Title: Hispanic/Latino Civil Rights | American Civil Liberties and Rights
Headings: Hispanic/Latino Civil Rights
Hispanic/Latino Civil Rights
Hispanic/Latino Civil Rights
East L.A. Student Walkouts

Content: That same year, Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act, which required school districts with large numbers of Hispanic or Latino students to provide instruction in Spanish. Bilingual education remains controversial, even among Hispanics and Latinos. What are some arguments they might raise both for and against it? Are these different from arguments coming from whites? Mexican American civil rights leaders were active in other areas as well. Throughout the 1960s, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta fought for the rights of Mexican American agricultural laborers through their organization, the United Farm Workers (UFW), a union for migrant workers they founded in 1962. Chavez, Huerta, and the UFW proclaimed their solidarity with Filipino farm workers by joining them in a strike against grape growers in Delano, California, in 1965. Chavez consciously adopted the tactics of the African American civil rights movement. In 1965, he called upon all U.S. consumers to boycott California grapes, and in 1966, he led the UFW on a 300-mile march to Sacramento, the state capital, to bring the state farm workers’ problems to the attention of the entire country. The strike finally ended in 1970 when the grape growers agreed to give the pickers better pay and benefits.