Right. They get angry. I have one at home. [laughs]

Yes, and they leave school. So we made a different kind of a dropout.

Wow, that’s fascinating. That’s really unfortunate. Because I look at schools like Roosevelt and Garfield, and I know the teaching population has become much more Latino than it was. Chicano, Mexican American, I’m not sure where they’re from, but I’ll say Latino to include every group. But the dropout rate is still very high. And the food, one of the demands was to have Latino food, tacos or frijoles, and I know they probably serve that—

I have to tell you. I think it was at Belvedere, and the student body did like a little survey against the cafeteria food, and they came in to see me. They wanted to change it. “We’re tired of burritos.” And I wanted to tell them, “Do you know how hard I struggled for that?”

That’s funny. [laughter]

But they wanted variety, but I wanted to chuckle.

They wanted hamburgers.

You know how things turn around and slap you in the face?

Yes.

“We want more pizza, but not from this. We want like Domino Pizza.” They had their little choices. “And cheeseburgers,” and this and that, “and we don’t want burritos every day.” [laughs]

I just wanted to laugh. “Do you know how hard I struggled for you to have a burrito?” It was funny to me. They don’t know your history. But I just chuckled. What else wrong did I do in life? [laughs]

Do you have regrets about some of those—

I think the symbolism was more important than the actual burrito, you know. We just didn’t want the whatever sandwich they were giving us. I don’t know what they were feeding us. I don’t recall. The spaghetti, everybody always liked spaghetti. But then I always laughed, because I always liked cafeteria food. I always like that macaroni and cheese and those kind of things. [laughs] But we didn’t get burritos when I was in school.

What do you think then is—I mean, it’s a big question. Having witnessed, you stayed in the area, you worked for the school district, so basically you’ve had a relationship with East Los Angeles schools for the past forty, forty-five years. Can you pinpoint anything that might—

You know, I always share that whatever demands I had, it was about equal opportunity as a Chicana activist in schools and everything, but then as a board member looking at the schools, sometimes the problems were worse. I did not go to an overcrowded school. I had qualified teachers. I might not have had the counselors that promoted me or even thought that I should go to college, so that has changed. But the budget cuts, you know. I had to access to, if I chose vocational ed, choices. So the schools, in some way there’s more cause for a walkout now than when I was part of that walkouts. They’ve deteriorated. And sometimes I come to the theory, do you know why they deteriorated? Because we’re the majority now. People care less about educating us, and that’s why. And that’s when I’m angry, sarcastic. I wonder if California has gone from third in the nation to forty-seventh in the nation as to what they invest because we’re in schools, because we’re the majority. When I want to be negative, I have those angry feelings. But then you look at it’s national, it’s the economy, we’re being affected, all that.

But in my moments of frustration, in fact, I just was going to read—I think it’s Steve Lopez; I didn’t read the article yesterday—about the deteriorating physical state of our schools. Oh, my god, when I was a board member, that’s why we put the bonds on there. There was a maintenance liability that hadn’t been looked at, and now we’re right back at the same issues. What happened? So you try to find reasons, and I look at the California budget, what we’re investing in education, where we’re not—you know, that whole plan of that everybody—oh, I forget what the label is Jerry Brown’s father, what was his educational plan? I can’t remember the term now, but it’s not there now (Master Plan for Higher Education). So you could go to a community college; you could go to a Cal State system. It was all affordable. You could go to UCLA. It’s not affordable. This is sad. And is it because we’re there? As I said, when I want to be negative, because we are the majority in the state and whatever school system—but I get to looking at the Eastside schools. I think we’ve done a great effort in elementary school and that I’ve never run into an elementary school that I couldn’t say where our kids aren’t getting the best. In middle school, you deal with it, the struggle the same, but I don’t think we’re developing that workforce that we could all benefit from. Whether it’s you’re going to pursue your interest in a career or go to college, that choice, we went too far over and we didn’t develop the workforce.

So there’s the overcrowding issue and then there’s the issue of teachers not being prepared. What does that come from?

I’m reflecting on being a principal. My poor teachers were easy to spot, and the system wasn’t easy to get them out, so there is a question in my mind about seniority and tenure and that that has to be revamped and it has to be easier to either counsel a teacher out, indicate to them, “You’re not there.” But the majority of my teachers were always good teachers that needed the flexibility and the equipment to be a master of their craft, and I think the budget cuts have hindered on that. I think that whole move to testing, testing, testing has inhibited creative teachers and limited their time with kids, so those things needs to be revisited. When you see teachers frustrated because they think they have to teach to a test and that they can’t do the extra and that they’re not encouraged to stay after school anymore and be that creative, giving teacher, that’s what I have seen deteriorate. So maybe, hopefully, the pendulum will swing and it will come back to a balance. The majority of my teachers were there because they wanted to teach. There’s always that 5 percent, 3 percent that you’ve got to look at that landed up being a teacher because they didn’t know what else to do or whatever, but I think that’s been weeded out. But getting rid of a poor teacher still has to be evaluated. So I don’t know if I’d be a person that would support teachers being evaluated based on how their students perform, because our kids come in with so many needs.

That’s true.

And what factor that is. Although I always said, data had to lead instruction, but you needed to know where your kids, your students were to go forward. That’s how I interpret it. I don’t know. Because they failed, you’re a failure? No, because they don’t come in the same. But do you have to move them forward? Absolutely.

Do you recall the L.A. Times piece? Were you following that story where they basically exposed many teachers, I think by name?

Oh, yes. I would have never done that. Like I said, because our kids come in with—especially in poverty areas, they come in—and not that I don’t believe in high standards, but they come in at so many different levels. I remember there’s this one little black kid that comes in and enrolls in my class, and he’s coming to live with his grandmother downtown, but he’s coming from rural Mississippi. The counselor brings me in and said, “I don’t know if I should qualify him from Special Ed, but I don’t see him having any—,” whatever. The child had no language. His English was worse off. And he’d been adopted by a little Chicano kid that was maneuvering the system. They became best friends. But I said, “You know what? I want to put him in ESL.” I wanted him to learn English as a second language here. But so how do you weigh that child? What is the best can we do? How does the system address him? What’s the teacher going to do? What’s the teacher going to be judged on? I think the teachers can do wonderful jobs with a kid like that, but if I’m just worried about his tests, I don’t want him in my class.

Wow.

If I’m just worried about his test scores, you know, and that’s what you’re starting to frame. And I’m just like, what do we do with this child? He’s not a second-language leaner, but he is a second-language learner. His English is so poor from a rural part of Mississippi that I don’t even know what the standards were there, but he did not master English, and he’s twelve, thirteen in front of me.

He was that old?

Yes.

I thought you were talking about—

No, we’re talking about—and I’m laughing because he’s got this little Chicano kid running him about. They partnered. “Miss, he needs lunch tickets. How does he get lunch ticket?” [laughs]

He was advocating for him.

He was his advocate. “Miss, I don’t think he should be in this class.”

How cute. [laughter]

So there’s this love, this bond. But I’m sitting there like all the systems that I have in place right now don’t fit this child’s needs. He should be in a non-readers’ English class. He needs to be in an underperforming English class. But he has no writing skills. He’s basically illiterate. First language is substandard English. We don’t have a place for him.

Now, I could give him to a teacher that can nurture him and do and everything, but if you’re a teacher that’s going to be based on how he performs in one year, I’m better off working with those that I can move on to the next level, if that’s going to be my evaluation.

So that kind of policy forces people to make those tough choices.

Decisions, yes.

Wow. Did you ever find out what happened to him, how he landed?

No, I didn’t. I think it might have been my last year. Then I did speak with the grandmother and tell them, “We need to do something special with him.” And she says, “Well, my daughter that lived in Mississippi, I’ve been telling her get out here and whatever, and then she had this problem and I think she was incarcerated. So they put this kid on a bus, and he’s mine.” You know, that kind of thing. Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, gosh. But those things happen.

Yes. When I was teaching at Bridge Street Elementary, it was always our great fear to send the kids to Hollenbeck.

Art Selva.

Art Selva, yes. [laughter] Yes, exactly. I mean, it felt like we were putting them into almost like a prison-type system. That was the mythology of the gang violence and the—

And the parents have the same. It’s just a fear of going from a small, controlled—“I know your teachers.” Unless you came from Sheridan, where you had a thousand students—

It’s a big school.

—versus Bridge, where you had a couple of hundred, that’s the automatic transfer.

When I was able to win over Art Selva type, I always put him, is that I started having more articulation when I got there, more articulation with the elementary schools and bringing them over, and also teacher articulation. I had my teachers and my coordinators go show the fifth-grade teachers, “This is what we offer in the sixth grade. You need to help us identify, first of all, that we put your kid in the proper place.” So I even had them throw out all textbooks, let them see what we’re going to do, and so on. But I remember Art Selva, who nurtured his kids as his own, and now I’m going to send them to this school. Luckily, I had a relationship with Art, but I had to do the best placement that I could, because kids going from a small school to a large school can be misplaced, can get lost in the system, plus adolescence kicking in. We forget that the perfect student and perfect child in an elementary school is going to hit preadolescence and adolescence, and they’re going to go off the radar. I always looked at my job as—I told them, “It’s not the locomotive moving just forward. They’re going to be zigzagging.” And my job is in the three years by the time I get them into high school is that they’re back on track, because they’re going to go through becoming sexually aware; they’re going to be exposed to gangs; they’re going to be more aware of drugs in the community. That’s natural adolescence, and that’s part of our struggle with that age of a child. I don’t care what color you are, what your educational level or what your achievement; that’s going to happen. So how do we keep them on track or get them back on track by high school?

And how would you do that?

That’s the whole middle-school philosophy. And be prepared with a support system. Have good counselors and understand that. Bring the parent—because parents don’t know how to deal with that, and the most active parent in elementary school doesn’t even want to walk onto your campus in a junior high because of the numbers and of the reputation. That’s just that struggle of an urban middle school.

So what were your biggest successes? I imagine that would have been a huge challenge.

You know where my blessing was, is that I was much better prepared to be a principal over a middle school after the board versus my first run as a principal going into the board. First of all, I had the confidence to challenge the system. I knew policy, I knew what I could do, and I was not afraid to break a rule. So I tell people it was a blessing to come. One of my first discoveries is that in that transition from elementary school to middle school, I walked into—there’s like a language placement exam that transfers you over, and I was finding that when there was a hiccup in the child’s education, he got placed in ESL too. Some of those kids, because they were coming out of the bilingual program, had never been Spanish speakers, but because the way they tested, they were going—so they went to an ESL—English Language—

As a Second Language.

—Second Language. And I would say, “This kid doesn’t even speak Spanish,” but that’s how he scored. So I was just pulling them out, and I got called on the carpet. “You can’t just do that,” or whatever. I called downtown, “These kids are being misplaced. This is what’s causing me so much problems. These teachers have a range of ability in this class.” It was just like—so I remember being directed to follow district policy. So I went in and I read the district policy. I told my counselors, “Get them out of there anyway. They have a right to fail in a regular English class.” And I found you had to do a Language Appraisal Team, and that was the only way policy-wise you could make it out, but it’s a cumbersome process. You have to have the parents, the teachers. You have to have data. But we did it. We did it. So then it turned out we had at Hollenbeck the largest reclassification of exiting of kids.

Wow. That’s a great story.

So we got called on the carpet.

Oh, jeez.

So I remember a team came to, like, call me on a compliance, and I said, “No, I did Language Appraisal Teams.” “Oh, well, you have to document it.” “Here’s the notebook. We did it.” I had a wonderful coordinator that really got it, what the problem was, and we just kept looking for those kids, exiting them. What I was told later is that the local superintendent that was, like, upset, that thought I was doing something improper, whatever, after I left, embraced it and that the district superintendent came back down after I left to see why I had such high exiting numbers.

Then the coordinator said—it was Cortina [phonetic] sat down with him and he showed him. “Well, how did you come upon this?” He said, “Well, Miss Castro said—,” you know, and that she got, like, reprimanded, and there was, like, this ego thing with the local district superintendent. I remember she directed me, and I just, like, “I’m an ex-board member, baby. You know what? I will go back and review the policy,” and then that’s when I did go back and review the policy, and I found that little—what is it—Language Assessment Team could overrule any score, and boom. Then we would do ceremonies when you got out of the ESL program. We had like an internal graduation program, and we had a party for you so that it was you had success after being swallowed up in negativity, because you didn’t—I mean, this is a kid that was never predominantly Spanish, sitting in the same classroom as a kid that is two years coming into the country. “I’m a misfit. I don’t speak Spanish, Miss,” parents would say. But it was the district was not clear on how to exit kids that in the elementary school whose parents chose to put them in a bilingual program and didn’t know how to exit them because the bilingual program didn’t exist in middle school. So you got all this mix-up there.

So I understand at least on the Eastside they—in fact, what I did is when I got put into that position, I called my own meeting with all the elementary school principals. I undermineded (sic) and went behind the scenes of the district superintendent, and I told them, “Look. This is what’s happening to your kids. Tell me about one of your favorite kids. Let’s follow them. Let’s see what happened to them. Let’s see if they got misplaced.” And then I got there. So then what they allowed us to do is I would send in teams before they—like in April, May, and we would assess that elementary school criteria, and if they had to be exited from the bilingual or ESL program, we exited them before they came to us. So they said after I left that they called all the principals and told them the problem, and that one of them told her, “Oh, we’ve been doing that with Miss Castro already for whenever.” So I just said, “Oh.” So that’s what gave me the strength, is I was a board member. “What are you going to do, fire me?” And I used to tell people, “I understand I have that unique, unique—.” I don’t know of any other board member that went back to teach or go back as a principal into the system. And I knew how to fire teachers if I had to, and I knew how to challenge the system. So I knew I had a unique opportunity to be a change agent, and I fought hard. I remember being—and she used her finger with me. [demonstrates] Whatever. I remember I had an assistant principal next to me, and he just said—he was nervous, and then I just told her, “I will go back and read that policy.” But then when we walked out of the meeting, he said, “Oh, man, I didn’t know what you were going to do.” I just told him—I used profanity—I said, “Fuck her.” [laughter]

You’re really good at controlling your temper at the moment, because that’s what allowed you to be able to go back and, I mean, to keep your cool, not explode so that you could go back and take care of business.

I remember when I was at Belvedere, I had gone through a series of shootings, and we lost five kids that year, and that’s what prompted me to run for the board. I didn’t have what I needed to do that, and that person that I thought was my friend was my superintendent, and she called me in, like trying to hold me accountable for the shootings and the killings. We lost five kids.

Hold you accountable?

Yes, because I was the principal, and I had lost five kids in one year. In fact, they used to call my junior high Beirut Junior High, you know, that kind of stuff. But she did that. She pointed her finger at me, and I grabbed her finger and I said, “That’s not necessary,” and I threw her hand down. I don’t even remember how I ended that conversation, but she was going after me in the sense of going to give me a unsatisfactory performance as a principal, and I had to call my political friends, like Richard Alatorre, or whatever, and I said, “Hey, I’m getting an unsat,” and this and that. So I had to use my political base.

I’m doing everything I can, and I don’t have parents yelling get me out of there, because that would be the first sign to me that I wasn’t doing the best I can. I even remember at one parent meeting after the third or fourth killing of a kid, I would go over the parents all that I was doing, what we were doing security-wise, bringing in resources. And I remember making them laugh by saying, “And if any of you know where I can buy Wonder Woman bracelets, let me know,” because that was the only thing I wasn’t doing I wanted to, because there was an upsurge of gang violence in the community and it was spilling over into the school. We found out later there was an early release, and there was—I don’t remember. It was Rockwood gang that, under the early release, they were being armed. In fact, they turned out later for—my friends in probation told me that that gang had been targeted countywide, and it was just flowing into my school. Then I remember being so upset with an L.A. Times writer who came and off campus interviewed Rockwood kids, and he put their picture in the L.A. Times. I said, “I’m going to guarantee you that these kids are now a target personally,” and, sure enough, within two, three years, all five of those kids were dead. I remember calling a meeting of all the—I said, “I need to know every kid that I know on campus that’s in Rockwood. I need to know their names.” I called a parents’ meeting. I told them, “Get them out of the state. They have been targeted countywide. Move them to Arizona. Move them to Texas. Get them out of the county of L.A.” That’s how bad that problem was. The blessing is that during this crisis, my first cousin was sent to East L.A. Sheriff’s, which oversaw, and he was the captain. So I had a direct line to him, which, based on my being a cousin, not because I was a principal. “I need a helicopter now.” “I need a car here.” “I just took another shooting,” and he’d be there.

Oh, my goodness.

