Friday, May 16th – East L.A.

3^rd period bell sounds at
an East Los Angeles high school, and 75 students & several teachers
are out in the main quad chalking silhouettes of their bodies all around
the school pathways. (The day before they had listened to presentations
by a WCW organizer which included testimony from Winter Soldier, the
Declare It Now video and the waterboarding AP clip.)  This school
has 5,000 students, and is a heavily-targeted recruitment ground for
the Armed forces and the Marines.

One teacher bought 20 bandanas for students
to wear; orange flagging tape went up around tree trunks, and students
started sporting orange flagging tape as hair bands, wrist bands, on
their backpacks, etc. Four volunteers put on the orange jumpsuits and
took their detainee role seriously: they remained silent, heads cast
down, arms tied, as they started a procession, surrounded by other students
with large poster of No Torture and enlarged photos of Iraqi war casualties.
The students began to march, amidst the clamor of lunch time and a school
sponsored election campaign for senior class president. But the march
was cut short because school administrators stopped the march and brought
students into the office for participating in an “unauthorized
activity.”  

The jumpsuits, posters, black hoods were
confiscated and the teachers were told they would be returned after
a conference with the school’s vice-principal to be held on Monday.
One of the teachers asked what the response would have been from the
administration if he had requested permission to have this lunchtime
procession. The administrator told him, they probably would not have
authorized it. The two WCW organizers who were invited there by the
teachers were escorted out of the school due to a regulation that “does
not permit outside visitors from mingling with students at lunchtime
without previous clearance”.  

Not to be discouraged, we met up with
three teachers and about eight students and carpooled down to the Recruitment
Center.  We were later joined by a social worker,and an impeachment
activist. One teacher marched into the Marine recruitment station demanding
to know why the marines go after her students, challenging the marine
recruiter to stand up to her, not prey on students with their lies;
sending youth off to kill and die.  

Teachers repeatedly asked recruiters
to come to the school and debate, but the recruiters adamantly refused.
One recruiter said that they fight to protect our right to protest! 
Two high school students walked into army recruiting station and one
of the students recognized her classmate. All of us went in to Army
recruiting with our signed eviction notices talking over the recruiters
heads, directly to the two students shouting, “Don’t sign, you’re
being sent to kill.”  

Six recruiters came over telling us we
had to leave and we demanded to know why – why can they come onto
the school and yet we have no right to be there. All six came over and
escorted us out. Then we noticed another student at the Marine Center
next door talking to a recruiter watching a video. The marines had locked
the door, so we pounded on it, using the bull horn, demanding that he
stop lying to the student. One by one, the social worker, the teacher
and then the students used the bull horn shouting thru the glass to
the student that he had options, don’t get sent off to kill and be killed,
maimed, commit suicide.

Both the Federal Office of Homeland Security
and the local police came, and told us we “could protest”,
but not disrupt the military recruiter’s ‘place of business.’
We couldn’t shout into the center or obstruct pedestrian traffic. We
started a picket line, led by the students, shouting “What are
they recruiting for? Murder, Rape, Torture, War. –  Shut it Down,
Shut it Down!”  

All during this time, many drivers honked
their support. One of the chants that drew an enthusiastic response
was – “Bush, cochino, marrano y asesino!” (Bush – pig, hog,
and assassin). As the protest drew to a close, one of the teachers summed
it up with her students: “We hit their weak spot – the recruiters
called the cops because we were getting to them. This is the real deal
– your fellow students were in there getting fed lies, all for a $2000
commission for these recruiters. This is what it means to stand up for
something you believe in”. 

The teacher later joked that the students
could call her to bail them out if they land up in jail, but she may
be in the cell next to them. This was the same teacher that told her
students, that one of the reasons why their high school walked out during
the East Los Angeles blowouts of the 1960s was due to the disproportionate
amount of Chicano youth dying in Vietnam. The Walkouts were not only
about racism and inequality in the schools – they were also about
the Vietnam war. 

Spirits were high, and both teachers
and students, thought this was a great success for the awareness that
it had sparked. There was a commitment among the participants to continue
this battle, including with next month’s 3rd Friday Iraq Moratorium.