University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Spiritual activism

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Spiritual activism

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Content SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM

by

Rocío Zamora

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(JOURNALISM)

May 2007

Copyright 2007 Rocío Zamora
ii
Table of Contents

Abstract iii
Introduction 1
Cultural Repression 3
Church Seeks Cultural Makeover 6
Spiritual Trio 8
Activism at Epiphany 12
Role Models 23
Validity Church Gave the Movement 24
Bibliography 27

iii
Abstract

Since the 1960s the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Lincoln Heights has
played an integral role in advancing Latino interests, providing many Chicano
leaders with the space to organize and produce lasting pieces of Chicano history.
Built in 1886, Epiphany is the oldest standing Episcopal Church in Los
Angeles and was recently designated a Cultural Heritage Monument by the City. But
the Church and its clergy have seldom been recognized for their role in the Chicano
movement.
It was back in 1967 when David Sanchez first organized the Brown Berets
within the Church’s walls. Epiphany’s basement served both as a meeting place for
organizers of the East L.A. Walkouts, as well as the birthplace of La Raza, a
newspaper directed at the Chicano community.
The Church and its congregation also played a role in advocating the
neighborhood’s cultural identity, often integrating mariachi, ballet folklorico, piñatas
and Mexican food with church events.
1
INTRODUCTION
Paula Crisostomo sat nervously at her desk, fidgeting with her pencil as she
looked up at the clock. It was 9:57 a.m. Her high school instructor went on with his
lecture, unaware that in a matter of minutes the 17-year-old honor student was about
to take part in one of the most defining moments of her life, one that would
ultimately affect generations to come.
“WALKOUT!”
The year was 1968. Crisostomo quickly gathered her belongings and left the
classroom, joining thousands of Latino students from all five East Los Angeles high
schools who were already marching outside to voice their anger over educational
inequities. Many teachers and administrators were stunned by the protest, but for
students it was long overdue.
The walkouts have since etched their way into the realm of unforgettable
moments in Chicano history, and many of the student organizers credit the Church of
the Epiphany, a small Episcopalian church in Lincoln Heights, and its three Anglo
priests, Revs. Roger Wood, John Luce and Oliver “Ollie” Garver, with providing the
space, support and inspiration needed to carry out the mass protests.
“The priests were at most of the organizing meetings for the walkouts,”
Crisostomo recently said. “They were talking to their congregants, educating them
and trying to raise money for us. So the involvement was pretty deep.”
After the walkouts, students were allowed to speak Spanish in school, the
bathrooms which had once been locked were now opened during lunch and nutrition,
2
and most importantly, a sense of ethnic pride was instilled in Chicano students, many
who now aspired to and attended college. Latino enrollment at UCLA jumped from
40 to 1,200 the semester following the walkouts.
“We were conditioned not to have any hopes or dreams, or aspirations of
being a doctor or a lawyer, or even going to college,” Crisostomo said. “But the
walkouts made us believe, know that we could surpass all that, individually as well
as a community.”
The fact that Epiphany is Episcopalian is also unique. Catholicism has
historically been the religion of choice in East Los Angeles, which is 96 percent
Latino. A 2006 New York Times magazine article said that since 1960, Latinos have
accounted for 71 percent of new Catholics in the United States.
While some churches during the late 1950s and early 1960s joined in the
fight for civil rights, particularly Baptist churches, Los Angeles catholic parishes
largely kept quiet and avoided controversy. The Catholic churches’ lukewarm
response toward the injustices being suffered in their communities left many young
Chicanos feeling a disconnect between religion and their daily struggles. And some
came to see the church more as a branch of the established government than of their
community.
Then Latinos found unlikely allies in Wood, Luce and Garver. The
Episcopalian priests did not share the community’s culture, or their most common
religious background, yet they were able to connect with the neighborhood by
providing a safe haven for Chicanos to express themselves.
3
Walking into one of Epiphany’s fiestas, members of the Latino community
felt right at home. Colorful rows of papel picado adorned the church’s walls while
Spanish music blared from the speakers. Kids would break the piñata while mothers
served everyone tamales and champurrado. Nowadays this could be considered a
typical scene of any church gathering in East Los Angeles. But in the early sixties,
this type of environment was groundbreaking.
The Parish of East Los Angeles, as it was popularly called, attracted Chicano
activists from all over the country and provided them with the support and space for
them to organize, including those who put together the walkouts.
Though there have been significant advances within the Latino community
because of Epiphany and various Chicano leaders’ contributions, East Los Angeles
schools are still considered inadequate, especially when compared to those in
suburban areas. At more than 50 percent, for example, Latinos nationally still have
the highest high school dropout rate in the country, according to the Pew Hispanic
Center website.
CULTURAL REPRESSION
Then a tall, slender 34-year-old, with a youthful appearance, Luce first came
to Los Angeles in 1965 after working as minister to the Spanish-speaking
congregation at the Chapel of the Intercession in New York City. The bilingual priest
came from a privileged background, but was sensitive to the plight of immigrant
communities, having spent years working in New York’s Harlem.
4
It didn’t take long before Luce was able to see the problems faced by the
culturally oppressed Latino community for himself. Wood and Garver came to the
same realization when they joined Luce at Epiphany the following year.
“The injustices were enormous,” Wood said. “People were being
reprimanded for speaking Spanish in the school yard, they were being pushed off
into vocational schools and being told college isn’t for you. I wasn’t just reading
about that, people were experiencing that.”
Once they set foot outside Epiphany, Chicanos were hard-pressed to find any
church or public gathering place that reflected the community’s decidedly Mexican
culture. Instead they were made to feel ashamed of their heritage, subjected to police
harassment, prohibited from speaking their native language and treated like second-
class citizens.
No one knew this better than former history and social science high school
teacher Sal Castro. A Chicano instructor at Belmont High School, Castro was one of
the few Latino role models available to students at the time, but he was subsequently
fired from three high schools for attempting to motivate young Latinos.
Among Castro’s offenses was helping kids organize a new Chicano political
party.
“In spite of the fact that the student body was 60 percent Mexican-American,
there weren’t any in the student council,” Castro said.
He soon realized that counselors, who had to give the okay for students to run
for government positions, were often trying to dissuade Latino youths from running.
5
“They were always told, ‘No you belong in industrial arts, you’ll lose time in
the student council,’” Castro said.
The boiling point came when Castro encouraged students in the newly
formed political party, the Tortilla Movement, to deliver part of their campaign
speeches in Spanish in order to cater to the ESL crowd. Castro wasn’t aware
speaking Spanish was against school policy and he was immediately transferred to
Lincoln High School as a result. He was also warned that if he showed up to his
former students’ graduation he would be arrested.
But the marginalization of Latinos did not end when they left school grounds.
Outside of campus Mexican-American youths were conditioned to experience fear at
the sight of police, especially when officers had been known to physically abuse and
even take the lives of young Latinos.
Afraid he was going to be harassed for violating curfew, 13-year-old
Salvador Barba panicked and ran from three police officers. When they caught up
with him the officers made their arrest, but not before sending Barba to the hospital
with two broken vertebra, internal bleeding in his groin area and head injuries
requiring 40 stitches.
“During the workover, the victim pleaded for the police to stop their
rampage, but instead they told him to shut up and called him insulting names,” the
Eastside Sun reported in 1968.