So that’s what caused me to run for office, is that I saw this school system didn’t have the resources to address a school in crisis and that I had lost three, four kids. There was an Anglo high school—I think it was Reseda High School—that had lost a kid under very similar circumstances and got the press and got the this. My kids could be dying and nobody’s—this is East L.A. It’s happening. I remember I wanted my school police officer—they weren’t allowed to wear uniforms, and I wanted him in uniform. I wanted him to be quickly identifiable. I wanted school police cars. I wanted a tank in front of my school. So that was my agenda, school safety, and my first actions was to put all school officers in uniform. They got rid of unmarked cars. That’s why you have L.A. City School Police now. I said, “You want visibility.” You want visibility, and that out of policy, because we didn’t want our schools to look like police states. I said, “Look at things now. You want officers on campus even on elementary schools. You want them this and that.” What was happening at my school was probably happening in other parts, but because we were 100 percent Latino, poor area, nobody’s giving me the attention that one kids gets shot up in a school in the Valley that is a successful school, and all this media and attention and everything. So I got that political picture real quick.

So then I decided I want to run for office. Didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but when you run from a point of anger, you’ve got a lot more strength than you knew. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what it cost. I had never thought of running for office, but things could not stay as they were. Then when I got elected, I had never even asked what a board member got paid, and I lost the salary of a good-paying principal to be a board member. “Oh, shit. What the hell am I going to do?”

Did you go to their funerals, these kids?

I went to a couple, but I didn’t really, because parents were angry at the school. In fact, I remember one mother said, “All I did was just send him to school.” So that’s where I tell you I ran on a point of anger. That’s all she really did, and I couldn’t protect her kid.

It happened on campus?

They didn’t happen on campus. They happened either before school or after school. But I did take a shooting during lunchtime. You know, god guides you. I had an assistant principal that was hungry, and he sent a teacher assistant on campus to go buy lunch for him, and she just happened to be coming back to school, and she was behind the school at lunchtime where she saw a gun go out, and they shot onto the campus during lunchtime. Luckily, she had a radio with her, called it in to me, I called it in to my cousin. He sent a helicopter. She followed the car. They didn’t know she was behind them. Then from a distance, I.D.’d and everything.

Well, what we found out was that nobody got hit. She just saw the bullet ricochet. After lunch a kid goes into the nurse’s office. He doesn’t know how he got scratched or burned. It was a bullet had gone right by him, and he didn’t know. He just felt a burning. He didn’t hear the gunshot. He didn’t see it. And I’m just thinking, you know, it could have been a vital organ, whatever. So I’m telling you, we were like pins and needles. Then I kept saying, “Nothing in my administrative training trained me for this, and nothing in my administrative training taught me how to take a school and a community through mourning.” But I’m always looking for the comic. We had had a kid that had been shot, and it was the day of his funeral. This is just, like, I go, “Why is this happening to me?” I had noticed that in the front of my school there were these five big pine trees, and there’s one that’s missing that died.

I’m sorry. I’m going to break down and cry. This is just too sad. [laughter]

No, no, it will make you laugh. Let me make you laugh. I ordered the replacement tree, and like a year later, the tree people show up, and their in the front of the school, they’re going to plant the tree that I ordered like a year and a half. They’re digging a hole, and they put the tarp out to throw the dirt, and it’s the day of the funeral. These three little girls come screaming into my office, crying, “Miss Castro, Miss Castro, are they burying,” whoever the child’s name, “in front of the school?”

Oh, god. [laughs]

“Oh, shit. What are you talking about?” “No, they’re digging his grave.” These are little girls, you know. [laughs] “What are you talking about?”

They drag me to the front of the school. I see the gardeners. They’re digging the hole. They have the black tarp. They’re going to plant the tree. And I have to tell them to please not plant the tree that day, and I have to explain to these three little girls that that is not the gravesite.

Oh, my god. [laughter]

I was just like, why does this happen to me? I mean, I want to laugh, but it’s also I have to calm them, and I have to say, “Let’s go talk to them.” I think I even turned it around, and, “You know what? Let’s plant this tree in honor of,” so-and-so. I have to admit, it’s like how in the hell did that happen? But I was just like, oh, god, the things that you deal with, that you have to deal with. So we got through that, but I could not believe on the day of his funeral, they’re digging the hole in front of my school, after a year. So I had to go to my office and laugh.

Well, probably because it’s just to not deal with the terrible sadness.

And these girls are just, like, distraught. “What the hell are you talking about? He’s having a funeral over there. We’re not burying him in front of the school.” [laughs]

But I guess it goes to show you how impacted they were, that it was at the school. I don’t know how the school got to be the target of—as the blame, I mean.

It was a community issue that was spilling over into the school, and middle school is the craziest years. High school kids are sophisticated enough to handle whatever it is going to go out in the community. Middle school, they bring it into your classroom, into your campus.

So I learned an awful lot. So after that, I was able to lead the district into putting uniformed and school police marked cars and that every school had to have a safe school plan, because I truly was not trained or prepared for it. What are you going to do if something like this happens? So there was a policy, and I know principals were upset, they had to do another manual and this and that. I probably would have been upset as a principal, like one more thing I had to do. But I learned I had not been trained, and, I mean, I learned so much. My team became—we already knew, okay, first thing we do we’ve got to seal the lockers, seal the P.E. locker, get his information, get it to the police, name, emergency personnel, whatever. We trained ourself to do that, all these kinds of things. Early in the morning, meet with all the teachers, let them know what’s going to happen. The school did have a committee. We used to send a team to when another school anywhere in the nation would have—we had a response team, and they taught me a lot. Have the kids write. Have the teachers write. You know, you think of that. You never think about the teacher breaking down. Do I need substitutes for these teachers? The first one, we reacted. The second one, we were better. By the third one, that year I lost five kids to gang violence, and two on one day.

Oh, jeez.

So, you know, we learned how to do, “Okay, I have another death. I just got a call. First, engage. A kid was shot on the corner. He’s ours. Our name. Let’s run all the emergency information, seal his records, get the records. I need the all this on my table.”

By the fifth, we were handling the situation. So we wrote our own little procedures and guides, and I used that experience to say, “You know what? None of your administrative training in college or as a system ever tells you this is what you do at a school in crisis. This is what you do when you’ve been shot at. This is what you do whatever. So we—I say “we,” my administrative team. I had one administrator that I learned that couldn’t handle that kind of panic, so I put him on supervision as far away from my office as possible, because he would get, like, scared, and I couldn’t deal with him. But I had my other ones that knew what to do. But that’s what gave me that experience. Like I tell you, I did not have the parents or the community crying for my ouster. I used every single resource. I had gone to Cal State. Most of my friends went into probation. They were right there at East L.A. They used to come and do supervision, and I said, “And wear your jacket that says ‘probation’ in the back.” Or they would call me, “The rumor is that after school you’re going to have this or that problem.” “Come on down. Open this.” I remember my first or second year, I had some probation officers, and they wanted to come on campus and be there at lunch, and I said, “No, I don’t need this kind of stuff.” But by that year, I told them, “You know what? You want an office? You can have an office in my school.”

You just kept taking whatever you could. I just learned to use whatever resources in the community, probation, the sheriffs. I had outside people coming in doing parenting classes, meet with these parents, referrals galore. It was a trying time, but I learned a lot, and I learned a lot of what the system didn’t have to offer me, and that’s when I realized I was possibly going to be demoted because I didn’t have the resources. “I’m running for office, and I’m going to be your boss, and you’re going to give every principal these resources.” And one is, the first one was put our school police in uniforms.

What about dealing with the gang? Did you learn anything about trusting gang involvement?

Well, what I learned to do was use the resources. I used to use the county probation department. “Come on campus. Let me know what’s happening. These are my numbers. Let me know whatever rumors you know. You know what? You have kids on here that you’re monitoring.” Now our schools have probation officers on campus, that you give them a space. You have kids on your caseload that are on my campus. Now they’re allowed on campus. Where I was one of those principals that said, “No way, no way, don’t come here.” After that, “What office you want? Where do you want to be located?” When I went back to Hollenbeck, we had a probation officer assigned to that school, and you know what? That’s great. You’re having a kid that’s causing trouble, doing this and that, and his probation officer is there. We’re part of the team.

So a lot of that changed, but it was an ugly year for me, an ugly year, and I think I hadn’t made that decision to run, or even think about it, until I was at graduation, and I had the graduation program in my hand, and at the back page, the sponsor put “In memory of,” and listed the five kids. I go, “What the hell is this?” So a unique opportunity opened, they had changed the boundaries, and no incumbent, and I just said, “I’m running for that office.” Then I got elected. I go, “What the hell did I do to my life?” But it was on a safety issue I ran.

I imagine it was to—I mean, I shouldn’t be putting words into your mouth. [laughs] I’m so into this conversation. To turn that crisis into something positive—

I realized that every principal needed resources and needed training. I remember when I passed the policy that every school—and Barbara Boudreaux, the black member, got it right away. She had been an elementary school principal. So we co-authored. So that was the black and brown community saying, “Every school had to have a school safety.” I remember principals that I knew were upset with me. “I’ve got to do another notebook for you, and these are the elements?” And it was a lot of work. Then I just told them, “I’m telling you from my own experience, hopefully you’ll never have to implement it, but we’re going to have safer schools and we’re going to have the schools that can respond.”

Then later on I remember using the—because it also dealt with earthquakes, that I had gone through an earthquake. It dealt with fire, whatever, all these things. I had gone through a school being torched, you know, all this kind of stuff. I said, “You know, later on you’re going to be glad if you have an issue. Then you can be able to say at least we discussed it.” Because I had never had any of that in my training and in my experience. I never knew what to do if there was a shooting and how to secure things and if there’s a death. I learned through experience.

Do you think that there would have been anything you could have done to prevent that with any information or knowledge, what you learned later on?

Later on, I learned how to use those probation officers, how to use rumor control, how to secure a school. It even helped me in the—there was a teacher strike, and I had a friend—they used to, like, group four or five hundred teachers, and then they’d go pick a school and picket that school and everything. I had a friend call me and said, “Hey, your school has been identified, and we’re going to hit you at eleven.” They were so angry. The first thing I learned in a teacher strike is remove all the kids from classrooms that had windows towards the street. So when he called me, I told all those teachers, “Double up. Move to the other side of the building,” and everything. I called all the gardeners or whatever, “Secure all my gates. All of you guys are going to be on supervision.” So he said when they hit my campus, it was so secure, and they had no access to kids that go crazy, or teachers. He said they walked away like twenty minutes, because there wasn’t any—you know.

But that’s what it taught me, how to secure a school, how to move it. I just said, “We’re moving across. We’re not having any kid at a window,” especially junior high and whatever. All my gates are tight. “You know what? You’re a gardener. You’re going to stay at this gate, and you’re going to lock it, and nobody’s going to move you. We’ll have somebody come by.” I knew how to handle an emergency. “Here we go again.” But I always remember that phone call, and I remember I told him, “I’m going to report you to the union for giving me the heads-up.” [laughter] Because I had heard, you know, all you have to do with—you have a thousand-plus middle-school kids, junior high school kids, they react to any kind of craziness.

Right. It doesn’t take much to get them—

It doesn’t take much.

I think I’m going to stop it here. I do want to ask you more, but I don’t know if—

I get into school policy— [laughter]

You did answer a lot of what I wanted to talk about today, but one thing was—and it’s totally back off your career as a principal, back to the walkouts, is the list of people who were arrested doesn’t really make sense to me as far as how did they—did you ever think about—

You know, I worried that night when they were being arrested, that I was going to be arrested, and Joe Razo, I think it was at that time—I don’t know if he recalls it—in conversation said that he was shown my photograph and asked to identify me. I don’t know if he remembers that conversation, but I remember, right after, him seeing me and saying, “Hey, that’s your photo,” and something to that effect, and it worried me and that I didn’t know everybody and I didn’t know their involvement. So it was haphazard to me.

I expected Sal and I expected David Sanchez. Joe I didn’t know, other than maybe being at Lincoln and seeing him come down the hall. Some of the others I knew, whatever, but I know that I felt just as involved as some of those that were. You know me; I’m always quick with a joke. They weren’t into arresting girls yet, you know, or they didn’t arrest any women. [laughs] But I sometimes felt very relieved that I was not arrested, because I felt just as guilty if anything—if there was guilt, if there was involvement, I just felt just as I would have been just as guilty, and, thank heaven, I will never really appreciate not being arrested, because I don’t know how I would have handled my family, and I don’t know how my family would have handled me. As I said, in the family I had a respected sheriff in the family that was attached to East L.A. Later on, through that movement and after the indictments, there’s a wedding in the family and he confronts me, and my brothers come to the rescue. Then my tía, whoever, was getting married—I don’t even remember which cousin got married—had to, like, break up the reception because of the confrontation. Later on, we mended. Then I remember being in a situation where the sheriffs come down, and maybe I’m marching or whatever, and I spot my cousin. I think my thing was fear that he’d see me and he’d come after me, like, you know, like, “There she is. She’s a troublemaker. She’s probably a leader. Go get her,” type thing. I remember that fear, and so that when I spotted him, I skirted to a different part of the demonstration or whatever, because now it became family.

So if I had been arrested or indicted, I don’t know what that would have done to my family dynamics. So I feel very guilt on one side, because I think I was just as guilty as some of them, if not more than that, but also so very relieved.

When you say guilt, do you mean that you feel you were as responsible for making it happen as anybody else?

Yes, yes, that what I meant. Yes, yes. And I don’t know if that’s my ego, but I think my participation. I don’t know what many of those that indicted would have said about my participation, but my own self-worth told me that I had been just as involved as they had been. But at the end, I had to make a joke, “Oh, they didn’t indict girls.” [laughs]

And they didn’t. [laughs] But you know it was really interesting, because I asked that question of Margarita Cuaron, I said, “Why didn’t they arrest women?” She’s like, “Oh, yes, they did. They arrested me and my father,” and this was at Garfield.

But I meant the indictment.

Yes, but they weren’t indicted, yes. But that’s rare. I think her case is rare, because she was with her father and there was some other circumstances and it was a different kind of thing. It wasn’t regarding the conspiracy.

Right, the conspiracy part.

So you said your cousin approached you. Do you want to describe what he said to you?

I just remember that we were at a family function. I don’t know if it was a wedding reception or somebody’s birthday, but it was a family function. My first cousin, Ray Sanchez, is an East L.A. sheriff, and he has that much police mentality. And as I said, we mended when he became captain of East L.A. Sheriff’s and I was a principal and I needed him. And I would, “Ray, this—,” and he would give me briefings as to what was happening. So we mended our relationship, principal and him as the captain. But while he was an officer, whatever, I remember him making some statement to me that—and I might have called him a pig. [laughs] I don’t know what I said. He said something about, “Oh, you and your Communist friends,” or, “You and your rabble-rousing friends, always causing problems,” or whatever. Then I think I responded to him negatively, and then I remember my older brother coming to say, “Leave her alone. She has a right to this.” Then they are more age-wise peer, they get into a little bit, and then my aunt coming in and saying, “I need you both to leave,” or do something to that effect. So in my memory of it, we caused family conflict.

Did your mom or you dad talk to you about that?

No, no. It must have been just a shuffle there, because I believe if my father would have entered, he would have put my cousin in place.

You feel he was stepping out of line and—

Yes. I just have that confidence.

That’s interesting that you would say you were afraid of him, that he would single you out rather than protect you.

Yes. This is another comment that later on, way after we’re at some family function, and somehow we’re talking about—to give you his police mind, we’re talking about somebody who robbed or stole something, and he says to me, “You know what? In so-and-so Middle Eastern country or whatever, when they catch robbers, they chop their hands off. That’s what they should do to that guy.” And I’m just like, “Holy Moses.” I just didn’t even get in the conversation. I just absorbed that moment to understand his police mentality. I didn’t confront him. I didn’t say, “Oh, that’s so bad, that’s so wrong.” I just shut up, and then I just remember staring and absorbing, that is his police mentality, and that there are people in the police force that have those kinds of beliefs. It was frightening. This is a loved one of you, this is a cousin that I used to play and love to look up to and play with when I was little. So I remember just like freezing and absorbing that thought, that there are policemen that have this mentality, and being frightened of it. Like I tell you, this came after me being principal, after restoring that relationship, and just stepping back and, “What am I going to do, change it?” I think he’s even retired when this conversation occurs. I had to put a stop to when we both retired and whenever we had each other’s emails, and he would send me all this right-wing stuff, like truly Republican right-wing stuff, and I finally had to tell him, “You know what, Ray? I’m a liberal Democrat, and this is offensive.” Since then, I have not received any. In other words, I’m telling him, “Respect my beliefs. I don’t know how else to tell you that I find this offensive.” So that’s how we ended emails. When we see each other, we’re respectful at family functions now, but I guess to each other we symbolized the opposites. And those two families are like the overachievers in the family tree. The Sanchezes are overachievers, and the Castros are overachievers.

That would be your father’s sister’s son?

Yes, my father’s sister.

So he was raised by a different father.

Yes.

But that’s an interesting dynamic of our community, is that conservative and the radical and everybody that fits in between that.

Yes. I just remember when he said, “Oh, they should just chop his hand off for stealing.” I just, like, froze. But I do remember saying, “That’s his police mentality, and there are people in the force with that.” It’s just scary.

As a principal, as a teacher, as an assistant principal, how would you handle discipline problems?

