|
I grew up with my dad going to college for his Ph.D. on the G.I
Bill and was always reading books and involved in school. My
older brother and sister as well as my younger brother and sister
that was our orientation which meant that after we moved out of
Lincoln Heights when I was around ten years old was when I began
going to school and having very few if any Mexican Americans in
my classes. Although I went to school in Highland Park which, at
that time Franklin High School was considered a paddy school but
there were significantly growing numbers of Mexican Americans at
those schools. during the 50's and 60's. I was elected student body
president at Franklin as the first Mexican American back in 1964.
And just for the record I ran as student body president and had
my name in for graduation as Rosalio not as Ross Munoz and did the
same thing here at UCLA. And it still bothers me sometimes that
a lot of people at UCLA still refer to me as Ross but I think more
now cariñosamente. But it took me a long time to get used
to that until I realized that the other people that called me Ross
are like my mother and some of my sisters because that's the name
my dad had to have in order to go to college and get a job or it
was just changed for him. In fact he was advised to change his last
name if he wanted to get college scholarships back in the 1930's.
So that's how I got my name as a junior Ross.
The discrimination
was there even for our type of family. My sister Maria Rosalia got
an A average. She was advised to go to East Los Angeles College
and even got a scholarship, Armando Castro scholarship to go to
ELAC. But she came to UCLA and entered the nursing program. She
may have been the first Mexican American to graduate but she married
her husband whose last name was Wortnick and was never recognized,
I remember going to hearings of Chicanos testifying that they hadn't
let Mexicans into the nursing school a couple years after my sister
had graduated. I mean that's how we were into Spanish surnames,
that is how we were identified and that is how the information came
out at that time.
My older brother
was also advised to go to Junior College. He is presently the presiding
judge of the unemployment appeals court in downtown Los Angeles
although it took Affirmative Action to achieve that. I never
got a counselor to advise me how to go to college and the only place
I applied was UCLA where my brother and sister had come. And it
is really true that there were not 100 Mexican Americans a couple
years before Ron had come. EOP had indeed started and there
are many more people here in this room than there were Mexican Americans
at UCLA when I first went there. And the ones that I knew were my
brother and sister. It was a very interesting kind of a thing. I
remember they tried to recruit me into fraternities, which I didn't
want to be in. It represented discrimination to me and elitism in
other things in my mind. But I was heavily sought after because
a lot of them didn't want to recruit African Americans.
When I would
make friends on campus and people realized I was a Mexican American
they would begin to tell me "Don't you find these Jewish people
real strange?, real funny?" Then the other real common thing when
people talked to me about my ethnicity it was generally people from
actually other Hindus that were on the campus asked me if I were
Hindu, if I was from India or other places because they didn't have
a concept of seeing a Mexican American or Mexican on campus especially
those first two years here at UCLA.
I got involved
actually in the student movement of the times before getting involved
in UMAS. And actually UMAS hadn't really begun at
that time. I was very disappointed with campus education and found
it not to be challenging enough, found it to be dehumanizing, found
it wasn't the kind of intellectual growth place that I wanted for
myself. And I found that there was a lot of great orientation in
other things. I got involved in a movement that we called the Experimental
college at UCLA. It was a criticism of the University for being
a very cold, calculated, servant. I guess we didn't put it that
way at the time but of the establishment.
Our generation
grew up after Sputnik and after education was being pushed as part
of the Cold War competition. Science was being pushed very heavily
at that time. Universities were growing and drawing more from the
middle class and a little bit more from the working class at the
time. But it was a very regimented style of University especially
at a place like UCLA. So students protested against that it was
part of the overall student movement and the Experimental College
we took on topics that were things from parapsychology kind of courses,
to course in Marxism, to courses in other social issues that we
were involved in the Experimental College.
And I happened
to be elected the chairman of the first kind of a group it was kind
of an underground group in the campus that got together to discuss
it. I volunteered to chair the first meeting and was nominated chairman.