6
CHURCH SEEKS CULTURAL MAKEOVER
Though instances of discrimination against the Latino community were
rampant, what proved more troubling to the priests was the effect these attacks were
having on the Latino psyche.
“The whole thrust was to assimilate,” Luce said, “And a lot of people felt—
including the kids— that there would be negative consequences if you became too
obviously Mexican.”
Carlos Montes, former Minister of Information for the Brown Berets, agreed.
“Back then young Chicanos were trying to be white. Girls would dye their hair
blonde, you know. ‘I’m white, white is right,’ all that kind of stuff.”
Luce, Wood and Garver saw the negative effects this lack of self-worth was
among the Latino community. Kids were obtaining positive reinforcement where
they could find it. In low-income neighborhoods, this often meant turning to criminal
activity and gangs for a sense of belonging and empowerment.
But surprisingly, one of the first things Luce did when he arrived at Epiphany
was do away with the church’s gang outreach program.
“Father Luce didn’t believe in Band-Aids,” said Nancy Von Laderbach, a
former member of Epiphany’s parish council. “He wanted to get to the root of the
evil, not what it caused.”
Luce saw that the problems afflicting the neighborhood were not specific to
gang-members. Latino youths lucky enough to avoid these pitfalls were also
7
prevented from reaching their full potential, and often misled into believing the most
they could strive for were blue-collar jobs.
Epiphany’s clergy wanted to change the fatalist mentality that beset young
Chicanos across the board and set out to provide an environment where Latinos
could experience a sense of belonging, Episcopalian or not. They actively sought to
incorporate the community’s culture as a way of injecting a dose of self-esteem back
into the neighborhood.
So when Luce met Natividad “Nati” Cano, director of Mariachi Los
Camperos, he asked the Guadalajara native to perform a Mariachi Mass, a Mass sung
in Spanish, accompanied by traditional mariachi instruments.
“He said, ‘You’re crazy Father, pardon me but you can’t do a mariachi in the
church,” Luce said, recalling Cano’s initial reaction. “I said, ‘We can’t, but you’re
going to.’ And his eyes just lit up.”
So regular Masses became Mariachi Masses, Mexican dishes became regular
church meals and celebrations became fiestas, complete with piñatas and Spanish
music. . Before Mexican traditions became a common part of East L.A.’s landscape,
they were already being incorporated into Epiphany’s daily activities.
“I went in there and the church was so beautiful with the papel picado, and
the Mariachi Mass, and I just wept because I needed a place as a Christian, but I
needed a place as a Chicana as well,” said Lydia Lopez, who now works for the
Episcopal Bishop at the Diocese of Los Angeles.
8
These innovative gestures of inclusion began attracting young people
desperately searching for a place to belong and the church made no attempt of hiding
its commitment to the neighborhood.
“I went to see the church one day and there were three flags out front: the
Episcopal flag, the American flag, and the Mexican flag, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s
brave,’” said Fran Gomez, a retired paralegal for the city attorney’s office and a
parishioner of Epiphany.
The bishop was very supportive of the work being done at the Parish of East
Los Angeles, giving the priests more freedom to explore different avenues where
they could better implement their skills.