I always looked at a child and its parents as what if my parents were in the room. So when I was as angry as I could be with a kid and I’m going to meet with parents, I would sit myself down for just a few seconds before and just remember, “This could be your parents in the room. Handle them with respect, be firm, don’t be mean. Don’t be out of—whatever. They’re struggling with their child, just like your father or mother might be struggling with one of you,” even though we didn’t have bad kids in our family per se. But I always tried to bring that to the table.

Then I remember one of the hardest cases I ever had to deal with emotionally, it was my student-body president and my ninth-grade class president that were caught for shoplifting at Disneyland on, like, two days before graduation, and I had to remove them from— ESPION: I’m going to pause it for a second. [interruption]

So these are kids I nurtured. They were the cream of the crop, and, of course, I had to not let them—two days before their graduation, I had to take them off graduation. I had to deal with these very positive parents, with very positive kids, and the father even threw at me, “As a Chicana that struggled, how are you taking my daughter off of graduation?” I just—I don’t even know where I pulled it out, but I said, “I’m going to tell you what I feel. You, as good parents, you as telling me as a principal that you respect, we didn’t give them the strength to say no at the appropriate time. And I can’t. Everybody in their class knows they were arrested at Disneyland, all the other parents, I’m sure, and I cannot let them. But I’m going to tell you that I accept I didn’t give them the strength, and I’m asking you as a parent to accept that when coming to stealing, we didn’t imbed in them what we should have.” Then I talked to the girls in front of their parents, and I told them that, “This hurts, but I never want you to be in this position again. You have to take this as the hardest lesson you’ve had in life now, but you’re going to be at your high school graduation.” But that was a hard one. As soon as the guy told me, “You as a Chicana,” I went, “Oh, shit.” [laughs]

Right. But you can’t just think about those two kids; you had to think about the whole school.

And not only that, “I can’t reward you. You are leaders and you got busted for stupidity.”

Right.

For stupidity. And not only that, what they were doing, it still affects me that I had to do it. You know what they were doing? They thought they were so cool, because Disneyland doesn’t arrest you for stealing until you exit the park. They were taking orders. “What do you want? You want that t-shirt? I’ll go in that little thing and get the t-shirt and give you the t-shirt.” So the Disneyland has a high security. They caught them early, and they saw them taking orders and delivering to other people. And then they were shocked when they exited the gate, that they were the ones that were arrested. It was just a bizarre—

Was it Grad Night or were they—

Yes.

So at Grad Night they were stealing.

Yes. But in middle school they don’t take them on Grad Night the night of graduation. Disneyland and Magic Mountain have dates that they allow junior high and high school kids to come, and they’re not always coinciding with your Grad Night, because Grad Night are high schools.

Yes, that’s right.

So that kind of thing. So it just happened that it occurred two days before graduation.

And it was a school-endorsed function?

Yes.

It wasn’t them just randomly at Disneyland.

Yes. Then when that father threw at me, “You, as a Chicana principal, are taking my kid that is student-body president,” or class officer, “off graduation,” I remember the lump in my—and then I tell you, I don’t know how—I just thought of it quickly and said, “Well, you know, you’ve just got to come to grips as the Chicana principal, that is a role model from you for your daughter and you as good parents, we didn’t give her the personal strength when to not do something that’s wrong.” And then I just turned and told the girls, “Don’t ever find yourself in this situation again, and I expect you to be on stage at your high school graduation with honors. But I can’t. I can’t let you go.” Then I had teachers that were angry at them, so I had to hold up the teachers’ point, and I had kids that knew what they did. I’ve got to tell them, “This is wrong.” Oh, that was like one of the hardest personal things, and I had—you know. Principals interact with student body this and student body. They’re like your little best friends.

Were they regretful?

Later on, the mother came and said, “ I think you did the right thing.” But like a year later. [laughs] Like a year later. They were pissed. They even went to appeal it, and I had to hold my own with my supervisors, who understood exactly where I was coming. But these were smart Chicano parents, and they took it to the max. I don’t even know if they got to the Board of Education. They only had two days. But their first steps supported my decision, because I could be overruled.

Were they getting money to steal these things?

No.

They were doing it just because they could?

Yes, because they weren’t getting caught. They were beating the system. When they told me they were taking orders, and the Disneyland people were telling me, “Oh, no, we saw them.” Then when we did our investigation, yes, they’d ask, like, their best friends, “What do you want? I’ll go get you that hat.” And then they’d come out, whatever. They did the stealing, and then they would give it to their friend. I was just like, “How can I let that go?” Because they were beating the system because they were smart. They weren’t smart enough to know that Disneyland doesn’t arrest you until you exit the park, because it’s not a theft until then. For being so smart, you were stupid.

Wow. Yes, that sounds like an incredible teaching moment, like they call today.

And for me and for those parents. Nothing in the Chicano Movement taught me that one. [laughs] Especially when they threw at me, “You, as a Chicana role model principal, I’m going to take my daughter who idolizes you.” Those are hard, hard moments.

That’s tough. That’s tough. That’s a tough—but I think that it’s not like you were rejecting her for a position in a special program.

Yes. I didn’t let him take it there. That’s why I turned around and told her, “I expect you on your high school graduation to be on stage with merit.”

Did you ever find out what happened to them?

She graduated and she did well and she went on to college.

Oh, wonderful.

But like I tell you, the mother was—I remember being out on supervision and she stopped and then I saw her. You know how you, like, freeze, “Oh, shit, she’s going to go tell me off again or something.” But she says, “You know, I didn’t say anything in the meeting, but I think you did right.” I go, “Thank you. Is your husband talking to me?” “No, and he never will. He never accepted it. That was his princess. He always wants just the best for her.” I get that. I get that. But I remember asking her, “Your husband?” “Oh, no, he still hates you.” I go, “Okay, well, don’t let him drive down the street.” [laughs] But see, then, too, she had to do it in her arena.

When he wasn’t around.

She probably would have never said that in front of him.

Interesting.

She just played the mother role. There were funny stories, a Chicana principal in a Chicano neighborhood and having the little reputation that you did. Some of these people knew who might have been—maybe I was somewhere across their lives in the movement, that kind of stuff.

Okay. I’m going to stop it here. [End of March 14, 2013 interview]

This is Virginia Espino, and today is March 22. I’m interviewing Vicky Castro at her home in Alhambra, California. I’d like to start today with your time in the—well, there’s one thing that I’m trying to figure out for many people in the Chicano Movement, and that is what were the important issues of the 1980s, and then we’ll go into your role on the Board of Education, because the Chicano Movement is such a solid period of the late sixties and then the seventies. And then what happens to the movement after in the eighties, for example?

And it’s funny, I just had this conversation with a friend that I said with the pope being Latino and then the Latinos having such an influence on the election of the president, I remembered that it was the 1980s that the Association of Mexican American Educators, at their annual conference, the conference was titled “The Decade of the Hispanics.” I said we didn’t know we still had to wait twenty, thirty years to come to—so I think as I recall the eighties, bilingual education was being formalized. I think, as I recall, it was like still a dream, and some schools implemented it and some principals were smart enough to get some bilingual teachers. But I remember the Chacon Act going into place, and I’m certain that’s like towards the end of the ’78, ’79, or maybe the beginning in the eighties, where bilingual teachers are now required or were seeking. So that was not formalized. It was the act that said you had to provide. As I indicated in a pre-conversation that I would never consider myself fully bilingual, very “pocho” my Spanish, and I was asked to be a bilingual teacher, and I just was, like, stunned, like, “You could do better for these kids.”

Then the credentialing program comes in, the requirements. So that’s what I call more of the eighties, putting into play as an educator bilingual education. Colleges had opened up enrollment. I think EOP programs were now just about across the state. There were the formation of professional groups, like I recall, like, the—what is the Latin Business Association, the Accountants Association, the Probation Department, Mexican American. So, versus just the LULAC and the MAPA, which had been like traditional there from—I don’t know when their beginnings, I think the forming of professional groups and maybe the development of a more rigorous and academic-oriented Chicano Studies program. When I was a student, I could B.S. my way through many courses because it wasn’t academically rich yet. It was more your activism got you through, and this, and so now you had to read literature and you had to produce. So I think that happens more in the late seventies into the eighties, it becomes solid. I think—I’m trying to recall—I became state AME president in ’81. And what were the issues? That whole thrust of Latinos becoming administrators and superintendents, I think those are the issues that I recall dealing with, still the clarification and expansion of bilingual education, not just as learning English, but having your core subjects taught to kids in native languages and the development of teachers in that area.

Were you part of any of that—well, the report drafting or the research on what would be a good bilingual ed program for LAUSD?

You know, I wasn’t, but many of my colleagues were, and members of AMAE, because I never considered myself a bilingual teacher and I didn’t carry a bilingual certification or credential. My Spanish was never rich enough to deliver instruction in Spanish, and by that time I had already moved into administration, so I wasn’t part of the development of curriculum in that sense.

Well, what about the criteria, and how did you feel about the idea of bringing—because I recall that Spanish teachers initially were brought because there was the argument that, like you say, you didn’t have the full bilingual—

Right. They brought in teachers from Spain while I was principal at Belvedere, so that must be as late as the 1990s, because it’s before I run for the board in ’93, and I recall having to supervise five Spanish teachers from Spain, and what didn’t click was the cultural. They came more like to do missionary work, is how I interpreted it. I had two female, and one was very arrogant, and I never said it to her, but I remember after one encounter when she was just very upset with some students, trying to share, in my mind, you know, I need to let this woman know that these Mexican kids were liberated and that they’re not under the rule of Spain. They have a different—it’s almost like from a strict parochial school setting where all the rules get in place or you’re out of the school attitude, versus this is a public school in California and you deal with every child. There’s no eliminating someone that doesn’t meet your discipline standard or your academic. And there was almost such a—those that did come were well educated in Spain and might have been middle- or upper-class Spaniards and then they were put in high poverty areas of Los Angeles.

Okay. I’m going to pause it for a second because the dog is jumping on me. [interruption]

Okay, we’re back, and we had a little hiccup. So I’m trying to remember what we were talking about. Well, hopefully, you can reiterate the story you were telling me, because we were talking about bilingual education, and I think it had to do with bringing Mexican identity into the classroom, into the school environment, and how that—

How there was a comfort level to do so because I had grown up with no Spanish spoken, very restrictive what we could do, and so it was just great to be in that era in the eighties to be able to welcome culture into the school and have—like I remember being very excited about being able to offer algebra in Spanish to kids that were here while they were learning English, where before, they would have to struggle with English or were not even put in algebra. So that whole thing being able to see the benefits of maintaining kids academically while they mastered English being implemented and having social studies, U.S. history taught in Spanish, so that kids, as they developed their English skills, also their academic was being maintained and was par to an English-speaking child. I think I shared the story about that welcoming of culture and Mexican traditions, we did big celebrations for Cinco de Mayo. If we were on the 16th of September, we made sure kids—and I always made sure that students, whether it was Veterans Day or Cinco de Mayo or Memorial Day, whether it’s a U.S. holiday or something that’s being celebrated, that they understood the history behind it. So I would have Veterans Day assemblies. I would have Cinco de Mayo assemblies.

I recall this one time, though, that I was confused. The Mexican consulate had contacted me at Belvedere that they wanted to celebrate El Día de Bandera, which is a big to-do thing in Mexico. I had no idea what that meant, you know. So they come and it’s a big assembly, and we have all the kids, mostly beginning English speakers. At that time, I’m talking about five, six hundred kids in the school at Belvedere were in the ESL program. I can remember the auditorium held eight hundred, so it’s a big audience. So I just knew the protocol that we do the U.S. flag first, and then you do the Star-Spangled Banner, and I had an orchestra, and then the Mexican consulate introduces, and they march in the flag, the Mexican flag, and they do that march where their legs are straight up in the air. I’m, like, up on the stage, and I’d only seen that like on Soviet Union parades or Communist, and I had never seen that kind of a march. So then when we start to play their national anthem, I really panic because they put their hand up, and they don’t put it down on the heart like we do. They hold it sort of like—I panicked. You know, how like before they say “Heil, Hitler”? That’s what it looked like. So I know my heart is racing, like what am I introducing these kids to, and what do I do? So I sort of panicked, and I just made the sign of the cross real quick because I knew that would be okay. [laughs] Then I remember my assistant principal next to me chuckling. I go, “I don’t know how to handle this.” Then they have on tape their national anthem, and, you know, ours is lengthy, but theirs goes on and on and on and on. And I’m like, “When does this thing end?” So it was just a whole realization that I was engulfed for the moment in a Mexican tradition that had to do with governmental protocol in their country that I had not been exposed to, and I was a little—here I’m educated; here’s I’m a Chicana; here I’m asking for culture within the school and for us to know our history from Mexico. But, whoa, was I totally unaware of their protocol. So it was a moment of learning, but also of laughter within because I was just so unprepared.

How did the students respond? Did they break out and—

Oh, no, they knew their protocol. They stood up and they were still—I don’t even know if they had mastered the Pledge of Allegiance in English or maybe they—I’m sure they didn’t sing the national anthem, but our orchestra played it. So they knew how to act. And at that time, the majority of the students were from Mexico. I just probably had a very sprinkling from El Salvador. But my students were all born in Mexico. And they were very respectful, stood up. They knew what to do. It was a little bit of watching the members, the representatives from the consulate as well as watching your kids, and me trying to learn real instantly what am I supposed to do here, you know, that kind of thing. But to say that that was the atmosphere that we had, were able to develop and be comfortable and there was no negativity, I had shared with you that I had been assistant principal at Franklin High School, and that Cinco de Mayo was coming about, and I asked what did they do. This is my administrative assignment before Belvedere. That was the school whose faculty was very stable, had had the same principal for seventeen years before I got there. I was an assistant principal to the other principal. When I asked, “What do you do to celebrate Cinco de Mayo?” because that’s what came about, they told me that the ESL department had a queen contest. And I just about fell on the floor, like, as a woman, a queen contest, and that’s what we do for Cinco de Mayo? So I was cautioned and not really allowed just to do Cinco de Mayo. I had to do an International Week with Cinco de Mayo within Monday through Saturday and recognize and make it a Multicultural Week, because I was introducing that faculty—not necessarily the student body—to multiculturalism.

Even in the—when was that—nineties? Oh, my goodness. At Franklin High School?

Yes.

Eighty-four to ’86.

Yes. Then I made a mistake—well, not a mistake. I didn’t expect this response, since I was guided to make it a multicultural, and I took that as an opportunity because it was a predominantly white staff with few minorities, but the student body in ten years had gone from 80 percent white to 80 percent Latino. So it was like boom, boom, boom, but the faculty doesn’t turn over that quickly.

From, like, ‘74 to ’84, you’re saying, it went—

Yes, because I had looked at the statistics. They have a very large and very well-respected ROTC program and, actually, military teachers, and a majority of them served in World War II. That doesn’t mean anything to me. So I remember my guest speaker for the Asian Day was Warren Furutani, who had came to speak about the internment camps. Well, it offended some of the ROTC teachers, and my principal had to intervene for me, because now we brought in the enemy that they had fought in this.

I’m like, I really had the belief that when I went to Franklin I had walked into a fifties movement, because when you have the same principal for seventeen years, you have the same activities, the same culture for seventeen years, and so if these people, if you look at it, came out of World War II, and many of them started teaching at Franklin and never went, and now I’m introducing a Japanese American person that’s talking about the internment camps, and this is just, like, too much for them, not for the student body. I was glad I was able to do it, but it was—we’re talking about Highland Park from East L.A., what, twenty miles? But it was the faculty that I was educating, and it was a stretch for me to come up with five days of guest speakers. Then I knew I could have Cinco de Mayo and we could do the traditional Eastside booths and sell aguas and whatever, tacos and taquitos and all that. We called it an international fair. But then there was a large Vietnamese group of students and there was a Filipino community in there, too, so I was able to bring—and I was glad to hear just recently that that tradition continues, that they still have Multicultural Week. So that way that was really something that the kids get to celebrate their culture but—

Okay. I’m going to pause it, and I’m going to remember to start it again. [interruption]

So what were we saying?

So we’re back, and it’s absolutely recording. You were talking about the Multicultural Week, that tradition that you started at Franklin that still continues. But did you think that it was an appropriate request at the time, and looking back, what do you think?

No, I think it was an opportunity. Sometimes you have to take those things and switch them, because when I heard they did a queen contest, I was saying, “Where’s the cultural identity as a woman?” In fact, when I arrived as the assistant principal—each high school has four assistant principals—on my door and on my label in this main office still called me the girls’ vice principal, and there was a boys’ vice principal. Lucky I went in with a new principal after seventeen years, because then I told them, “I am not the girls’ vice principal; I am an assistant principal.” So that was even a new change for the faculty.

Interesting.

And, of course, I had all those little traditional girls’ P.E. department, cheerleaders, drill team. All those things that affected young ladies were on my organizational responsibilities. So I was able to say, “Hey, I can do plan management. Hey, I can do this and that and so.” But what I realized I was doing is I was training a faculty. Me and the new principal, we were flipping over a faculty into the nineties, or that kind of thing.

