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Leaders Call UMAS Conference

Greatest Thing They Have Done

By Jim Bettinger

Editor

(Editor's note: The United Mexican-American Students (UMAS) on this campus sponsored a conference, "Educacion Para Todos," November 2. EL GAUCHO missed covering the conference, and so we here preent impression and recollections which UMAS leaders gave EG.)

Leaders of UMAS agree on one thing: "Educacion Para Todos" was "the greatest thing we've ever done."

Joel Garcia, chairman of UMAS, said the "this was the first time in three years the there has been an event that was truly related to me, and relate on many level."

Others in the room (Castulo de la Rocha and Juan Arroyo) quickly agreed. "By the time El Teatro Campesino (the Delano Farm Workers Theatre) came, it was almost a spiritual event," declared de la Rocha.

Garcia was quick to point out that the infrequency of such event "is a great lack on this campus. They provide ways of identifying for other groups, but we're still invisible."

The leaders could not agree on any one aspect of the conference that was the most outstanding; instead they seemed to feel that each event led to another, in a building wave of pride and emotion.

Garcia emphasized the fact that Mexican-American adult leaders from all over the tri-counties area were present. De la Rocha remarked that once they had seen the conference, most of the leaders stayed for the whole day.

All were effusive in their praise of a speech by Dr. Jesus Chavarria, a professor in the History Department, who gave "Some Thoughts on Education, Social Action, and the Mexican-American." Others spoke on "revolutionary change" and the Delano farm workers' strike.

"When Luis Carrillo, a member of the UCLA group and a Brown Beret, told the crowd that president of UCLA was a Chicano, they stood and cheered," one UMAS member said.

Early in the evening the group went to the UCen for a Mexican dinner cooked by the head chef in the UCen, "who is a Mexican-American," and then danced until 7:30 p.m.

From there they went to Campbell Hall for El Teatro Campesino, "and you could talk for an hour about that," said Garcia.

El Teatro Campesino, a bilingual theatre company, was created during the first part of the farm workers' strike as a way for the striking workers to express themselves.

Since then, it has traveled across the country in an effort to publicize the strike to the masses of America. In 1968, it received an Obie award "for creating a workers' theater to demonstrate the politics of survival."

"The important thing," de la Rocha went on, "was that we reached the students. We had 100 students, from as far north as Arroyo Grande to as far south as Santa Paula. I got a letter from one of the students at Arroyo Grande who told me that he and his Chicano friends talked it over, and Monday morning there were in the vice principal's office to see him about starting a chapter at their high school.

"At the end of the letter he said, 'When California became part of the United States, the Mexicans were declared dirt and treated as such, but now it is time we become gold.'

"That's what I tried to do in my speech," said de la Rocha. "I ended it with a plea for commitment, a plea for unity, and a plea for an awareness of the Mexican-American relating his position to society, because that's what we need."

UMAS leaders said that their next conference will "concentrate on the high school students in the north tri-counties," and will be January 2-3.