By the late 1960s Mexican Americans were at least four in five of Crystal City's people, and Anglos still ran its city hall and schools. In April 1963 a slate of five Mexican American candidates, los cinco, backed by Teamsters at the Del Monte cannery and the voter drive of PASSO, beat five incumbents for the city council. An Anglo-led ticket took the council back in 1965. The schools were the harder door, and in 1969 students pushed it.
The rules
José Ángel Gutiérrez, a Crystal City High School graduate of 1962 who helped found the Mexican American Youth Organization in 1967, had come home to organize. Cheerleaders had once been chosen by student vote. By 1969, according to later accounts, a faculty committee picked them and allowed one Mexican American on a squad of four. When two places opened that fall, Mexican American girls were told their one place was taken. Accounts also describe a rule that a candidate for homecoming queen or cheerleader have a parent who had graduated from the school. A student, Severita Lara, wrote a leaflet against the nomination rule and was suspended for three days.
The superintendent proposed a squad of three Anglo and three Mexican American girls. Anglo parents objected, and in June the school board voided the plan. In November students and parents brought a longer list of grievances. On December 8 the board voted 3 to 1 that it found no discrimination and would take no action.
The walkout
On December 9 students walked out of the high school and junior high. The next day about 700 people marched, around fifty of them adults. On December 15 the boycott reached the elementary grades. Counts differ: some historians put the first strike at 200 students, other accounts say about 500 on the first morning, and later totals run from about 1,700 to more than 2,000. Lara, Mario Treviño and Diana Serna traveled to Washington to see Senator Ralph Yarborough, and federal investigators arrived with some $328,730 in federal aid to the district at stake.
The demands were for more Mexican American teachers and counselors, bilingual and bicultural classes, Mexican American studies, harder courses in place of shop and home economics, and a student seat on the board. Sources give January 6 or January 9, 1970, for the board's settlement, when it agreed to most of them.
What came next
At MAYO's conference in Mission in late December, delegates endorsed Gutiérrez's idea of a third party. About 300 people founded La Raza Unida Party at Campestre Hall in Crystal City on January 17, 1970. In April its candidates ran for council and school board in Crystal City, Cotulla and Carrizo Springs and won fifteen seats, including two council majorities, two school board majorities and two mayoralties. Gutiérrez was elected to the Crystal City school board and later served as its president. In 1974 he won the Zavala County judgeship.
The walkout and what followed are told at My Story Museum in Crystal City. The exhibits on the Chicano movement in Zavala County were assembled by people who lived it.