So you have those opportunities to bring culture into school, and sometimes you have to be diplomatic so that the outcome is positive, because sometimes you get Chicano activists that do the demands where people resent it. It’s better to educate them and to embrace them, and, I guess, in a way you spoon-feed them. But at the end, I knew that kids were going to celebrate and understand why they were celebrating. But the adults, you have to bring along, you have to bring along.

Highland Park is an interesting place in comparison to Boyle Heights, where—

I’ve been celebrating Cinco de Mayo since I was a kid. And when was that? I graduated from elementary school in ’57, and we did Cinco de Mayo and [Spanish phrase] and whatever, whatever silly songs they had there wasn’t the total thing. And, like I said, the school was predominantly Mexican American, so those kinds of things were not questioned. So Franklin was a good experience for me because I had never been—two things—to a school that didn’t recognize the need for a cultural component to the school. In fact, the parent newsletter that went out in Franklin had never been translated into Spanish. The notices to come to parent meetings had never gone out in Spanish. These were things that, coming from the Eastside, that—what are you talking about? This was always just part of my career. So I enjoyed that opportunity to bring Franklin, in my own way, up to par as to what it needed to service that community. There was another thought there, but I lost it. I don’t remember what it was. I get into the story, I forget my question.

Culturally and demographically, was Franklin High School like Garfield or Roosevelt?

No, no, not at all, even though it’s within a ten-, fifteen-minute radius from there. As I’ve indicated in the past, I went to Euclid, Hollenbeck, and Roosevelt, and we were always the majority Chicanos, Latino, Mexican Americans. We were 90 percent, always, always, always. In fact, the Garfield-Roosevelt game, we used to call it the Taco Bowl. Now it’s the East L.A. Classic.

So when I go to Franklin, in my position I had to do a lot of the grant writing and everything. You have to look at the demographics, and I discovered that with almost a ten-year period, ethnically the school had flipped. It had been almost 80 percent Anglo and Italian, a lot of Italian, and there were a lot of Italian teachers. The principal, Mort Tenner, was Italian. And so it had been a big jock school for the football team, and they had gone to City, and the principal had been a real sports fan, and all these stories about him and what you needed to know about sports. So I come in with a new principal, and it’s now 80 percent Latino, and the other is maybe down to 4 or 5 percent Anglo and the other is filled in with Asian, including mostly Vietnamese and Filipinos. So I looked back at the demographics for ten years, and I said, “This school flipped.” And you don’t flip a faculty of 130, 140 even in a ten-year span. Then seventeen years, the same principal, he had hired all of that faculty. So when you hire, if you’re not—although there were minority teachers there, there were few, because also the stability of a principal that long, you don’t have that many new openings. So it was an interesting experience for me because I had been so Eastside and had never been too exposed. The other point I wanted to make, I had always been at a Title I school, which is the federal funding that comes in because of the poverty level, so I had been a Title I coordinator, which means you supplement. So we always had supplies. We had the Xerox machine; we had fieldtrips; we had teacher assistants in the schools I had worked. And when I go to Franklin, they’re not a Title I school. So I remember when they were giving out supplies at the first faculty meeting, you didn’t get a box of paperclips; you got an envelope with some paper clips. And teachers were given a ream of paper for the semester. When you requested something to be photocopied, you sent your paper down to there where the machine was. This was like, “What is this?” And it was because they just on the way—it’s a long story—on how they rank schools for Title I, and high schools are sort of towards the end of that, too, and just the whole thing.

So those two experience, going to a school that was not oriented to embrace and celebrate and use culture as part of the atmosphere in a positive learning environment, and then a school that lacked resources that were probably abused in other schools, you could go in to some teacher that hoarded all the construction paper for years and things like that. I was only there two years. Then the third, of being the girls’ vice principal and having to educate the faculty that I was an assistant principal, and that was real difficult for some of them, some of the men, because they had taught their whole career there. Some of them were one school the whole career, seventeen years the same principal. You do it this way. You do it that way. A funny story about that. It’s photo I.D., and I have that job. I coordinate the kids taking photo I.D.’s. I go, “Girls take their photos in the girls’ gym, boys take their photos in the boys’ gym.” And I have to provide supervisions for both locations. So then I asked, “Why don’t we just have them do it at one locale, and then I don’t have to cover so much.”

“We’ve never done it like that here.” Oh, god. Can you see that was changing the culture of boys can take their photo in the same gym as girls can take their photo in the same gym. That was the kinds of systems I had to change. The district had done away with the term “vice principal,” like, ten years, but I came in as the girls’ vice principal. So that’s how I walked into a movie that was locked in time. So I could be the radical, demand change, whatever, you know, “We’re going to do Cinco de Mayo here,” but I also knew I had a responsibility to educate the faculty and then also embrace the Vietnamese culture and the Filipino culture and still give respect to the Anglos that were still there, and my World War II veterans. [laughs] So, talk about a learning experience for me. It was easy to run or be an administrator on an Eastside school. That was home.

Wow. Because then I’m thinking about your value system and your ideology and your beliefs, and you’re in a situation where you don’t just represent one group. You have to represent—did you feel like you had to compromise any of your—

I know as the assistant principal and I knew I had a great principal to work with, it was Ed Rosas, and he was pretty much known to always work outside of the box himself. So he just said, after we reviewed and negotiated my duties, he says, “And you’re in charge, and the only time you come to me is when you mess up and you don’t know how to get out of it.”

So I did land up in his office a few times. “I just offended so-and-so and didn’t know.” So he would laugh and whatever. He was a great mentor. It was the only assignment I had that I looked forward to going to work every day, because he was so out of the box. There’s this scene that I wish I could have recorded. This is Ed Rosas. We’re clamping down on students that are late to school. Gates are going to be closed at eight. We’re going to know who comes in two minutes later, whatever. I’m standing with Mr. Rosas in front of the school, it’s 8:02, and a parent drives her son up, and the kid gets out. And Rosas says to the kid, “Get back in. You can’t come to school late.” And I’m like, “Oh, gosh.” Then there’s a little conversation in the car. The mother orders the kid out to school. Rosas says, “No, our gates are closed. You need to be on time.” The kid goes back into the—so this goes on three times, and I’m like, “What’s going to happen?” Then the mother drives off with the child in the car and lets him in a gate, and the kid jumps over the fence to get into the school. And I go, “Mr. Rosas, you couldn’t really do that legally.” He says, “But I’ll guarantee you that kid won’t be late again, or else he won’t come into the front of the school, just with the mother’s support of saying, ‘I’m late and I’m coming in the front door.’” But I just was like, “Oh.”

But he would do things like that all day, just, like, would handle so many situations that I just enjoyed. He were going through this audit and this review, and the auditor or the reviewer asked for, “What form do you use for this and this and that?” And I knew that we didn’t have a form. So Rosas just pulls a paper out of his desk, and he goes, “We use this.” The guy goes, “No, this is—,” da, da, da. “But that’s what we use.” “No, you can’t use this. This is—,” da, da, da, da. And I’m, like, stunned. The auditor just took it and dropped the issue. I said, “Oh, I can hardly wait till I’m a principal and I can use that one.” I never did. But that would be Rosas. That was Mr. Rosas. He just would not ever let something go. So I feel privileged to have been mentored by that man, because everybody is always by the rules and da, da, da, and that’s how you become an administrator. He just showed me, “This is what we use.” I wanted to laugh, but you have to sit there. [laughs] So those are great, great memories of being mentored by that man.

Yes, it sounds like he was making it up as he went along, depending on the situation or the circumstance at the time.

Absolutely. He just handled whatever situation in front of him, and he was in charge. He was the boss. So that’s what I learned to carry in myself. I’m the principal. I think it came up later about, “Why do you do it that way?” “Because I’m the principal,” you know, that kind of thing.

In fact, that was why I retired, is an assistant principal came in and she said what he had done, and I said, “Why did you do it that way?” He goes, “Miss Castro, that’s how you told me to do it.” Then I said, “Oh, this is time I’m forgetting what I say these days. It’s time for me to go.” [interruption]

So I paused it and them I remembered to turn it on again. I freak out about it when it happens. Okay. So we’re back, and you were telling me about—well, I think we’re good about the principal, and you just kind of finished at that point.

I was just saying that even though I came in with that strong Chicano Power, this is what we’re going to do here and there, that when I was put in positions where I had to lead a faculty or whatever, I knew that it was an educational process and that you can be all Chicano Power, this is what we’re going to do, and demand this and that, but it’s better to educate them. [interruption]

Then I wanted to—because we lost some of the recording when I paused it, and you had told me a story about the AMAE organization and the conference that—

Oh, when we took three hundred educators from California, went to a binational teachers conference in Mexico City, and I wasn’t part of that organizing group and everything, so I didn’t know quite everything. I knew we were hosted by the mayor of Mexico and very privileged status there.

But one of the ceremonies that we were involved with is—this is where that culture comes in to, like, what am I doing here—is the ceremony where the organization is putting a wreath at the monument of the Nino Heroes. I’m there at the ceremony and I’m hearing the speeches go between the speakers, and then I realize, “Wait a minute. That’s a battle against the United States, and here I am honoring those that defeated the United States.” I don’t know if anybody else was questioned. I wasn’t troubled by it, but it was an interesting identity moment that, like, should I be doing this? Is this, like, anti-American? Where are my loyalties? So it just caused for that pause, that chuckle. The only other time I had that moment was when the Mexican consulate had asked me to participate in the ceremony celebrating Dia de la Bandera, and I’m totally, like, “Where am I? Who am I?” you know, that whole, “Where is my loyalty? Why am I doing this, these people?” Then I recall that one of my favorite songs—I don’t carry a tune well—was the Battle Hymn of the Republic, when I was [sings], “From the halls of Montezuma.” I never knew what the significance of that statement meant until I was in front of that Nino Heroes. I’m like, “Oh, my god, all these times.” So you do get like—and I guess that’s what’s sort of difference, maybe my friends that I went to high school with, and I don’t know so much about the majority of my colleagues during the Chicano Movement, but we were very much, and I was very much, U.S. in the sense based in the sense of why I deserved equal treatment, because I was an American, although I wanted my cultural identity. I had a right, I had rights, and that’s that Civil Rights Movement that brings that to me versus—or that’s what was part of the guiding force in me versus just identity with Mexico. That was just the cultural aspect, that I had a right to know where my parents were, and I probably knew more about them than about Mexico and things. Whatever cultural traditions they shared with us, it was out of family and not necessarily because they had studied or even traveled through Mexico.

Right, because you said they were both born in the United States.

Yes.

Well, some people during the Chicano Movement had the ideology of the internal colony, that Mexicans in the United States, many were here by happenstance or by conquest and not by—

For me, a lot of that is just the rhetoric of the movement. I’m sure there’s some people that that was more of a guiding principle for them, but the guiding principle for me was I was a U.S. citizen, my uncles had fought in the war, I was born here, I had a right to—these are my justice struggles, and along the way if there’s anything I can do to enhance education and if it’s a foundation of who you are and where you came from, then I want to struggle for that too.

You didn’t agree with the—or you didn’t feel, like, resentment towards the U.S. government for its role in—

I never ventured that way. The resentment I had against government policies is when I didn’t get treated or I wasn’t given equal opportunity. That was more the premises that I worked from. I might have made reference to Aztlán, the mythical world, or, “You stole our countries,” but I don’t think I was embedded emotional—those were more like emotional statements or the rhetoric of the day.

Right. What about the land-grant issue? Was that something that you felt you could go get behind?

No. No, although I found I did—I was in his audience once, and he was just a fascinating embracing—could make you charge forward or something. It was his personality. But I really never looked into that and, you know, just sort of embraced the Treaty of Guadalupe a little bit, that I have a right to those kind of—but never really deep academically rooted or structured.

That’s okay. When you look at those individuals or that period—maybe not those individuals—is there anybody who stands out as being a real leader for you of that era? I mean, I know that there are probably leaders in different areas, but I’m wondering if—like, for example, we have Martin Luther King and we have—

Absolutely Cesar Chavez. Cesar Chavez symboled a lot for me in the struggles of the farm workers. Then also, as I indicated, I had been privileged to be trained by him when I was with YCCA, that we were trained in organizing techniques, and that one of the speakers for us was Cesar Chavez. So to have that personal touch and to have been in his presence and to have private conversation with him, so definitely Cesar Chavez. Then locally, not necessarily a relationship, I came from the Boyle Heights area that had one of the few congressmen, Roybal, and having my father and mother being a little bit of politically charged, experienced their support for him. Let me pause a little.

Okay, because now you’re biting me (dog). [interruption]

Here we go. Okay. So you were saying that Edward Roybal—

I looked up to Edward Roybal because I happened to have been raised in his district and I remember the talks of his council, and then when he was City Council and my parents’ respect for him, and then also he was the first Latino congressman I ever knew. Then the other person that I think I was politically very, I feel, a mentor was Dr. Ralph Guzman. He was, I guess, a researcher in my days at Cal State L.A. He’s in the history department, but he mentored in the sense of letting you know that—or sharing or giving me the belief that my community activity and my acting was important, and taking me to be among his speakers when he would put a panel somewhere. So I owe a lot of respect to him.

Would you consider Gloria Molina more of a peer than somebody who was a mentor?

She’s a mentor after I become an elected official. Okay. I sort of was aware of her political campaigns. I never really worked on them, but always had respect. When I decided to run for office, I went to her to ask for her support, and her challenging questions and her, “I’m not going to get into this. This is two good Latinos running against each other,” but finally she endorses me over the other candidate, I have a photo with her, and that comes.

Then when I really appreciated her is that, first of all, there’s a sense that she was always mentoring. I always had a loyalty and appreciation for that. Then when I needed a job because the board pay, you know, it’s only a stipend, she hired me as a part-time staff. So I actually had the opportunity to sit in her staff meetings and see what a tiger she is and how demanding, and that how I was just too sweet to be a board member. I learned about assertiveness in a political arena via Gloria, and I appreciate that opportunity not only for her being there when I had difficult situations, being the board member that represented a very controversial possible high school in downtown that took on state issues, she was always there as my support base. And then when a new board comes in and they want to oust Ruben Zacharias, the Latino superintendent, she and Roybal-Allard and Monica Lozano from La Opiñon were always a phone call away. So that I remember I was board president when they fire Ruben, and I remember having to call Gloria and tell. She’s giving me strategies and, “Let the other ones know we’re going to fight them here,” or we’re going to do this and that. So she was my support base. Then it gets down to where I call her and I tell her they have the four votes, they’re going to vote him out, we’re into negotiating his salary, he wants a million dollars. “Well, where are they at?” Then I’d call, and I’d call her and I’d call Lucille Roybal-Allard and I’d call Monica. They’d do whatever, “This is where they’re at,” whatever, and, “Do I go in fight more?” “We’re not going to accept it.”

He has a lawyer, but we’re also negotiating, I guess, on behalf of the community. We’re at, I think, $750,000, and Gloria says, “Tell him to take it. That’s as far as we’re going. That’s enough. They have the votes. They don’t even have to do this and that. If they’re there, let’s do it.” So I have to go in and tell Ruben, “We’re at $750,000. The advice is that you take it.” He doesn’t want to, and his lawyer. I said, “I’m there. I have to vote.” They were my backup, my support, so I always appreciate Gloria in the sense of talk about a mentor, a supporter, and a tough cookie. I remember this one scene. It was called the Belmont Learning Complex. That was the controversial high school. On the opposition to me is Maria Elena Durazo from the union. And because the construction firm owned a hotel downtown that was in a union conflict, she opposes the building of the high school. Gloria, who also represents the area, and I are on the need of the school and whatever can be mitigated. Gloria came to speak to the board in support of moving forward, and Maria Elena is there opposing it, and these are like—up until that moment and that controversy, I have very much a strong fan of Maria Elena, but then it gets a little personal. But then I remember after the guest speakers, going out into the hallway to go thank Gloria for being there for me and speaking, and her and Maria Elena are going at it verbally, verbally, you know. And I’m just, like, they both held their own, and then Gloria concludes, “That’s my position,” and then walks away. I mean, I just was, like, you know, that was, like, seeing two powerful women, and in all rights, even though I have political differences on this issue with Maria Elena, I highly respected her, her power, and knowing that you’re in the middle, that you’ve caused a little bit of here and there, and they go out and have their own relationships and support this and that. But I would say Gloria truly invested in me as an elected official.

You could count on her whenever.

And most of the time I went through her staff and told them what my issue, but Miguel Santana [phonetic], who is now the point of controversy in the budget in the city, was her chief of staff, and he would be able to call when it was necessary to be a direct phone call between you. “Let me get Gloria on the phone for you.” Or, “I think she wants you to do this.” So he was a point person. But he also would often just say, “Let me get Gloria on the phone for you.” “Gloria, this is my issue. This is what’s happening,” this and that, whatever. Then she would be really good. “What do you want to do, Vickie?” So she would hear me out. But I had fun when I was part of her staff because, as I said, she’s hard on her staff and she makes them produce on whatever issue she’s working, and they would call me the consentida, because she would never, like, treat me like that, you know. So I remember one time there was some issue that one of them wanted to bring up to her, but “Oh, no, she’s going to yell at me. Vickie, you say it. She won’t yell at you,” that kind of thing. So I used to laugh at them. So I enjoyed that privileged moments with her where I was treated like that.