Fortunately one of the guys pushing it was a very progressive editor
of the Daily Bruin so I found name on the first page of the
Daily Bruin of a leader of a movement on the campus. And it had
an impact. We have fifteen to twenty courses of students and professors
and other people just organizing their own courses, just really
kind of discussion groups or rap groups or whatever we might call
them now but it was a protest against the University. It was a criticism
of the University. I remember on the college bulletin, Franklin
Murphy who was a very high powered man in this country at that time
was Chancellor and he called UCLA the "marketplace of ideas". So
on our first bulletin or announcement of the Experimental College,
we called it the corner mom and pop store of education.
And I got involved
through that in the educational reform movement which was the tail
end (inaudible) of the Free Speech Movement and actually
it was a very illuminating experience. [It] got me involved with
a lot of people and got me noticed by a lot of people and I was
hired as kind of a student counselor by the counseling center at
UCLA. In a way it was kind of supporting my activism and the kinds
of activism I was espousing on the campus and, perhaps, was a way
of trying to push for affirmative action among forces within the
administration. I don't know, I don't know the people that made
the decision to hire me and why they did that. But I was hired to
do was, one of the first things they actually asked me to do outside
of what I was otherwise doing was, to try teaching some of the or
tutoring or being involved in the Upward Bound movement,
where I got in touch with student from Roosevelt and from South
LA and other high schools that were there. {This] was very educationalf
or me as much as it was for them.
My older brother
at the time got me a little bit more involved in some, he had graduated
from UCLA and was working with the gangs in East L.A. along with
other people like Antonio Rodriguez and going to groups with Al
Juarez and others. And so he took me to some of the first formulating
meetings for UMAS. I wasn't aware of what it was. I didn't
identify politically that way. But I remember going to City Terrace
and Eastern with a group from Monteperez and others were discussing
what are we going to call this group. One guy Jesus he went to USC
suggested we have a Chicano fraternity. I said, "We don't need that
kind of a thing." And it went on.
I began going
to some of the UMAS meetings right after being elected to
the student council at UCLA. I was elected education policy commissioner
and started going to some of the meetings. I was a little frightened
because I didn't speak [Spanish]. Spanish was not my first language.
I had learned it having spent a year in Mexico but I didn't feel
articulate in it at all. I remember going to UMAS meetings
and Spanish was often a primary language and so I felt intimidated
by that. Some people might of thought I was stuck up or stand offish
but I felt a little intimidated. I was not from a lower income community.
Spanish is not my first language and many of the people in UMAS
were [understanding] because many of the people I think in UMAS
had some schooling in Mexico which didn't have quite the stigma
or discouragement from them.
The first real
involvement with UMAS that I had was when UMAS decided to
sponsor a symposium on campus for the Chicano Movement inviting
Corky Gonzalez, Reyes Tijerina, Bert Corona, Luis
Valdez and a number of others were going to be paid and they
wanted to pay money. I had been critical as a student council member
of a lot of the fraternities and athletic support who got big banquets
and big budgets from the student council. And UMAS came to
me and wanted to get several hundreds of thousands of dollars for
this conference to pay for people I hadn't heard of, but they wanted
me to present because that was the only proper thing to do. And
I really am happy they did. I had a hard time, I say, "You mean,
I gotta ask for that much money for these people that people don't
know?" And Moctezuma Esparza cornered me in the halls of
Kerckoff hall and he told "Rosalio," or he might have said Ross,
"Look in the mirror, eres muy indio. Your in this movement whether
you want to be or not." And I said, "You know, it's true." And so
I went and advocated for that and to me that symposium, not because
that fight, I guess was part of it, [It] was very important to me.
