L.A. Latinos and a New Harmony : Benefit Concerts to Help Mexican-American Youths Learn Leadership Roles

More than 20 years ago film maker Moctesuma Esparza had an educational experience that changed his life.

A two-day leadership conference on education in the Santa Monica Mountains provided the epiphany for Esparza, then 16, that inspired him to graduate from high school, score high on entrance exams, and earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UCLA. The conference focused on just how woefully inadequate schooling had become for Latinos in his hometown of East Los Angeles.

“The Mexican-American youth leadership program took high school students and exposed them to experiences that provided self-esteem and identification and clear messages of who we were, what was before us in society,” Esparza said in a telephone interview. “All of a sudden we became aware of what was possible in their lives.”

Fired by this realization, Esparza helped lead more than 1,000 East Los Angeles high school students to walk out of class on March 6, 1968, in a protest of sub-standard education. The walkout set off a chain of events that students hoped would better their lives. They demanded an end to overcrowded schools, soaring dropout rates and a re-education of teachers who routed Latino students into auto shop instead of college prep classes.

The leadership conferences pointed Esparza, co-producer of “The Milagro Beanfield War” on his path to success and did the same for fellow protesters such as NAACP fund-raiser Paula Crisostomo, Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre, state Sen. Art Torres and Sal Castro, the Lincoln High School social studies teacher who masterminded the walkouts. Because of the impact the workshops had on their lives, this group decided to revive the series of conferences and two benefit concerts will be held Wednesday to raise the money needed.

Latin artists Ruben Blades, Linda Ronstadt, Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana, Poncho Sanchez, Celia Cruz and Tito Puente will perform Wednesday night at two benefit concerts at the Biltmore Hotel. (For ticket information, call (213) 888-6944.) The concert will also air this fall on the Cinemax Sessions series which showcases Latin artists.

Guitarist Carlos Santana, who in the late 1960s launched the rock group that bears his name, said he feels strongly about the cause.

“I am concerned with educating Latinos to come to a place where they can choose for themselves what they want to be,” Santana said. “I am concerned with positive identification for Latinos so they don’t drop out of school, so they can feel you have to do your best, so that when you walk down the street you always leave a good impression.”

All proceeds from the concert--they hope to raise between $100,000 and $200,000--will go to the nonprofit National Hispanic Arts, Education and Media Institute and be spent to sponsor four leadership conferences, each one to include 150 youths. The first is scheduled for Oct. 6-8.

“With reviving the youth conferences, what I think we’re trying to do is to offer Chicano youth today alternatives, to let them see that they do have choices other than dropping out of school, other than getting pregnant, other than taking drugs,” said Crisostomo, a board member of the National Arts, Education and Media Institute. “Today there’s such a lot of good, strong Latino role models. We would like to use those folks who were also part of the movement 20 years ago, to have them come and address the youths and lead workshops.”

Esparza has spent a good deal of time looking back on those days in the late ‘60s and wondering what came of all the passion.

In fact, every year he and a group of others involved in the walkouts have met and talked about the state of things. “We’ve been reflecting on the 20 years gone by, the status of education, what progress has been achieved by the social forces of the ‘60s and it became very clear to us that things, in fact, had started to become as bad or worse than they were 20 years ago,” he said.

Today, overcrowding in predominantly Latino schools is worse than it was two decades ago and the number of Latinos who enter universities is disproportionately low. Latinos compose more than 50% of all students who drop out of Los Angeles high schools, Esparza said.

“We are dropping out in almost genocidal numbers,” Esparza said.

For his set, Santana said he plans to play a song he wrote in 1987 called “Goodness and Mercy” which was inspired by a biblical passage that said: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us the rest of our lives.”

“I encourage people to keep dreaming,” Santana said. “If I can do it, you can do it . . . I think we can make a change together.”