But she did hire me to do a job, and she supports a lot of parent education programs, and she had never had—let’s say she gives organizations money to run parenting classes. She never had an evaluation of these programs, so she had me visit very large district that she has and then to submit an evaluation of the programs to her, and I compiled what I observed, did some evaluation on the teacher, how many parents were being reached, and things like that. So it fit my agenda just well. I was experienced in that arena, and I produced some good work for her too.

Do you think that her way of running her political agenda is effective, based on all the other leaders that you’ve encountered and that you’ve met over the years?

I never was in the position to observe another elected official as part of a team that worked for her or on that basis. Maybe Art Torres and Richard Alatorre were people that I respected, even to Richard, in the sense of what they were doing in the legislature and how they did sort of, like, open pathways for people to also seek office. But other than Richard Alatorre, I never had a one-on-one relationship, and Richard was more of a mentor during my early years in Chicano for Community Action and things. So it’s a completely different relationship. I didn’t look at them necessarily as a female role model, so that definitely as an elected official I would say that I learned so much from and that in her own way she mentored me.

You mentioned working for the Principal Rosas or Rojas. Was it Rosas?

Rosas.

Rosas. And what you learned from him and what you took from that experience. What did you take from the experience of—

Boldness, boldness when you’re the principal. It’s your show, and at the end of the day, you’re the one that is accountable. So if you’re going to take a risk, it’s your risk and not to be afraid. Very seldom but I would say that when I left the board I was even more bold, because what were they going to do, fire me? You know, that kind of thing. Take chances. Look beyond the rules, not necessarily break the rules, but you can bend the rules, and if there was no rule, make just sure kids benefitted. So I think I got from him a philosophy, a manner of being administrator, but being accountable.

Well, how about with Gloria Molina? I guess that’s what I meant. What skills did you take from her and lessons did you take from her, experience with having such close contact with her, seeing her work?

Her personality and my personality are very different. She’s a very strong woman and I’m a very strong woman. I’m trying to identify right now. They’re different. I always got the sense of power from her, and I don’t know if I always generated that power, but I always tried to say to myself, “You’re in charge, and if you don’t speak up, who will?” So I think that’s what I got from Gloria, and that I strive to gain from her strength, because when Gloria’s in the room and when she’s on that supervisor, when she’s in that staff meeting, when she’s saying, “This is the way it goes.” Now, the difference is that I was a policy-maker, where she was a decision-maker. So there’s a little bit difference in the role and the power, but strength to stick to your guns and step up to the plate.

And there were several controversial issues that came up during your board time. You mentioned the Belvedere—

Belmont Learning Complex, which was the high school that is now the Roybal Learning Center. They changed the name, I guess, to get out of the controversy. It was being built on a former oil well or there was oil underneath, and the fumes from the oil were supposed to be toxic and everything. It turned out the school is there and it is functioning, and the safeguards are there, but I used to get letters from construction firms from Saudi Arabia and across the world, “What’s the problem? We build high-rises on former oilfields.” But it was a controversy based on a union issue, from my perspective. But we did change the standards in California. It did change the standards in California in the sense of what was allowable prior to where a school was built now became more rigorous and there had to be much more review than prior. So as I was going forward with the staff to build the high school, everything was being challenged, so that it put pressure on the legislature. If there was no definite regulation in place, it had to be defined and then made, so which there are schools that are built. Beverly Hills is on top of an oilfield. So it’s just there was no regulation prior to that, but because of the influence of the union, and it was the hotel workers, that they could put on Sacramento those regulations. A lot of it was delaying, delaying, delaying the construction of the school, but it’s running today.

What did Maria Elena want?

To leverage the construction and the contract to either put pressure—the construction team was Kajima, also owned the Otani Hotel. So if I can stop you from getting this contract or hold you up until you unionize your hotel, and so they wanted to leverage it to—because they were within miles of each other. So it was to leverage pressure on the owners, Kajima, to unionize the Otani Hotel.

What was your position on that?

I was a Board of Education member and that I was elected to bring a high school to the most overly crowded school in the district. I remember meeting with Maria Elena when she first brought the controversy to me, and I said, “Maria Elena, you play your hand and I’ll play my hand, and I hope we have mutual respect, but my job is to bring a school to this community.” It had the highest density in the city, it had been on a year-round schedule longer than any other area within L.A. Unified. Many of these kids had been bused since kindergarten and never attended a neighborhood school. I fought for and used every—working with my other colleagues. After seventeen years, we fought for a bond to build these schools, and this was, like, the number-one area in need. “I have to deliver a high school to this area. That’s my job. That’s what I got elected to do. Your job is to unionize that hotel, and you go do it.” To this day, I don’t know whether the hotel is unionized, but it delayed the opening of that school by almost eight years.

That’s a long time.

And a long time for those kids to continue to be bused.

I mean, was there an alternative? Was there an option of using a different construction group, or why did it have to be that one?

Well, you go by competitive bid and that whole process. This whole bidding process to build a school is pretty rigid, rigorous, and then there’s a team. I think the point that they had is they could initially finance their construction project, and it was a hard one, because I think the second team was TELACU, which came from East L.A. But they’d have to go out and get loans, and they didn’t have the money to put upfront at the time, and who could guarantee they were going to get the money, where Kajima was an international construction team, and they’re going to front the money and get reimbursed by the district as they construct, which at the time might have been a poor political decision on me, but I went with feasibility and who could do the job quicker and all that. Little did I know it was going to delay it, but the school—

Was it unanimous? The rest of the board members, were they—

No, it was always a 4-3. It was unanimous the first couple of votes, but as the union comes in and the controversy comes in, much of the votes to go forward on the construction were 4-3.

So there were some people who Maria Elena was able to convince?

Oh, absolutely, mainly those that were supported by UTLA. So it became a more—that’s a

This is Virginia Espino, and today is April 4. I’m interviewing Victoria Castro at her home in Alhambra. Before we started to record, we were discussing your run against Gil Cedillo, and I’m wondering—I know you said it before, but I can’t remember if it was on record or when we were having a conversation, but about Richard Alatorre’s comment to Gil Cedillo when he decided to run against you.

Well, Gil Cedillo and I were candidates for the Assembly, and we grew up in the same neighborhood within two blocks of each other, and so we had many similar friends. I was an elected official already, and so, of course, I’m going after endorsements. So I went to Richard Alatorre, who I had known for years since my activist days, and he shared with me—I guess it was an unwritten rule—that he and Torres and Polanco and all of those, I thought, had made that if you were an elected official and you were going after a position that didn’t have an elected official, it was an unwritten rule that you had first dibs at it. So he shared that with me and that he was going to try and talk Gil Cedillo out of running, because it was sort of like my rite of passage to run for that office. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know at the time, or I should have known or I didn’t pay attention to it, is that the Speaker of the Assembly of the House was the person that really could open doors, and at that time that was Antonio Villaraigosa, who had been in the same high school class as Gil Cedillo. So we’re really talking about neighborhood kids running against each other. And he endorsed Gil, and I felt a little more betrayed by Antonio, because when he ran against Bill Mabe [phonetic], who was Polanco’s chief of staff, I went with him, and I was already an elected official. So when he was the man out, I went with him and he got elected. So at least I thought I was going to get a little more neutrality, and I surely didn’t. But Alatorre shared with me there was sort of like an unwritten rule, those that were in elected officials had first right at a call in getting their endorsements.

Did you have a chance to talk to Antonio directly? Did you have a chance to—what do you do in a situation like that when—

I did talk with Antonio directly, and then he shared with me, “We go back to junior high and we’ve been buddies, and he’s always been there.” Then they had both come out of the Labor Movement, and so at that time I didn’t know the power of the Speaker. I think I was looking at Antonio; I wasn’t looking at the power of the Speaker. And that meant big unions, big money, that kind of stuff. So I surely got my butt kicked. [laughs]

When you talked to Antonio, I mean, how did he justify his decision?

He went on a personal basis, and I did remind him, “I went with you with Bill when you were running against Bill Maybe your first run.” He just sort of ignored it and went right back to the friendship. So it was convenient for him. Then when I realized it was big guns against me is when Gil and I had our appointments in front of the County Federation of Labor where all the different unions are present. As I walked in, Antonio was at the door to where the county was going to be, and he was greeting every labor member, head of the labor union that was coming in. So that was like his seal of approval for Gil. So those are the rules of the game.

How do the caps break down? You got to see a bit of that factionalism or—

Yes. You know, I never saw the depth into the whys. It was really not philosophical or even different agendas. It just seemed you took me on, I should have—like I could have walked away very angry at Gil. So I think I saw, like, the Molina camp angry at Art Torres, because of the way they treated her in Sacramento when she was an Assemblyperson. I don’t know the details there. Then with Art Torres comes Alatorre, and so it’s sort of like a given camp. Then there’s the Richard Polanco, who I don’t know if Gloria endorsed him, but I’m not too sure. So you sort of had to always be judging who you go to when. The school board members, in the sense of—are policy makers, so in the sense of power in the political arena are not big heavy hitters, but in the business world, L.A. Unified, you get a contract with L.A. Unified, that’s big bucks. So that’s where the power came in that position. In fact, I remember opening the doors for a young lady I met, that she came to see me, that she was selling paletas and how do you get business. So you really open doors. “You have to go see—these are the buyers,” this and that. She landed up with a million-dollar contract because L.A. Unified’s so big. The same thing happened with the person that was selling, like, Doritos or whatever the chip was at the time. So that’s where I didn’t get it when I—I was ready to improve education. That’s where I got that you could influence big bucks, and that’s why you’re on the radar to all these people, not because you’re educating kids, but because you’re going to buy a series of books, you’re going to change a publisher. That’s when the heavy hitters come out and try and influence you.

Woo you and be your friend.

Right, yes.

So then you mentioned Gloria Molina’s camp. So would you say, I mean, when you’re talking about, like, for example, you mentioned a few interviews back that when you joined the school board, you got to see what it was like. You had firsthand experience with the old white guard.

Right. The city’s old white guard.

So how did the Chicano Movement—did it change it? Did it add to it?

I think it sort of could possibly keep it in check to some degree. But I just attended a supervisors’ meeting, and they were just totally disrespectful to Gloria, so, you know, I think it’s still there. But because I represented downtown Los Angeles, I had to often understand what the Eli Broads expected of the district. There were just tons of names that I had that were never in my world, the Chamber and all that kind of stuff. That was all a new world. So I relied on Gloria, who had already been in that arena for a while, for perspective. Then I would get calls from the Polancos and the various—I think it was the first month of my office that I got a call from Trump, Donald Trump. And I thought they were joking. They said, “Donald Trump’s on the phone for you.” Well, the school board was in negotiations for the Ambassador Hotel, which he had purchased, and we were trying to take over by eminent domain. In eminent domain, you pay the current market price. From what he paid, it had dropped millions, so he wanted to talk to me about it. I was so, like, “I ain’t talkin’ to you about this. I only see you on TV or whatever.”

Then this nasty thing happened to me, and it’s all like within the first month or so. A friend of mine called—an acquaintance of mine, Helen Hernandez, “I want to take you to lunch and I want to introduce you,” and everybody does that your first month. So I said yes, and I remember going to lunch with her, and it was at swanky hotel in downtown L.A., and she’s with another woman. Then the other woman in the conversation, “I’ve known Vickie for this, and I’ve known Helen for that.” She introduces me to this woman—I don’t remember her name—she’s a lobbyist for Trump. I get used, and I just said, “You know, I’m not prepared for this,” and I excused myself. I was angry that someone that I took as a personal friend trying to congratulate me—I don’t know how much she got paid to set up that meeting. That’s what I took it.

So you think she got paid or you think she was—

Yes, I’m sure she got paid to make that introduction. So that’s the world that the Chicano Movement and my role as a principal had not prepared me for, and that’s the world I entered, that a lobbyist for Donald Trump is working his way and Donald Trump is on the phone? I mean, like, this is, like, too quick for me. I remember going to Eli Broad, one of the—it was sort of funny to me, for me anyway. We were in negotiations with UTLA, and they were—

I’m just going to pause it for a second. [interruption]

Okay. My apologies. You were saying that there was a meeting. You were going to talk about Eli Broad and—

I don’t remember where it is in my term of office, but there’s a possibility that there’s going to be a strike, that we’re not getting anywhere in negotiations. So Eli Broad calls. I’ve never met the man; heard his name, his influence. He wants to invite me to lunch. So I go and I meet him and it’s in his office. There’s one of his representative. It’s very quiet, all his artwork, and then they’re bringing in to—he has like a private little lunch area and everything. The meeting was to tell me he did not want a strike for the city. So whatever the chitchat and this and that, it leads up to, “I want you to know, I don’t want to see a strike.” I’m like, “I’ve never taken a dollar from you,” this or that. But what I found out later is that he met with most of the board members that way. So it’s sort of like that white guard telling you, and I’m like—

What role did he have in—

He’s a city leader. I believe his words, “It would not be good for the city for there to be a teachers union strike, so you need to work to resolve it.” I said, “Well, that’s what I’m working for.” What else would I be working for? I’m not going to do something for just a strike’s sake. But it would be, like, with power comes that arrogance to tell me.

I wonder if his kids used the LAUSD school system.

Probably not. I’m sure they’re privately schooled. Often many of the downtown Chamber men that I really didn’t know—this is where I really come from the barrio into this arena. I knew the school system, my superintendents, and that, but I never understood until later on in my term of office the importance of the business aspect of L.A. Unified, the employment aspect, the number of employees we have, the contracts we give.

I don’t think there was ever any heavy talk about the takeover or mayors caring about the majority of the board until we passed those big bonds, because it was all about our construction money. We were the largest construction program west of the Rockies. There was no other construction projects going on in the United States.

Wow, the whole U.S.

The whole U.S., and we passed a $2.2 billion. So that’s when Riordan runs some people for Board positions. So what I learned, it was always that power struggle to control the business aspect of L.A. Unified, and then the little talkers of the reformers that muddled the waters and don’t let teachers and principals do their jobs.

So would you say it’s a corrupt system?

I use the word “corrupt” more with fraud and misuse of funds. No, it’s a controlled environment. It’s an attempt to control the money aspect of the district, and I never saw corruption, though, but it’s heavily influenced by the big players of the city.

Well, you know what they say, the very leftist radicals of the Chicano Movement, when they talk about people who have had your position, the school board, Antonio or even Gil, Gloria Romero [phonetic]. There are just numerous people, Gloria Molina—that power corrupts. And you’re explaining attempts at people trying to seduce you to persuade your opinion in their favor.

That exists. That exists. And there’s also a sense of obligation that comes. To run for office, you have to ask people for money, and so when you ask someone, “Give me money,” I think you feel that you owe them to some extent. Now, whether it means you owe them a vote or not, but you definitely have to listen to them and you have to consider their point of view, I think. And it becomes part of your integrity if you’re not opening to hearing the other side, I think, and that becomes very difficult, very difficult. That’s why I was sort of—as I served on the board, I was given a position of a little more freedom, because I was not the teacher union candidate. So they used to talk about UTLA candidates on the board. Then when it got very politically tough, it was after Riordan ran a slate, and he had three Riordan board members which were anti-UTLA. So I was a fourth vote, so I was very fortunate that I didn’t owe my allegiance to either one, my election to anyone, and I could look at the issue. Sometimes I would joke about it, like, “Who wants to be my best friend today?” that kind of thing. So it’s very difficult, because the way we get elected is by taking people’s money. If you give me $100,000—and at that time the board candidates had no limit on what they could be received from anyone. So you can be very influenced.

Right. If Eli Broad wants to donate to your campaign and you like his point of view and he likes your point of view, that seems like it’s corrupt in a way.

It’s out of integrity, what we think of elected officials, but it’s the reality, no matter whether it’s a board member, an Assembly member, or the President of the United States.

Absolutely.

So that’s the hard part. It takes money to win an election.

Right, lots of money. That’s the issue with Gil Cedillo and Jose Gorea, people are challenging Gil’s funders. So, anyway, that’s a whole other issue. Do you think that there’s a way to remedy that?

I think it just comes with—well, there has been, by limiting the amount of money a PAC or individual can now donate to the school board members. When I was on the board, there was no limit. But, you know, those with money find a way. I think that’s just our political system.

How did you keep from being seduced? Well, I know that you’re a person of integrity, I mean, that goes without saying, but I’m assuming most people who go into those positions from the Chicano Movement are people of integrity with strong values.