SPIRITUAL TRIO
“The three priests, they were quite a trilogy,” Von Laderbach said. “Father
Luce was the great idea man, he was sloppy … but he got things done in his way;
Father Wood took care of the parish. He was the hometown guy and took care of the
women and all of that; Father Garver was in between the two.”
Described as an energetic man who was constantly walking the streets of
Lincoln Heights, Luce was often seen talking to anyone he would come across.
“I could remember passing by on the bus, on Broadway, when I was going to
work downtown, and I would see him sitting there at Dino’s talking to the cholos,
sharing cigarettes,” said Crisostomo, now the Director of Government and
Community Relations at Occidental College.
9
“The way he related to us … he was maybe the most egalitarian human being
I have ever met,” said Moctesuma Esparza, producer of the movie Walkout!, and at
14, one of Epiphany’s youngest visitors.
Though Luce was never too busy to listen to anyone from the neighborhood,
he was rarely as generous with his colleagues, who said working with the popular
priest often proved a difficult task.
“I used to call him the most consistently relevant son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever
known, because he is a genius in so many ways, but very irritating,” Wood said of
the stubborn Harvard graduate. “He wasn’t easy to work with. It was one-way; but
he was so often right.”
A mustached, dark-haired man with blue eyes, Wood was as committed to
achieving social change for Latinos, though he didn’t consider himself part of the
inner circle when it came to rubbing elbows with Chicano leaders.
“In many ways I was on the edge of that, because John Luce was on the front
of it, and someone had to mind the shop, run things; have confirmation classes, the
bread and butter stuff.” Wood said.
Instead, the more conventional priest focused his time on developing the
minds of kids too young to be involved in certain facets of the movement by taking
them on field trips, talking to their parents, and organizing after-school programs.
“One of the first things Wood did, among others, was to start the BUSCA
school to try to get the kids to learn the culture and so forth, and that brought in the
parents,” Von Laderbach said.
10
A Stanford-educated lawyer, Wood’s expertise as an attorney also proved
invaluable to Chicano activists at the parish.
“Wood would often lend himself to interpret legal things,” said Eliezer Risco,
an Epiphany parishioner who went on to become an Episcopalian priest. “He was a
big help in that way because a lot of people at that time, we used lawyers like they
were paper towels.”
An avid UCLA sports fan with a kind face and permanent smile, Garver was
a little closer to the action surrounding Luce. The priests lived together and since
Luce didn’t drive, Garver, who died in 1996, frequently acted as his chauffer. But the
Harvard MBA also served as Epiphany’s bookkeeper.
“Father Garver was calmer and had a great sense of humor,” Risco said. “He
saw everything with a smile and was always ready to help in any way he could, not
just as an accountant.”
All three clergymen performed their share of activism in their respective
arenas, but the priests also relied heavily on the help of their office administrator, the
late Virginia Cueto Ram, an Arizona native and longtime resident of Lincoln
Heights.
“You can’t say it was just the three of them because Virginia Ram was also
there. She was the office administrator and the administrator of anything that
happened in that place,” Risco said.
“Virginia was no nonsense. The families needed help, the kids deserved it, so
she got it done involving the mothers,” Rosalio Muñoz, the Southern California
11
organizer for the Communist Party USA, said of his former Cub Scout den mother.
“A familiar scene was Virginia careening in and out of Altura Street driving the big
box white van with a mother or two and seven or eight kids.”
In fact many people credit the Latina with bridging the gap between the
largely Catholic, Mexican community and the Anglo clergy due to her strong ties
with the neighborhood.
“She was just a power house; just a bundle of energy and all the parents knew
her and trusted her,” Crisostomo said. “And that’s why they were willing to leave
their kids there. She was really something. Virginia Ram, she was cool.”
Ram was also the inadvertent inspiration behind the naming of the Brown
Berets, as she told then UCLA graduate student Horacio R. Fonseca when he
interviewed her in 1986.
Ram recalled how a teenage David Sanchez, prior to becoming Prime
Minister of the Brown Berets, was following her around Epiphany, trying to get her
to give him some of the clothes that had been recently donated to the church. She
quickly grew tired with his incessant pleading.
“I said, ‘David get away from me!’ And he kept bugging me, and finally, I
picked up a blue beret and threw it at him. I said, ‘Here, I’ll give you that,’” Ram
told Fonseca. “And David started wearing the blue beret. He started organizing all
the young people and before I knew it, everybody kept passing the blue beret around
to each other.”
12
It wasn’t long before someone came up with the idea of switching the blue
beret for a brown one, and the Brown Berets were born.
It was with the help of these four individuals that the community’s perception
gradually began to change. When the neighborhood kids realized they were free to
embrace their culture they started to regain the confidence they had lost and little by
little began coming up with ways of improving their neighborhoods.
“It was opening doors and saying, ‘Yeah, you can do that,’ and making
people believe in their selves,” Wood said.

