public education system. The school would focus on building students' self-esteem through culturally-relevant curricula. It was named after Tlatelolco, a square in Mexico City. During the conquest, it was the site of the last stand of the Aztecs, witnessing the massacre of thousands. In post-Revolutionary Mexico, Tlatelolco became home to the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, which celebrated Mexico's dual cultural heritage, seen as vindication of indigenous Mexico. It was also home to a community of scholars. In 1968, Tlatelolco became the staging ground for massive student protests, and saw yet another massacre, this time by Mexican forces. As such, the school's name evokes the history of duality, reconciliation, and hope for indigenous and Mestizo people. The Tlatelolco massacres were in response to the Olympics, where thousands of people were being displaced for an Olympic event. Yo Soy Joaquín - Poem With his poem Yo soy Joaquín, known in English as I Am Joaquin, Gonzales shared his new cosmological vision of the "Chicano", who was neither Indian nor European, neither Mexican nor American, but a combination of all the conflicting identities. This new "raza", or "race" found its roots in the Pre-Columbian civilizations, which he believed gave it rights to inhabit the ancestral land of Aztlán. It was strengthened by conceptions such as those of José Vasconcelos, Mexico's Secretary of Education under the Revolutionary Álvaro Obregón, who proclaimed that the hope of humanity lay in the mixed "Raza Cósmica" of Latin America. But perhaps more than anywhere else, Joaquín, the archetypical Chicano, found hope for his future in his own personal and spiritual awakening, a realization forced upon him by his status as an oppressed minority in the United States. Some scholars have credited Gonzales with authoring this historicized, politicized definition of what it is to be a "Chicano". The far-reaching effect of the poem is summed up by UC Riverside professor Juan Felipe Herrera: "Here, finally, was our collective song, and it arrived like thunder crashing down from the heavens. Every little barrio newspaper from Albuquerque to Berkeley published it. People slapped mimeographed copies up on walls and telephone poles." It was so influential that it was turned into a play by Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino that toured nationally. It is seen a foundational work of the burgeoning Chicano Art Movement that accompanied, complimented, and enhanced the Chicano Movement, and, as the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán exhorted those talented