I worry now. It seems that when we did have Richard Alatorre and Polanco and Art Torres and those that broke barriers there, there was a Chicano-Latino agenda. This is to open doors for us, to make us fair players and everything. Now that I look at California and our elected officials, and there’s so many Latinos, I don’t know what their agenda is. It’s no longer a Latino agenda. There’s like we made it to the table on our own, and so once in a while you have reference to, “Well, when I grew up I had this challenge,” but it was not like in the arena of education with an Assembly Speaker and this. I don’t see the charge on education and making that our first agenda item that’s going to be great in California.

It seems now that there are more Latinos in the state of California, education is on the bottom. So I talk about a perspective of Chicano-Latino agenda for equality and access. As you get people in there, they forget the agenda that put them there. So that’s my criticism of the current Latino agenda.

So you’re saying that you think it’s positive, it has a positive impact to have these godfathers and godmothers leading the Latino-Chicano political caucuses.

No, I don’t think I’m saying that. I’m saying that currently today, that those that are in power that are Latinos, they have forgotten that there was a Latino agenda to get them up there. Now they’re equal. So now I think they’ve lost the fight.

I don’t know if you want to talk about anybody specific. Do you have anybody specific?

Well, with all respect, because I’m not in his shoes, I look at John Perez, who is a former student of mine, who is always very underdog, advocate, and things like that. Now I look at him as the Speaker of the Assembly, and I see all his struggles and the fight in the budget and this and that, but I just expected more in the sense of putting education first. That’s the part that—and that’s my perspective of my involvement in the Chicano Movement, is to even the playfield we have to have equal access to all schools have to be of quality, access to colleges, scholarships, this and that. And that’s not out there right now. It’s a lot of it is survival because of the economy, but it also doesn’t seem to be anything that’s used as a banner for us. So I’m so very proud of him as being someone that I knew as a high school kid, and now he’s Speaker of the Assembly, I’m very proud of him and I’m very proud of his work, but that Chicano activist, I don’t see it. He’s an Assembly member that’s the Speaker of the House.

Was he an activist in high school?

I don’t know if he was student body president or class officer, but he was in his high school MEChA. So, yes, to some extent, yes. He also came up through the Labor Movement, which was in his tenure in labor really became Latino, you know, the membership of the Labor Movement very heavily Latino now. They get to fight the issues on principle and maybe sometimes the Chicano-Latino perspective. [laughs]

Is there anybody who you think exemplifies, who’s—because that’s another question about—there was this recent article in the Huffington Post, and it just came out of San Diego. It looked at a few kids in San Diego, and it was saying how there’s a generation coming up that doesn’t identify with the term “Chicano,” the term “Chicana,” or the Chicano Movement.

It’s not only that. As I might have mentioned to you before, I would always lean towards hiring Chicano-Latino teachers, thinking I’d get that extra little commitment out of then, but then I would say only one or two out of ten would carry that agenda. The others were teachers, they did their business, and they didn’t go the extra mile because they were Latino. They were good teachers, but I never got, like, “I’m going to go make sure that this community is growing with us in the school.” I said, “This is like the payback,” because I think I struggled to open doors for—in my career it was always about opening doors to access to college, and many of them carried that belief that they made it on their own. I always had good grades, and I got into the college I want, where they didn’t struggle to do that. So, therefore, they didn’t owe it to anyone to do anything, where I think I might have dampened their spirits if I had told them, “You know, I hired you because you’re a Latino, because I have all qualified teachers here. But I picked you because I was in a position to do so, and that was my beliefs and my hopes. And you turned out to be a good teacher, but not an extraordinary committed teacher to the community.”

And I think where that can affect you, as I moved up in my career, it was always about opening doors for Latinos behind me, so if you don’t come in with that agenda, you just get there on your own merit, is your belief. But, you know, there were lawsuits, there were struggles, and many of them need to be continued.

We’re now thinking about celebrating the hunger strike at UCLA, that created the Cesar Chavez Chicano Police Department, and those issues are still—they were part of that in the nineties. What are we about, and what is our commitment, and the teachers that we hire, are they doing, giving back? Are they from the Chicano Movement, or are they just great professors? So it’s so interesting.

Exactly. So it’s sort of like, well, that’s what you fought for, that someone didn’t have to carry that, but it’s not like we’re performing at par. So the struggle needs to go on, so that’s the hard part.

Well, I was looking at some books that document, some historical books, like, for example, from Juan Gomez Quinones and Professor Ernesto Chavez and historian Carlos Munoz, and they say things like, for example, Juan Gomez, Professor Gomez Quinones, says that by the 1970s the Chicano Movement had diffused. That’s one of the narratives that is coming out from historians writing in the eighties and nineties, that it ended, it diffused, it waned.

Yes. And I remember the 1980s were supposed to be the Decade of the Hispanics. So I’m not a historian, and I don’t know, the Chicano college movement might have. I’m not too sure what he’s talking about, but I think part of it is you do see that where the farm workers are no longer the rallying point that motivates you like they were truly the underdog and you worked for them too. That sort of diffused, and I know that just about all Chicano Studies departments are struggling for survival now. And I’m going to have to answer that question. I just yesterday received an invitation from a group of Mechistas at Cal State L.A. that the department is of no use, no classes, whatever, and they want a panel on why Chicano Studies is important and how did you—so I think in the sense even if you’re an Anglo teacher, I want you to take some Chicano Studies so that you’ll understand, so that you can assist students. I think you need to have cultural knowledge. You need to know some of their what comes with family. I used to tell the story about with teachers who bring me a troubled student, and I could have a kid that is all F’s in something and the parents aren’t reacting. When I tell them he showed disrespect, and, boom, mom and dad are right there. So how do you use that to get better grades for this child? And you have to have that cultural knowledge. So I think there’s still a place for these things, but it’s definitely fighting for survival.

Let me give you a couple of more quotes, and then maybe something will come to mind that’s contemporary. Then Ernesto Chavez says that, “Looking at the historical context of Mexican American activism,” so that’s going back as far as the 1800s, I’m assuming, “the Chicano Movement emerges as a moment rather than a seminal event.”

I’m starting to believe that. [laughs] And I struggled with it, because through my career and my life I’ve been asked to speak to many student groups, and I would sit there puzzled, in the sense of why are you glorifying these years when the issues are still out there and you should be organizing to improve those conditions. So I often would not come up with a solution or an answer, but I think I’ve said it a few times, like, “Okay, I was part of a walkout. Okay, I was part of this demonstration. Yes, I was there.” But as I sat on that Board of Education, we were not achieving at a level as an ethnic group. We were not producing the high school graduates that we were—the struggle continues. There should still be riots out there or at least some kind of urgency. So I can understand why historians say that, because there’s some kind of unsolicited glory that I participated at that time. I think in my own little way now I still struggle in those issues. I still try to be on some committee or some board where that’s there. So the revolution should not be over. [laughs] The Chicano revolution should still—it might have been refocused on immigration versus—because that’s where I see the student activism, and rightfully so. But in the sense of achievement levels, and we are making entry into different arenas that we had no representation. It’s like I used to say, “Okay. So my superintendent, my boss is Latino. What good is this doing me?” [laughs]

You used to say that?

When I was frustrated, you know, like, “Where’s your agenda?”

That’s a common feeling in California, because of all of the elected officials that we have. So I think that there’s no right answer. I think it’s good to ask those questions. Finally, Carlos Munoz, Jr., who I’m assuming you knew, he says that, “The movement of the sixties disappeared into the pages of history by the mid-1970s. Most leaders of the 1960s did not play a central role in the political struggles of the late seventies and eighties.” So that the struggles of the eighties and the seventies—

I think maybe not in the political, not as of yet, but I think we were struggling in whatever career advancements, and we became leaders. Like, I can look at the group that I went to Cal State with. Maybe they didn’t go into the political room, but Carlos Jackson became the head of L.A. Housing Authority. David Sandoval becomes the director on EOP in the state of California. So we took leadership roles, but not necessarily in the elected arena. So we might have skipped a beat there.

Do you consider that as part of the either legacy of the Chicano Movement or part of the Chicano Movement when people like yourself get on the Board of Education, people like Juan Gomez Quinones becomes a notable professor at UCLA, and—

Yes, and Moctesuma Esparza—

Exactly.

—in the film industry.

I think we carried our agenda and we opened doors, and those that came after us might have continued, but many of them just got there because they believed it was on their own merit. But I hope it’s like a spiral, that maybe when it comes around again, it’ll be a little niche higher and so that it hasn’t ended. That’s what I want to believe.

There was a great article in the late eighties by an L.A. Times journalist—I don’t know if you knew her—Maritza Hernandez [phonetic].

No, I don’t remember her.

She was there for a short while, Latina. She did a piece on the Chicano Movement today, where is it, and it was in the eighties, nineties. But she interviewed only men, so David Sanchez and—I don’t have it with me to show you the exact—so it’s just that same question. Do you think that it’s over and done with? Do you think that it’s reemerging again or there’s things that you could say—

I think the causes that created the Chicano Movement have not been resolved, and therefore the heart needs to keep pumping so that maybe it’s taking a different pathway. Maybe it’s not the protests and the yelling and whatever, and maybe the MALDEFs of the world are taking it on, maybe the elected officials are taking it on to some degree. So it’s not the civil rights struggle like the United States went through. It doesn’t have the same face. That’s what I want to believe. And that’s based on the issues are not resolved, and we are not all in this United States of America as equal partners and equal opportunities.

What would you say would be maybe a critique of the Chicano Movement, what you see looking back, that could have been improved?

Another person to add to your quotes that made me sit up is Bert Corona. In his autobiography, he makes criticism, and this is even, I think, prior to reading any of these, that the Chicano Movement failed—I don’t know if he used the word “failed”—because we weren’t attached to the Labor Movement and so that we didn’t have an expected outcome, and we were just struggling to struggle. So that’s what after I read his—I think it’s a page or two—I just said, you know, that’s true. We just sort of, like, randomly went after everything. We didn’t have a focus, all of us as a group. We took on different focuses as individuals and tried to conquer them. My bottom line, when I see a strong educational system that we can all benefit from and afford, then I’ll feel fulfilled.

Have you been able to travel to other school districts with a large Mexican American—

I was very fortunate to do that in two arenas. When I was on the Board of Education, I needed to work, so I worked for the Cal State L.A., the Department of Education, evaluating student teachers, but I could not evaluate within L.A. Unified, so I got to visit and see teachers all over the county. In many ways, L.A. Unified was in proper training of teachers, I thought was better, but when I went to school districts like El Rancho, that was just always predominantly Latino achievement level was higher and high school rates were higher, and it was always sort of Chicano, and so it was doing well. So I sort of would lean to—because it’s a smaller district to control, and so that maybe we get lost in this big system or in different sections.

Then the other arena is when I was on the school board. There’s an organization called the Council of Great City Schools, and they only looked at large urban school districts, and I represented L.A. on it. So you had to have over 200,000 students to be on this committee, so it gave me—the East Coast was lots of times ahead of us, and I just think it was because they’re closer to Washington, D.C., but that blacks were struggling more than Latinos. So it sort of was a real—it widened my perspective, and so I could come back and say, you know, if L.A. would go this way, or if we do this, many of our—using data for to guide instruction, I observed that in Chicago like ten years before the term was even used in L.A. So I think reform in education was more based on eastern states and then flows towards us, although I recall in my teaching days, bilingual education and what we did in that and whatever, other districts would come to visit L.A. to see what we were doing, and somewhere that got flipped around. There was this school district in Ysleta in Texas that I went to visit, small school district, but they had achieved and flipped over and almost had very few students that were behind grade level, and it was all Latino. So how did they do it? So I was exposed to that.

Was it a working-class neighborhood?

Yes, yes, and it was right near El Paso.

Ysleta.

Ysleta. So I just remember being very—looking at their scores like, wow, and these are right over the border.

Did they have a bilingual program?

Yes, they were totally bilingual. In fact, their superintendent’s guarantee that his students will graduate from high school ready for college and bilingual, and ready for college meant every high school senior took the SAT, had their scores. Whether you were going to college or not, you were going to graduate bilingual. That was what he was pushing, and his scores—I don’t remember his name, but that was his—I said, “Gosh. Gosh. I want to work for a district like that.”

Did you get a chance to see how they implemented their bilingual education?

Fully bilingual. First grade, kindergarten, if you were English speaking and you weren’t Latino, you were going to learn Spanish, that dual language approach. It was very well implemented.

When I was teaching, I was hired as an emergency credentialed bilingual teacher, and it was under the program of the—oh, gosh, I can’t remember the name of it. But the day was separated by language. So in the morning, you get your core subjects in Spanish, and then in the afternoon, art and P.E. in English.

Yes, and you had to have so much in English.

Then but the same teacher would teach the Spanish and then teach the English, so that, to me, was an inherent problem in the program, because the Spanish-speaking kids, they would just refer—because they had spent all morning speaking Spanish to you, and then in the afternoon you were expecting them to speak English to you, and it just didn’t come naturally.

Yes. When you separate language versus—I think I saw in Ysleta where if you needed to learn Spanish, you went to Spanish class for a while, and if you needed to work on your English, you were given an extra hour of English and then the teacher would—in fact, I remember whatever the student addressed you in, you answered in that, so that it was natural and that eventually they become bilingual, so that that was the students’ need. Or if you knew the child, you answered in this, or you could answer in English and see if he understood what you said, but to respect the child’s question and to answer it in what you thought was language appropriate for him or her, which gave it a natural—but the teachers were bilingual, fully bilingual.

All the teachers were fully bilingual.

To my knowledge. You know, I don’t know. I can’t say all. I don’t know. I don’t know that part. Just classrooms I observed. And there were Anglo teachers that were fluent Spanish speakers.

In the case of the walkouts and that period, it was mostly about preserving language, preserving—

Preserving language and a right to know your history.

So when you get to a situation—what I experienced teaching is the difficulty in transitioning the native Spanish, the monolingual Spanish speakers to English. Did you ever have a chance to look at that issue? It’s almost like the reverse. It’s like, okay, so these kids are already coming with their language because they’re recent immigrants. How best can you teach them English? What programs were working and successful?

I’m struggling, because I was always a secondary teacher, and so I never saw really little kids grow in that area. But I did see English as a Second Language. If you had a strong bilingual teacher, even though they have to be very fluent in English and Spanish, you could move those kids quickly. If you had mono-English teachers, I don’t think they could help the struggling child as much, because sometimes they needed assistance. So my most successful transition into English were with strong bilingual teachers who were teaching English, but could clarify and support the child’s primary language while they learned. In fact, there’s one that stands out. A principal now, Mauro Bautista, his kids met whatever the year’s expectation and went above, and then they would celebrate transitioning out. So he was, like, the best teacher, and I used to try to hire and have other teachers observe. But he always struggled with the district’s prescriptive type of, you know, you have to take them into this series and whatever. He didn’t like that kids didn’t read a whole book. They read sections in English and whatever. He wanted to take them through the whole book. He wanted them to be literature-based, and so he would do that on his own time. So it’s doable. You just have to have the right teacher in it.

Did you follow the end of bilingual education, dismantling of bilingual education?

Yes, I was on the Board of Education when that occurred. That’s Ron Unz, yes.

That’s right.

Yes, right. I’m trying to remember. I get 187 and 227 mixed up, because they come both while I’m on the board.

Very close, yes, to each other.

One is deny all extra services to immigrants, and the other one, Ron Unz, was the bilingual end. That was really hard. That was really hard, because it sold another plan that was not the silver bullet. It seems to me that they forget the teacher’s ability to guide a child. You don’t educate a child by a program. Teachers educate children, and you should have an array of tools. I think when they dismantled the bilingual, it was very emotional and it was sad, because whatever program they brought in has not produced, and so at least I knew we were graduating bilingual kids.

Did you have a chance to look at the statistics, and do you think that they told the whole story?

No. Much of Ron Unz and Alice Callahan led that emotionally charged, based on Ninth Street Elementary School where kids went in there and they never exited bilingual. So it was a very underperforming school and there was a lot of misplacement of kids. You could have cleaned up the system somewhat versus—and that’s where I never wanted to be locked into a program. I wanted a variety of programs and where the teacher felt good. You give me the results, you know. Then the State Board of Education says it has to be this program and this and that. I always struggled with that kind of almost academic liberty that you should be able to have at a school, or if I’m the instructional leader, let me as a principal call it and let me work with the teachers, and if this is working for this one and that one, but I want results at the end.

We became too prescriptive, too prescriptive, and, in fact, I think when I exited, I had to find a loophole in the district’s program to manage it. We became very prescriptive. In elementary school, you give them some kind of an exam, and based on that exam, they get placed in the junior high or middle school, and that there was such a misplacement. I had students whose parents had opted to have the child in a bilingual program, but I don’t know what they marked the records. So they took this exam because they were underperforming reader or writer. They did poorly on the exam, and they would land up in an ESL class learning English, when the parent would come telling me, “He spoke English since he was born. There is Spanish in the house.” And I tried to fight the system to get him out, but I found the loophole in the policy to get him out and then became successful at that. But language learning and development has always been a struggle for us, but I truly believe in a true bilingual program with qualified teachers that can take a child where he’s at and transition him into the appropriate languages. That’s the richness that should be there.

