Yesterday was the 40 year anniversary of the the “Chicano March” in East L.A. that was held to protest the Vietnam War. I came across a few pictures and I found them very interesting.Whats even more interesting to me is that this anniversary falls around the same time as all the immigration laws going on in Arizona. Im completely against violence, but maybe its time for someone to stand up and lead some more protests…

The Chicano Moratorium, formally known as the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, was a movement of Chicano anti-war activists that built a broad-based coalition of Mexican-American groups to organize opposition to the Vietnam War. Led by activists from local colleges and members of the “Brown Berets“, a group with roots in the high school student movement that staged walkouts in 1968, the coalition peaked with an August 29, 1970 march in East Los Angeles that drew 30,000 demonstrators.

More than 20 local protests were held in cities such as Houston, Albuquerque, Chicago, Denver, Fresno, San Francisco, San Diego, Oakland, Oxnard, San Fernando, San Pedro and Douglas, Arizona. Most had 1,000 or more participants. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 from around the nation, Mexico and Puerto Rico marched through East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970. The rally however was broken up by local police who said that they had gotten reports that a nearby liquor store was being robbed. They chased the “suspects” into the park, and declared the gathering of thousands an illegal assembly. Monitors and activists resisted the attack, but eventually people were herded back to the march route, Whittier Boulevard. As protest organizer Rosalinda Montez Palacios recounts “I was sitting on the lawn directly in front of the stage resting after a long and peacful march when out of nowwhere appeared a helicopter overhead and started dropping canisters of tear gas on the marchers as we were enjoying the program. We began to run for safety and as we breathed in the teargas, were blinded by it. Some of us made it to nearby homes where people started flusing their faces with water from garden hoses. Our eyes were burning and tearing and we choked as we tried to breath. The peaceful marchers could not believe what was happening and once we controlled the burning from our eyes, many decided to fight back.” Stores went up in smoke, scores were injured, more than 150 arrested and four were killed, including Gustav Montag, Lyn Ward, José Diaz, and award-winning journalist Rubén Salazar, news director of the local Spanish television station and columnist for the Los Angeles Times.^[2] As the Chicano poet Alurista put it: “The police called it a people’s riot; the people called it a police riot.”