Rln 10 01 15 edition

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S a z a í , R “ u err a N o” G

CHICANO MORATORIUM TURNS 45:

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES “All you’d see was smoke and siren, and people running,” said 56-year-old Mike Castañon. “It was just chaotic.” Gomez-Quiñones also remembers that day vividly. He and his friends were close to the stage when the officers attacked the large group of people. “We had to scramble to get out,” GomezQuiñones said. “I had to carry a friend’s young child. We had to get out quick.” Luckily for his friends and him, his godmother’s home was only a block away. “I was just flabbergasted,” he said. “We did not hear any order of disbursement. The only warning was when people began to shout and pushed us to each other. Like a thunderbolt.”

History

The National Chicano Moratorium was the pinnacle of opposition to the Vietnam War by Americans of Mexican descent. “The 5,000 to 10,000 who were actually in the park had a deep experience,” remembered Rosalio Urias Muñoz, one of the co-founders of the National Chicano Moratorium. “The most important driving force was the war and its impact on the community. But our method of organization, our intent was to build it as

part of the overall Chicano movement and to reinforce so that it didn’t become a separate issue competing with the other issues.” Muñoz and one of his friends, Ramses Noriega, set out to mobilize the Chicano community against the war. Muñoz, a multigenerational Chicano, came from a middleclass, educated family. Both of his parents were teachers. Noriega came from a workingclass family of Mexico. They met at the United Mexican-American Students, which became the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, best known as MEChA. Muñoz, who became the first Chicano student body president at UCLA, was drafted [See Chicano, page 6]

National Media Try to Put Pope Francis in a Box pg. 5 Sustainable Seafood Expo to Expose Savvy Choices pg. 11 SPIFF Scores Big with A Ballerina’s Tale pg. 17

October 1 - 14, 2015

riot. When you look at the film and you hear the audio transcripts, what you hear is mayhem being driven by police.” For Eliseo Montoya, the events of that day are not a lost memory. Montoya and his family went to Laguna Park to see what was going on that day. He said his parents weren’t political. They were just curious about the moratorium. They couldn’t have known that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department was going to turn the peaceful event into a war zone. “All I can remember is my mom picking me up, my dad, and running, running,” recounted Montoya. “I can’t remember speeches or who it was. I was maybe 7 years old at that time. I was barely going into the first grade.” Tear gas canisters were dropped from helicopters and demonstrators were chased through the streets by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies and Los Angeles Police Department officers. Four people were killed, 150 were jailed and a number of businesses went up in smoke. Mike Castañon, who was about 10 or 11 years old at the time, was riding his bike to the event when the violence erupted.

The Local Publication You Actually Read

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ertain tragedies, such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, become lodged in the perpetual memory of the nation. However, there are some historical events that often escape the collective memory of Americans, such as the National Chicano Moratorium. On Aug. 29, 1970, more than 25,000 Chicano anti-war and anti-draft demonstrators from across the country gathered on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles to protest the Vietnam War. Law enforcement officers claiming to have been chasing a robbery suspect that ran into the demonstration in Laguna Park (now Ruben Salazar Park) attempted to break up the gathering, herding participants at the park back toward the street. “The moratorium was a massive attack on the civil rights of our community, which included the deaths of various people, injuries to scores and the arrests of hundreds,” said Juan Gomez-Quiñones, a history professor at the University of California Los Angeles. “The march was peaceful, orderly….There was no reason for police interference with the march and assembly….The police said it was a Chicano riot. The Chicanos said it was a police

By Zamná Ávila, Assistant Editor

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