You’re talking about teacher autonomy or principal autonomy to evaluate her school population and to see what program fits best of the different bilingual education programs. Is that an argument for the breakup of the LAUSD, make it into smaller—

I never really believed in the breakup of the district, but I did believe in the smaller units within the district, and only because of you go back to the purchasing power and the power of a poor district versus a district that can meet its needs.

I represented the schools of the southeast, the Maywood, the Bell the Cudahay, and they wanted to break away from the district, and I would tell them, “You have the population that you would be a good-sized district and you could support yourself, except right now you don’t have the schools to house your kids. So wait till L.A. builds your schools and then reconsider.” Because I don’t think I believe in a small district, because you don’t have the financial flexibility, but a midsized district like the El Rancho School District that can make those affordable financial decisions, where when you’re a small district you might not generate enough money to adequately support your schools, but if you’re a midsized or above, L.A. is just huge. So I do believe in there has to be a middle ground there.

There’s a school—are you familiar with the Marco Firebaugh High School?

In the southeast, I’ve heard of it, yes.

Is that part of the bond?

Yes.

My son’s fancy prep school, La Cañada, played their school, got creamed, and they just seemed like they had it together. I just thought, “Gosh, if I was an immigrant, I’d go there, because there’s so much dignity and respect and pride.”

I never had that opportunity, but could you imagine being able to open a school and you choose your faculty and you set the tone, and kids are excited about a facility?

I see that at the Old Belmont Learning Complex. I was there for opening day and kids, “People care about me. People care about me.” That’s in a community that is also adopted by a city. So I’m not too—if it’s Southgate or it’s Maywood or whatever it is, they also have a City Council. That’s what was great about those cities. Like Bell High School, not only was it part of L.A. Unified, they also had a City Council that would support the efforts of the school. I think one of the councilmen was an assistant principal at the school, and they were one of the first high schools that I saw that put technology into the school that was connected to the library system of the city. So that’s what a city run. But could they finance their own school yet? No, because they needed another high school because they were overcrowded on year-round, and only L.A. city schools needed to build their school for them.

Is the Marco Firebaugh charter or is it part of LAUSD?

It’s part of LAUSD. I don’t know if it’s charter. Charter would just mean who runs it.

Oh, that’s right. That’s another one of those big debates, bilingual education, smaller school districts, leadership.

That’s the good part about charter, because I tell you, when I was out of college I wanted to run a brown school. I ran brown schools, but I didn’t get to call it like I wanted to. I did my best.

What do you think now, having been on the board with folks from other ethnic groups, do you think that we benefit from being just only in a brown school, or do we benefit from experiencing other cultures and other groups?

Whatever is the natural setting, that’s what you—in L.A. you cannot—we still live in ethnic communities, so you’re going to be in a brown school, you like it or not. The integration, I saw some benefits, but also a lot of kids that learned to miss the bus on purpose and nobody comes for them, the accountability. But then I know of students who were bused out their whole life and had to become competitive and had to be survivors in a different environment who were quite successful. So you had the array. I always think it’s best to go to—unless your mom and dad is going to—

Okay. I’m going to pause it. [interruption]

I was very proud. Prop 187 is the one that would deny educational services to undocumented children. I was very proud of my colleagues. The polls closed at eight o’clock, and it was very evident that it had passed. We were in session. I think, about by 8:15, 8:30, we knew. We knew because of our largeness that we would be able to take a stand that small school districts couldn’t. So we instructed our lawyers to file for an injunction. So eight o’clock the next morning, our lawyers were in flight to file the necessary papers to stop the implementation.

What was that like? Were they supportive of the bilingual program?

Absolutely. Well, no, those are separate. Those are separate. [Proposition] 227 is what did away with bilingual, and there was all a little bit of mixture in that.

Okay. So let’s talk about the bilingual part of it.

They were supportive in the sense of it was the law, and what I do remember they did, which I was a little disappointed in her direction towards us—I wanted more of a fight— we hired Vilma Montoya (Martinez?) [phonetic]. She had been the head of MALDEF, the first Latina I knew head of MALDEF. She went with—I don’t know which law firm, but I insisted that we have a Latino lawyer of her caliber, and they hired her. She reviewed the law, and then her recommendation to the board was that we needed to implement it. There were no loopholes-type thing. So I remember we had to take away our ethnic commissions, and I remember having to—because I respected her word. I wanted her to be, “No, let’s go to the Supreme Court,” or whatever. But she said, “No, the law was clear that,” you know, da, da, da. So we had to not only modify our bilingual education, I think we could only do dual immersion or those that were parents volunteered to put their kids in. We rewrote it, and then she recommended that we do away with all our ethnic commissions. We had the black commission that we would look at ethnic problems. I remember when I voted for the closing of the ethnic commission, the Mexican American Commission, I was called Chicana “falsa” and all this kind of stuff. But once you’re on the board, if you don’t have the legal, then it makes it—I guess I could have done a symbolic vote, but it was against—they did all the ethnic commissions at one time. I wasn’t always that quick to think I could do a symbolic vote, but so I just—

Did you feel backed into a corner?

Sort of, you know, because it was the law, and it was clearly stated to us our options by a lawyer that I respected, and having her background from MALDEF, I didn’t take her words lightly, you know. And I had sort of swayed my colleagues to, “Let’s get someone of her caliber,” so how do I then vote no against them? So that was hard.

Now, but the 187, I was so glad. So we knew that we had the guns to get the injunction and fight it in court and that smaller districts could not do that. They couldn’t have the lawyers in flight. We had already agreed, prior to the closing of the polls, that as soon as 8:15, 8:30, when it was determined whether it passed or not, if it had passed, that we would be in session and instruct our lawyers to—they flew up to San Francisco and asked for the injunction and then filed the unconstitutionality of it.

What about when the debates were occurring whether or not to save bilingual education, preserve it, change it, alter it, or just eliminate it?

That was real emotionally hard because, of course, I wanted to save it, but I also knew that it was implemented different ways in different schools, and that I saw that that was more of our challenge, that we needed to look more at results. And we’re talking statewide, because this part of the state is failing, and this part, and you could even look in neighborhoods. There were some schools that had a strong leadership and teachers who were into it and they were producing well. Then you’d have a school down the road where it wasn’t being implemented for whatever reason. So there was room for improvement and results that needed to be guided, but the actual dismantling of it, I remember trying to analyze those that were in favor. There were these two families from Ninth Street School and they were Latinos. That’s where they were so opposed to bilingual education. Not all Latinos to United States come from poverty. These were from well-to-do, well-educated—I think one was from Mexico and one was from Argentina. But they landed up in a Latino community, but they were college graduates.

Wow.

And they were professionals. They did not like the bilingual program that was going on. It wasn’t fast enough. See, I don’t think their children should have been through all the steps. They could have with a tutor and this, but because of their newness to the country and moving into this neighborhood, I’m sure they moved out quickly because they were professionals. I never looked at our parents as being college-educated from other countries. They were the exception to the rule.

That’s pretty rare, isn’t it? Like what would you say, 2 percent, 20 percent?

Oh, yes. So I could see that, and I used to—I can’t remember. I think his last name was Lopez, and I think we were even on debate in some program. I’m saying, “You have the right to opt your child out. Why are you taking that right from another parent?” And he would just say, “Because it’s hurting them.” So it was an emotional and—

Did that get press, the fact that these parents were educated and—

Remember, Ron Unz is a multimillionaire, so he’s funding the whole thing, and he’s using these parents as the spokesperson to other Latino parents, saying, “You know, this program is hurting your child.” And every parent wants their child to learn English. There’s not a parent that doesn’t want that, but the method is where—and he’s saying the program of L.A. Unified that he was speaking to wasn’t working, “Look it, look it, look it.” They were also coming in with all that baggage of poverty, too, so, you know, and Unz got his word.

Public sentiment.

Yes.

It’s a tricky question even—

And there’s that racism. “They’re here illegally, and why are we doing extra things?” So all of that is being surfaced, so that was—

Have you ever seen them afterwards?

Never, never, never.

You have no idea what became of them or their kids?

I don’t know about him. Alice Callahan, actually, she was an interesting woman. I actually sort of liked her. She had been a Catholic nun but who really wanted to be a priest and was denied in the—so then she became a priest in the Episcopalian. So she was truly an advocate of the poor, I would say truly, and she was basing this on—she had been director of a childcare center right next to Ninth Street, so she’s just saying, “I’ve been here, I’ve seen no results. This is not working. This is not working.” She was very articulate, and she also carried part of the community. So there was a part of her I respected. I was just sorry she was on the other side.

Were you able to compare the results after the dismantling? I mean, was there a significant—

No, I didn’t compare results. When I went back as principal, I had to implement, and so that’s where I found the program the district had adopted had its problems, and I didn’t have the influence anymore. In fact, I was directed to follow district policy. So I just said, “Wait. Let me read this thing. I’ll find a loophole in it.” So that was very hard for me to be directed, and the fight in me to do best for kids still came out. And I think eventually that the district improved that system. I’m hoping that.

Has anyone done that qualitative study?

You know, I’m sure they have. I just haven’t looked at it.

Quantitative, comparing the results when—do you know how long the program was in effect? Because I’m thinking about when I was teaching, and I can’t remember the name of the academic who had the theory of the two bubbles and so you took—

Oh, yes. Krashen. Stephen Krashen. Stephen Krashen from USC.

Yes, right. He had this brilliant theory of these two bubbles, and that what you learn in your own language just transfers, which is what they use in Latin America in all of the very elite—

Stephen Krashen from USC. I think prior to Stephen Krashen, that many schools, once we were told that we had to provide primary support, many schools created their own system of bilingual education. So you had different qualities of bilingual education, and even the district. If you were a Latino principal or teacher, you sort of had that little freedom to do your own. So what was called bilingual education was the gamut. So some were successful, some weren’t. There was the dual language emerged, then there was total immersion, and all these things, and then Stephen Krashen comes and says it’s the two. So we were all learning at the same time.

But whatever was at Ninth Street and got Callahan and Unz with his funding destroyed the flexibility, and what came in, at least to Los Angeles, was too rigid and did not allow for quantitative or quality control of where a child was going. You had to, like, really look at it. To me, it was the beginning of everything test- and data-driven. So, “Today I don’t feel like taking this test, I mark this, and that puts you in this classroom,” versus, “Let me get the teacher’s opinion. Let me see where you should be.” I believe in being held accountable for achievement as the principal, and as a teacher I used to use, “Wait, we failed everybody.” But I don’t know if tests-driven-only, data-driven like that is—I believe you can use data to improve instruction versus holding people accountable for it, because our kids come in with an array of needs, array of abilities, and that has to be part of the formula.

One of my colleagues when I was teaching said that one of the big problems, and not just in LAUSD, but in the U.S., is that we haven’t learned how to educate poor kids or the working class. It’s not the language issue; it’s the poverty issue.

And that’s why Ysleta stood out to me, because they were all Title I eligible kids, and they were performing. It was a small district, so that’s what it attracted me to them. They broke that rule. This is a high-poverty level, and they’re achieving and they’re graduating at a higher rate.

Were there any schools that you can say in the LAUSD that even came sort of close to that kind of success rate?

Well, Bridge Elementary sort of had that little reputation for a while, you know, as being one of the more productive, and I think it was maybe Art Selva had a big influence, because he would follow kids for every grade level, and they were like his children. So maybe that was the only school I was aware of. Then Second Street also had that reputation for a while.

Second Street.

I think so. I’m Boyle Heights based. So Second Street, Bridge carried those reputations early on, and that’s a very small area that I’m comparing. I never really knew of too many secondary, because we deal with too many kids and too many issues. Usually high-performing secondary schools usually follows the economic level of the community, or did. Hopefully it doesn’t, except for some of like the Old Belmont.

Marshall is doing pretty well.

Yes.

It’s just a fascinating question.

I’m not current in that anymore. So I’m sure that I used to look at those kinds of things and think nothing stuck.

Well, I’m sure also there’s been significant changes in the achievement.

Yes.

So let me ask you then—we didn’t have a chance to talk about Zacarias. He was superintendent while you were—

I have a fascinating story. When I was principal, he was my local superintendent, I didn’t care for him. I thought he was weak in the sense of he was very social. In fact, I think I recall one incident for sure—maybe there are others—where I underminded his authority, didn’t pay attention, and would pull that.

Then I get elected to the board, and he supports the other candidate. But, you know, bygones are—I’m on the board. Then we’re searching for a superintendent, and we’re doing a big national search, and it comes down to these things. Zacharias was loved by parents, mostly women. [laughs] He was very personable, very charming, whatever you needed to go in and complain, and that’s why I didn’t like him as a principal. If you went to complain to him, he’d call me and say, “Do what the parents said.” And I would [demonstrates frown]. So he had a huge parent following, so when he selected, I remember we were interviewing, we were interviewing, and I was clearly getting—he was a finalist. They were down to Siart, I think his name, and Zacarias. We were down to two or three finalists. There were three for Zacarias, and there was David Tokofsky, who hadn’t decided, and then there’s the other three. Now, David Tokofsky represented a predominant Latino community. I remember it’s the weekend before Cinco de Mayo. People were, like, demanding that Zacharias—he wasn’t my star pupil, but I’ve got to go with the community. They put me in place. This is what they want. Then I tell David Dukowski, “David, it’s Cinco de Mayo weekend. I better get your vote for Ruben today, or everywhere I am for Cinco de Mayo I will let them know that you are the hang-up.” So we got Ruben Zacarias in, because he was playing it. He was playing it. I think he might have landed up with Ruben anyway, but he likes to go for the intellectual game and the challenge, and we had surely dragged this out. But I remember making that statement, “Everywhere I go, every parade I’m in, every fiesta I talk to, I’m going to let them know, because they’re going to ask me is Ruben going to be superintendent, ‘Only if we get David’s vote. Only whatever,’” this and that.

So we landed up with him, and there were so many receptions on his behalf celebrating his becoming superintendent, that it got a little lengthy, and I finally remember telling Ruben, “The end of this year, it’s not how many receptions were held in your honor; it’s going to be about your work. So you better get down to it,” because I’m getting like—he’s not presenting it. So he starts and he puts a good team together and he starts to move the district, but he was not the strongest superintendent I had worked with as a board member. He was okay. He was okay. Loved by the parents, though, and so if Ruben said, “Go right,” the parents wouldn’t argue it. So you have that morale and that spirit. Was he the strong instructional leader that I had hoped or whatever? No. So, lived with it, and then when the Riordan board comes in and decides to vote him out, I can’t believe I’m the president of the board. So, of course, I have to be his advocate, and rightfully so, because I would say across the district, across the ethnic lines, Ruben was loved, cared for, their candidate. So I was in that position. But those board members, this is the Riordan board, wanted him out. The sad part is, poor Ruben. He was not in favor of the Belmont Learning Complex because Polanco was not in favor of it for political union reasons. But the Riordan board uses that issue to oust him. So he gets ousted from my—it’s just like comical, but I had to carry what I believe was the responsibility given to me by the parents to support Ruben, who had not been my number-one candidate, who I had seen his weaknesses, but I truly believe when you have the support of parents, I need to support you. I can be critical of you. I can tell you, Ruben this, Ruben that, but underlying—and so I was the president when they decided to oust him and buy his contract out, and I realized they had the four votes. So I just had to play that role to get him a respectable departure. So he walked away financially okay.

Well, do you think that the parents loved him for positive reasons or—

Because they were listened to. So I don’t know. We’re such a large system, when do you have the superintendent’s ear? Other superintendents might have given their ear to the leadership of the city, might have given to the old white guard of the city, might have given to the business community, might have given to the instructional leadership. So you have your arena. Ruben’s arena and where he gathered all this love and respect were the parents of the district, and all of the Latino elected officials got that and came to be supportive, and this board just slapped him. I still have this memory of a board meeting where every Latino elected official that I know in the city, in the country—because young Gloria Molina is there and some of the outlying districts—everyone except Antonio Villaraigosa are present in front of the board saying that they want him to continue, and the board still ousted him.

I wonder if that’s recorded in the—

Oh, yes, it is.

Like video recorded?

Oh, I’m certain it is.

Wow.

I remember sitting there, and it’s just, you know, we’re a horse-shape, and I’m just seeing all the Latino elected officials that I knew were in front of me, and this board could care less. It was the Riordan board.

How did they get to demonize this man so powerfully?

They used the Belmont Learning Complex, which was the big controversy of that high school, that Ruben didn’t even support. That was my school. They just twisted it.

But why would they target him? He seemed harmless, like you say.

It was a matter of putting in their own team. It was about putting in their own team. I should have written a book or a journal. It was a systematic approach to taking over the business aspect of the district, and that business aspect included the $2.2 billion in construction. That’s my theory.

Because I remember his reputation was not of somebody who was outspoken, who was—

Got along with everyone.

—a despot. He basically did what he was told, essentially.

Yes.

