Movement Resurges
Many scholars maintain that ever since the death of farm labor leader Cesar Chavez in 1993 there has been a resurgence in the Chicano movement, particularly at colleges and universities nationwide.
This new activism peaked in 1994 when hundreds of thousands of junior and senior high and college students across the country walked out of schools and held marches and rallies in opposition to California's anti-immigrant Proposition 187. "The mass mobilization against 187 reaffirmed the need to be unified," says Angela Acosta, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico.
"The Chicano movement shaped my life," says Acosta. Yet, as someone who worked against 187, she believes the new movement is no longer limited to Chicanos but encompasses Latinos, immigrants and other people of color.
Genevieve Aguilar, a senior at Hanks High School in El Paso, says the Chicano movement is "definitely not dead" -- that it lives in students like herself who battle against people who believe that racism no longer exists and who don't see a need for Chicano or Latino programs.
When students ask Aguilar, who has been a member of the education-oriented National Hispanic Institute since she was in the ninth-grade, why there isn't an institute for whites, she has a ready answer.
"There is: It's called government."
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