Towards Inclusive High School and College Institutions
Public education for Mexican Americans in Chicago [has been] largely characterized by underachievement exemplified by high dropout rates, overcrowded schools, limited enrollment in universities, and contestation demonstrated by protests, hunger strikes, and the construction of new schools in their struggle for educational justice. -Jaime Alanís, 2014
We wanted to have educational opportunities coming from a Latino perspective, which was important -Diana Solís, Festival Co-organizer
Given the poor schooling conditions facing Latinos in Pilsen, it is estimated that during the 1970s, more than 70% of students dropped out before completing high school (Marroquín, 2018/19, 53).
Though it would take each many years to complete their own college degrees, as two rare Pilsen Latinas who had graduated from high school in 1973 and started college, Festival organizers Diane Avila and Diana Solís featured numerous educational resources at the Festival, from a local alternative high school to college recruitment programs.
To address these dire conditions, Mexican immigrant mothers including Raquel Guerrro, Inez Loredo, Teresa Fraga, and Mary Gonzales had led a successful fight for a new high school that would honor rather than suppress the Spanish language and Mexican cultural roots of many neighborhood youth, culminating in the opening of Benito Juarez High School in 1977.
Latino Youth Alternative High School (“Latino Youth”) had a table at the Festival. With its culturally empowering curriculum, this community-based school gave neighborhood youth a second chance to gain a high school diploma. Latino Youth’s dedicated writing teacher Sandra Cisneros, who had returned to Chicago the prior year after completing her MFA at University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop, treated Festival attendees to a reading of her compelling poetry that day.
Below, we see an letter about a 1975 collaboration between Latino Youth and MLEA to offer baking classes to teenage girls from the neighborhood. The letter is co-signed by Maria Martinez, the first MLEA staffer. With strong bonds between MLEA and the alternative school, Festival organizer Diane Avila offered workshops on women’s reproductive health for its female students by 1978.
As few Pilsen students graduated from high school, even fewer were encouraged by their teachers to enroll in University of Illinois Chicago Circle (UICC), the recently built University of Illinois campus that opened in 1965 (below). Low Latino enrollment at UICC was even more problematic because a historic Mexican immigrant community on the Near West Side had been razed to make way for campus construction, displacing many residents to nearby Pilsen. During the 1970s, Latino students joined with other students of color to organize for a more inclusive campus. With the Latin American Recruitment and Educational Services program (LARES) and the UICC Latin American Studies Program at the Festival, Pilsen youth could envision their future in higher education. Festival co-organizer Diana Solís transferred back from Columbia College to UICC in Fall 1979. As a result of student mobilizations, both LARES and Latin American Studies, where Solís would immerse herself, had become autonomous, Latino-led programs by the mid-1970s (Vaughn et al., 2021).
Also invited to the Festival was the Illinois branch of Aspira. Located in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Logan Square, Aspira focused on the low educational attainment of Puerto Rican youth and preparing them to pursue college. El Centro de la Causa’s Project Quetzalcoatl also participated in the Festival, a college and vocational school recruitment program in Pilsen aimed at high school seniors and “drop-outs” that assisted with activities including filling out admission and financial aid forms and gathering college catalogs for El Centro’s library (Chicago Public Library, 1975, 11).
Here's more about How Pilsen’s Founding Mothers Built Benito Juarez High School (WTTW)
Learn about the History of LALS (Latin American and Latino Studies) at UIC: A Program Birthed in the Maelstrom of Change
Preview a great book on Latinxs and education in Chicago published in the University of Illinois Press Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest series: Latina/o/x Education in Chicago: Roots, Resistance and Transformation (Pulido et.al. 2022)
SOURCES:
Alanís, Jaime. “BlowOuts: Latinismo and Chicanismo in late 1960s Chicago.” El BeiSMan, September 1, 2014. http://www.elbeisman.com/revista/post/blowouts-latinismo-and-chicanismo-in-late-1960s-chicago#:~:text=Pilsen%20in%20the%201890s.&text=This%20essay%20argues%20that%20from,demands%20for%20urban%20school%20reform.
Cooper, Cloee. “How Pilsen's Founding Mothers Built a High School.” WTTW Chicago, November 28, 2017. https://interactive.wttw.com/my-neighborhood/pilsen/founding-mothers-built-a-high-school
Marroquín, Nicole. “The Froebel Uprising of 1973: Recovering the Struggle for Benito Juarez Community Academy High School.” Counter-Signals 3 (2018-19): 52-64.
Pulido, Isaura, Angelica Rivera, and Ann M. Aviles de Bradley, eds. Latina/o/x Education in Chicago: Roots, Resistance and Transformation. Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 2022.
Vaughn, Mary Kay, Leonard Ramírez, Marta Ayala, Ester Díaz Martín, Frances Aparicio, and Ralph Cintrón. “History of LALS at UIC: A Program Birthed in the Maelstrom of Change.” Last modified January 2021. https://lals.uic.edu/about/history-of-lals-at-uic/