Nice to the parents and had an agenda, but not anything that was controversial or radical.

It was Riordan-Eli Broad construction money. That’s when I really get the powers of the old white guard that runs the city of Los Angeles. It was he just happened—whoever would have been there, if it wasn’t their man, because they bring in Howard Miller as an interim, who I truly landed up seeing no integrity in his—in fact, to the point of disgust, because he just filled the spot till they got Romer. He’s, what, interim superintendent for less than six months—I don’t even remember how many months—but he walked away with a full medical package for him and his wife. I voted no. That was disgusting.

Then they bring in Romer, who had been governor of Colorado, actually a good superintendent, you know, hired an assistant superintendent to handle instruction, and then he played in that group, and it was all about construction. So I got along with Romer very well and got that real easy and dealt with it the best I could. I think Romer is the last. Oh, no, no, no. Before Romer comes in, they have Cortines. After Miller comes Cortines, Ray Cortines, as the superintendent. He was my all-time favorite.

Cortines?

Yes. I thought he was truly a superintendent. He was an experienced superintendent. My first meeting with him, I had been through this political mess, I had been through the Howard Miller, and now they bring in Cortines until they put in Romer. I remember my first meeting, and I tell him, “So, Mr. Cortines, why should I have faith in you as a good superintendent?” And he said, “Because I’m brilliant and I don’t give a damn.” Then I said, “I think I can work with that.” He was an honest man, and he was going to run the district. Then he was supposed to come in and sort of mentor Romer as a new superintendent, because he had never been a superintendent or even been in the educational arena. He exited a month earlier. He meets with the board members and says, “I’m leaving earlier than I thought.” I said, “What’s up?”

He goes, “I don’t think there’s room for two at the top.” And that’s all he said, and then he exited. In other words, “Romer wants the show, and I’m in the way.” That’s how I interpreted it. So that was an interesting period, but I will never forget, and I deeply appreciated Cortines’ frankness and openness, and I learned to say he was brilliant and he did what he thought was right.

I’m not up on the latest regarding him, but he was in the news recently.

I know. This is after he leaves. He leaves, I think, on good terms, and then they bring in Deasy. But he was also gay. So this is, like, two, three years after him being a superintendent. So a person that he brought into the district filed a sexual harassment case against him.

While he was superintendent?

That’s what he’s saying, yes, but like two, three years after the fact.

He’s arguing that Cortines sexually harassed him after he was no longer superintendent? I’m not sure.

Yes, something to that effect. To me, the bad part about that deal is that I think the board should have been held responsible, because you have sexual harassment cases all the time in L.A. Unified, because just the nature of human beings. But I was real surprised that when they came to settle with the individual, that they had a press conference to announce their settlement, the Board of Education did. Usually within a settlement of a personal nature like that, part of the settlement clause is that there will be no publicity on either side. But the Board of Education announced the settlement. It’s stupid, stupid, stupid. Whoever their lawyers were, were guiding them. That should have been part of the settlement so that all that happened, I believe, is it upped the amount that this guy was going to get out of that, because usually I would think a high-profile case like that, they pay to settle. But the board, I said, “Why are they holding a press conference to announce this?” I guess maybe they thought it was already leaked or something, but how stupid.

What were you able to achieve once Zacarias was no longer superintendent? Did you see a difference in the effectiveness of your position as a board member?

No, and that’s part of why I decided not to seek a third term. With Romer, well, my major victory when Romer comes in, is I couldn’t afford to take on a third term because when you retire from the state teachers retirement, it’s your last highest paid salary, and my salary would have been twelve years old. So I knew I had to go back into the system to at least be reasonably—I’m single. I’ve got to take care of my own—so I knew I wasn’t going to—but, well, after Zacarias left, I had probably two years of being very influential on the board because I was independent. I wasn’t part of the three UTLA and I wasn’t part of the three Riordan members, so I could influence on which way. So, in fact, one of my biggest influence was the last large pay increase that UTLA got was on my fourth vote. So I think it was like over a period of three years—it was 15 percent. I don’t know, three, five, three, six, whatever. So that was that.

Then I also was able to help select the board member—not select. I could have run for office, but financially I knew it would be like, whoa, when I hit retirement, this is going to be bad. So when Haizar decided to run and seek that office—I don’t even remember who ran against him, it had been rumored that Riordan was going to run him against me, although he denied it later on. I verified that. I asked him, “What is your position on Belmont?” He [demonstrated --stalled]. But he had been a lawyer in the environmental field and construction field, so he had a better—and he was going to be not as polarizing as I had already been with that board. So I looked to his professional experience, but then when I posed the question, he hee-hawed a little. I said, “You’ll not have my endorsement, and I will not guarantee that I will not run against you unless you tell me you will get that school built and you’ll fight to get that school built.” And he agreed. So then I decided, and then I brought in his staff early so that he wouldn’t have lost period. In fact, Monica Garcia, who’s on the board, was his chief of staff. I brought her in two or three months earlier to set up his office. During that period, it was probably pretty much maintaining as much focus as I could and movement in keeping that school going forward, that new high school, because I was so desperately needing it. Then I think when Huizar came in, I had to make that statement. Even if I couldn’t back it up, I had to make it. So I guess I feel accomplished in the legacy of that high school as well as schools all over the city, and then I guess almost getting Zacarias a million-dollar buyout. Dang, I go, this is a person that I didn't even like when he was my local superintendent.

How does it feel to be in that position? You basically don’t get recognition for those things.

I know.

I mean, when I think about some of the things you said regarding Belmont and how you struggled for it, it seems like it should be called the Vicky Castro, Victoria Castro High School.

One of the parents said that La Victoria, that they were going to call it...I have this joke with friends that every time I turn a corner, there’s a new school. Who’s that school named after? How come there no school named after me? [laughs] I go, “I hope I don’t have to die before somebody considers it.”

But do you think about those things?

Jokingly. There must be some root of it that I go—I wouldn’t mind. I know that the auditorium at the Roybal Complex carries my name, but I’d like to see a school named after me. Sal Castro has one named after him. [laughs]

Good point. So when you think about what Sal has done for the kids of the L.A. Unified School District and think about some of the other people, yourself included, is that really—

Julian Nava, he was an ambassador. Okay, Sal Castro continued the leadership conferences. Okay. Sotomayor, she just got there. She has a school. But then what was it the other day? There was some incident at a school, and it was somebody, De la Torre. I go, “Who is that? I don’t even know his background.” So I just laugh. But it’s also politics. A board member from that region has to—so I guess maybe I’m not on Monica Garcia’s top list. I think I’ve been critical of her a couple of times.

But did you help her get her foot in the door?

Yes. I told you, she was chief of staff to Huizar, so I hired her, but this last election, I went with somebody that was running against her, so that guarantees the next four years I’m not going to have a school named after me. [laughs] So I just laugh.

Unless you get a parent contingent knocking on her door.

But I truly feel proud that I took that issue about construction money, those bonds, and that I flipped—once I won the primary, I flipped my campaign into passing those bonds, and that whole organizing team that would have been in place for an election turned into the bonds, and that it was the Latino community that passed that first series of bonds. I remember looking at statistics. Some of the precincts in my district passed those bonds with 70, 80 percent vote, and the Valley, they failed, mostly. So it was the votes from the Latino community that carried the bond over, and so I feel real good about that.

So in thinking about our earlier discussion about is the Chicano Movement dead or declining or did it end, do you see that as part of a longer arm of the civil rights activism that you started?

It does live. It does live. It just probably, like I said, it’s taking a different visual approach. It’s not necessarily the protest. It’s not the demands. It’s not the pounding. It’s not the sit-ins and everything. So maybe we are in positions of influence where we make those kinds of moves, because I could have closed up my campaign and saved that money. But I had the organizers, I had the victory, and I had fun. I remember telling parents, “You don’t have to be citizens. These are schools for your neighborhood. Go find me the citizens. I have the list. I have the voters, and you can go talk to your neighbors.” And so we did a good job.

I think it would be an excellent oral history project to start interviewing some of those families who are impacted by these new schools, just to show what the general public—

I was brought to tears when they named the Roybal Belmont Learning Complex after Congressman Roybal. I went to that ceremony, and it’s all about the Roybal family and all the heavies are there. But they had a couple of student speakers, and one of them just like, he says, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love our gym. When I walked in, I kissed the floor. I’m a basketball player, and this is my dream to play on this kind of a court.” So that kind of validation was what it was really about. And I understand that it has the lowest crime rate.

I’m sorry. Now you’re making me cry.

That the Roybal Learning Complex has the lowest crime rate of any high school in the city. All schools have crime rates, but that it has the lowest.

And that’s right in the heart of downtown.

Yes.

Do you know which high school has the highest?

No. I’m not too sure.

Wow. Well, I remember the whole debate about the uniform. I don’t know if you were on the board at the time they decided to go with uniforms in the elementary school.

No, I wasn’t.

There was an issue.

There was an issue. No, but I had my own debates as a principal. I recall that we made it—it always has to be an option, because there’s constitutionally challenged, and a parent could opt out. But if a community voted for—so when I went to Hollenbeck, they were in uniform, and so I used to have confront some kids in some families. I only had one nasty parent. In fact, it was sort of towards the end of making my decision to retire, I remember hanging up with this parent and saying, “I think she pushed me over. I’m retiring.” Because I always took a lot of pride on my ability to work with parents, even difficult parents in difficult situations. I had students that had died and shot at and criminals and great parents and all this. So this kid who was gifted didn’t want to wear a uniform, so the parent calls me, “I don’t want my child to wear a uniform if he doesn’t—.” So I started to tell her, “Well, the parents in this community voted, and I want you to consider we’re across the street from Roosevelt. So it helps us as soon as a high school student is on our campus to identify them. Plus we’re on the corner of Sixth and Soto, and we have had more than enough incidents to know there are drug dealers there. So in case they came on campus—.” And she goes, “I don’t care. My kid is not going to wear a uniform.”

So I knew I lost the argument, so then I tell her, “Okay. Well, I will write a note to all of his teachers tomorrow indicating that he’s not to be sent to the office because he’s out of uniform.” Then she said something sarcastic to me, and then I said, “Wait a minute. I’m working with you on this issue now.” She told me, “But that’s where you’re wrong. You work for me.” And that’s the first time—I’m so glad it was on the phone. I wanted to say, “Bitch,” you know. I was just like I just remembering taking the phone and just taking a deep breath. Don’t tell her your thoughts. I even wanted to tell her—what did I come up with? “Oh, you’re son’s going to grow up and be a UPS man.” [laughs] You use sarcasm. But that was the first time I had run into just no way of working with that parent, and, unfortunately, I was upset, because even when I’ve had parents yell at me, like [demonstrates], yelling straight in your face, and I’ll just say, “You know what? I don’t get paid to be yelled at. Stop and let’s look at this.” But this one, “You work for me,” I just wanted to tell her, “Not any more. I’m retiring. That’s it.” Hernandez. Her name was Hernandez. I don’t know whatever happened to the kid. So I was sort of lucky I inherited already a school that was uniform, and I actually did like it. Some people want to take total individual out of kids, like he has a white t-shirt, but it’s supposed to have a collar. Give me a break. That kind of stuff.

Then I remember these other parents that came in dead against. They were going to be sixth-graders. “My son is not going to wear a uniform,” da, da, da. They were well dressed, whatever. Then I said, “Why?” Then finally the mother said, “Because he’s very, very fat, and we can’t find a shirt big enough for him.” And I said, “Oh, I happen to have 3X’s. Let’s try it on him.” And it fit him, and it fit him comfortably. I said, “The man that sells them, he’s giving me these, so I’m going to give you three t-shirts,” and that was the end of it. So sometimes it comes disguised, so that’s the opposite. I always try to find, “How are we going to work with this one?” And I have parents yell at me and everything, but that lady got me that day.

Well, probably because of it was nearing the end and you didn’t have patience, a lot of reasons.

I think I hung up on her.

Oh, you did? [laughs]

Because she called the district or whatever, after she calls my supervisor and they call me, and then I told them, “You’re lucky I didn’t tell her where to go.” So I am getting ready towards the end, because I even told my supervisor, “You’re lucky I didn’t tell this parent where to go.” I would admit it.

I was reminded of the uniforms because when you mentioned the one kid who wanted to kiss the floor of this beautiful gym, part of what I understood about having uniforms was it gives all the kids, like, this uniform sense of respectability. They don’t have to worry about trends and who’s got money and who doesn’t.

I think it’s your neighborhood. For me at Hollenbeck, it was about safety. I wanted to know when somebody didn’t belong on that campus was on campus, and that anybody visual we could spot right away. But it’s definitely an equalizer in middle school. High school, I want them to have a little bit of identity, even though it can get bizarre. Although there was a high school—what is it? It’s one of the medical schools. Not Bravo. It’s Grand—the orthopedic magnet school. They decided to go high school with uniforms, and they actually look sharp except they must have let the kids decide, because they had khaki pants and a black shirt. Now, I would have probably banned that on mine, because that’s usually like a certain—

Like a gang thing?

Yes, the khaki pants and the black shirt. I hate most little gangsters use black or the little black hoodies and things like that. And they’re downtown. They’re at Grand and Olympic, somewhere out there. But it worked for them, and they did well, but they were also a magnet school, so smaller.

What about the gang violence? Did it curb that, having uniform?

It not curbed it, because kids are smart, because then they get down into the way they lace up their shoes or the way they wear this or that. So when they want to be in a gang, they’re going to be in a gang, and it’s not the uniform. But it lessened it. You couldn’t spot them as easily. The part I always struggled with was the sagging pants. “Get your pants up.” So even though we had uniforms, we had the little saggers there.

There was a certain urban look that they gave to their uniform.

They always like to—even wearing uniforms, there would be little girls in pink hair and this and that. And it would freak out teachers, and I would think, “Just let them be, because they’re going to be that way. They have a right to. If their mom isn’t here telling me, let her be. Let her be.”

I think this is going to be our last. Do you have any final thoughts on the Chicano Movement? We’ve talked about its legacy, but do you have anything that you can say?

I think it’s like I say at those panels, that don’t think that the issues are resolved and that our concerns and our struggles and our resolve should be at a higher degree than ever. It wasn’t just about protesting.

What would you see in the twenty-first century as—

We’ve got to fight economically to put all those teachers back and classroom sizes down, and especially in the state of California, we have to be at the top of the nation in what we invest in a child, not at the bottom. I think we’re forty-seventh. That’s a crime. And as our Latino population goes up, the farther we go down.

Do you think that the Riordans and the Eli Broads of the world have a more of a negative impact on public education than a positive? I mean, there’s a school in my neighborhood, Monte Vista, named after Richard Riordan, an elementary school or is it a learning center or something?

It’s a primary center. I know because I’m from Highland Park, and I went, “Damn it. He got a school.” [laughter] I didn’t even get a primary school named after me. I think they are well-meaning men and they’re putting their money behind, but their money comes from the business aspect. So I wouldn’t say that they don’t give a damn about whether we perform or not, because I think they look at it as the working force of California, and that we should be an educated working force. So their motives would be different, maybe.

But do you think he wanted to see the school succeed, he wanted to see them improve and improve the high school dropout rate and college?

I can’t say that. And I’m basing that he was more political than he might be viewed by the public, and that’s because when I was leaving the board, he called me into his office and tried to convince me that if I had run he would be supportive, after friends told me he called them directly and asked them to run against me. So just I know that he wasn’t being truthful. One of his last comments to me was—and talk about condescending and going off—something to the effect of, “Honey, don’t worry. Your high school will be built.” And I wanted to say, “You mother—.” whatever, but I stopped and I said, “You never know when you might need him.” [laughs] So that kind of a thing. So I think I just sucked it up and said, “Well, I appreciate your comments,” and said goodbye. So, you know, in other words he validated to me, for me, that this was really a political tool.

His interest in the education of Angelinos was for economic-related gain, not for the benefit of improving—

The whole controversy of the school, it’s going to be built. So I used the controversy of your school to get the superintendent I wanted in place. I used the controversy of your school to—and I call it my school. It was a community school to put in the Board of Education in that, because we didn’t know how to handle things. So I probably would not have had that insight if it wasn’t for that last comment he made to me. He was condescending too. There’s the white hierarchy of the city talking to you.

Right. And you’re saying that that still exists today, hasn’t gone away.

Yes, it’s backed by money.

Do you think that the generations, like, for example, people who are maybe in their thirties now, are going to keep perpetuating that, who are white, like the Eric Garcettis?

I’m hopeful that no. I’m hopeful no. I think it was a national trend for mayors to take over cities. Antonio gave his shot. I don’t think I see the two candidates now, Garcetti and Greuel, they’ve got their own city. Or like I told Riordan, “Stay out of the educational field and go get us a football team.” [laughs] I think I’m quoted in the L.A. Times.

Okay. Well, I’m going to stop it here. Thank you so much.

No, thank you. Absolutely.

It’s an honor to do this with you and I appreciate all your frankness and your funny stories. [End of April 4, 2013 interview]