And the most important part and the part I will never forget of
the ballroom there was Reyes Tijerina getting up and going
about his evangelical style in Spanish. My grandfather was a Protestant,
Methodist minister and didn't have quite the style of a Tijerina…
entirely in Spanish [Tijerina's talk] looking about these people
that I had been involved in Kerckoff hall and classes just unable
to understand any of it, but I could understand it. It just was
something unbelievable. You know when my first time in my big hall
at UCLA they advised us history majors that we shouldn't take Spanish
that we should take French and German. You know the other big meeting
I went to was Abbot Lodge telling us how vicious the Vietkong were,
now its Milosevic or whoever they are doing that with now. But that
was really something to see that on the campus. To me it represented
my culture my roots were now really on the campus.
I think the
next big thing was what Reynaldo Macias mentioned the Phi
Si incident, the Viva Zapata party, they called it their
second annual. I think they had there 25th about ten
years ago. And that was really a challenge because it made me see
the kind of institutional racism that affected some of the students.
[We] the student council and eventually through UMAS we convinced
them the administration we wanted them to completely throw them
off the campus. But they were at least suspended. The student council
said that the administration was dictating to the students, these
are overreacting Mexicans here that are oversensitive. And I remember
the women next to me on the student council said some of my best
friends are in UMAS but …I remember after that I resigned from the
student council and it wasn't really noticed.
There was a
student election we were trying to get an African American, Eddy
Anderson and a Mexican Jorge Aguiniga as President and
Vice-President. But in reaction to this suspending of this Greek
thing there was a Greek power rally on election day on the campus
that day. Hundreds and hundreds of them and what it meant was white
power against us. And that was a very kind of frightening thins.
Actually during all that controversy I met a guy named Ramses
Noriega whom I knew in UMAS but he congratulated me for
resigning. He thought it was an act or courage and conviction and
it started me working with Ramses and we later worked together to
organize the Chicano Moratorium a couple of years later.
He was the one who helped organize my successful campaign for student
body president the next year.
But one of the
things that incident and that activism of ours triggered was what
was called the Chancellor's Taskforce for the Urban Crisis
that was organized. And it was really the beginnings of affirmative
action, official Affirmative Action on the campus. There
were African American students represented. UMAS was represented.
Ron and I were on the studies program, myself on the entrance program.
But we were really executing the policy of UMAS at the time. And
we put our emphasis primarily on the entrance and we argued that
we need to have more students. They needed to lower the standards,
and have plenty of money. We studied the history of enrollment in
the University.
The highest
points for enrollment for UCLA were in the later 1940's and mid
50's after the Korean and WWII when there was money through the
G.I. Bill to allow Mexican Americans in after the money was
not available there were much fewer. But we argued that we need
to get rid of the standards for admission to really dig into our
community and that was created in the High Potential Program
which actually recruited a lot of the activists from the walkouts.
But one last point one thing that happened after all of that even
though the Greeks had led this big movement the next year there
was a very corrupt government a lot of these people that were in
student government ended up in the Watergate Whitehouse they were
tricksters and political manipulators. In any event when one of
them got thrown out there was an opening for Student Body President
and I saw I had a chance to win and my friend Ramses said, "It would
be useful to our movement to do that"
In the fall
of 68 we came back on campus organized my campaign off the farm
workers picket of the Safeway that used to be in Westwood village
and was elected by substantial majority by the student body. And
one of the things that we did get passed at that point was that
funds from the students voluntarily were voted to fund affirmative
action and fund minority and poverty student opportunity on the
campus. It was needed I think a reaction to the reaction to the
backlash to the backlash of the year before. And I think it's important
to see that. There was substantial support from white students from
much of the faculty and others for affirmative Action at that time
and there were opportunities. And I think if we are going to win
affirmative action in the future we are going to have to be talking
about what does affirmative action mean to changing education for
everyone white, black, brown working class people in this society.
And I think that is the key because we are now in a position where
we are not just speaking as a minority but a significant part of
the progressive movement in our country and to really take on the
issues of affirmative action and Chicano education we have to be
taking on the whole system of education.
|
