When a popular Hispanic teacher didn’t get his contract renewed at Robb Elementary School in 1970, hundreds of students decided to boycott school for weeks in what they called a stand against pervasive discrimination.
Students walked past Robb Elementary School during the walkout in Uvalde that started on April 14, 1970. About 200 Mexican American students marched out of Uvalde High School to protest an unjust education system., our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Even though the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed segregated schools in 1953, Uvalde’s Mexican-American children were sent to Robb Elementary or Anthon Elementary, where almost all of the students were Hispanic, while most of the city’s white children attended Dalton Elementary — considered the better-resourced elementary. So when Garza was dismissed, the students had enough, Ciprian-Moreno said.
“We were hoping to show the county that we were united as Hispanic students and that we were able to carry out our protests in a peaceful and intelligent manner no matter what they thought of us,” said Ciprian-Moreno, now 70 and retired after a 30-year teaching career in Uvalde and nearby cities. And Robb Elementary, the school that triggered the walkout, is now known around the world as the place where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers.
Today, more than 80% of its roughly 15,000 residents are Hispanic, and six out of 10 residents speak Spanish at home — although they primarily speak a border “Spanglish” that bounces between English and Spanish. On the streets of Uvalde, Mexican-Americans were expected to step out of the way when white people approached on the sidewalk, Ciprian-Moreno said of her youth. At the local department store, she said it was common for employees to urge Mexican-American customers to shop quickly so they would leave the store faster.“Back in those days, we were considered second-class citizens,” said Sergio Porras, 71, who participated in the Uvalde walkout as a high-school senior.
Ciprian-Moreno’s grandfather fought with Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the Mexican Revolution more than a century ago, and she grew up hearing his stories about the courage of Villa and fellow revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.In the early months of 1970, Ciprian-Moreno said she and her classmates would gather during the lunch hour and after school to talk about doing something collectively to send a message.
Garza took a job as principal of a junior high school in Crystal City and later returned home and was elected mayor of Uvalde in 1996.After the board didn’t renew Garza’s contract, some students continued to demonstrate the following week outside of Robb Elementary, at the town’s junior high school and school board meetings. Some demonstrators, including Ciprian-Moreno, recall seeing Texas Rangers on rooftops with guns pointed at students.
That summer, Genoveva Morales, a mother of 11 children, filed a class-action lawsuit against the school district, claiming it discriminated against Hispanic students by not providing them the same quality of education as white students and that it had segregated them from attending two better-funded elementary schools.
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