ACTIVISM AT EPIPHANY
The Parish of East Los Angeles was relentless in seeking out funding for
youth-oriented programs like Teen Post, VISTA, and Young Citizens for
Community Action, designed to help kids flex their leadership muscles and get them
exposed to new ways of thinking.
But Mexican-American youngsters were not the only ones benefiting from
what Epiphany had to offer. By the time Luce came to Los Angeles, various
movements had already sprouted around California. People working to make
changes within the Latino community inevitably heard of Epiphany at one point or
another and were eager to collaborate with the Episcopal Church.
Already an activist in his own right, Risco had been working with Cesar
Chavez’s United Farm Workers for two years before coming to Epiphany at the age
of 32. He had been sent to aid the boycott effort in Los Angeles, which Mexican and
13
Filipino farm workers had organized to fight against unfair wages and living
conditions.
It was during his time in the City of Angels, between stopping trucks carrying
fruit to the central market in downtown and asking liquor stores to ban Giumarra
Vineyards’ goods, that Risco met Luce.
“He was at Epiphany and would support us a lot by taking caravans of
youngsters to Delano, bringing clothes, food and help,” Risco said.
Chavez also took notice of Luce’s aid and soon developed a close
relationship with the priest and his parish. After the farm workers union was
organized, Chavez and the farm workers found themselves coming to Los Angeles
more and more, staying in places Luce had set-up for them, including the church hall
and Luce’s home, across the street.
“It was natural for Epiphany to get involved because it was an immigrant
population in the church and many of them had relatives or knew someone who was
working in the fields,” Chris Hartmire, a Presbyterian minister and former director of
the California Migrant Ministry, said. “But most of all they believed in what the farm
workers’ movement was trying to do.”
The priests believed in it so much that they would often join the farm workers
and members of their congregation when protesting chain stores selling non-union
produce.
“When all those boycotts of Safeway and all that, Roger Wood was there
with his dog at the picket line,” Lopez said.
14
Using Epiphany as their L.A. home base, the farm workers would work
together with the people of the parish when organizing boycotts, strikes and
campaign efforts.
“Epiphany was the headquarters for breakfast, lunch, dinner, organizational
meetings, and assignments,” Hartmire said. “The Bobby Kennedy campaign was the
most obvious example of that.”
A longtime advocate of labor unions and social justice, Kennedy had shown
his support for the farm workers when he visited Chavez during his hunger strike
earlier that year. Hoping his vision for the presidency would help improve their
social status, farm workers and members of the Mexican-American community
mobilized at Epiphany to help him win the 1968 California Presidential Primary.
“We were all going to door to door,” Hartmire said. “We had registration lists
to find who can vote, how they are going to vote and make sure they got to the polls
on Election Day.” Kennedy won the California primary as a result of the farm
workers’ and Epiphany’s efforts.
His assassination on election night, June 5
th
, 1968, sent shockwaves around
the country.
“His death felt like a mortal blow to all of us,” Hartmire said.
The church and the farm workers were devastated, but not discouraged. They
realized what they had accomplished and knew there was more work to be done.
Parishioners and farm workers were later successful in getting favorable candidates
like Art Torres and Richard Alatorre voted into office.
15
During his years with the farm workers Risco became keenly aware of
Epiphany’s commitment to social justice and he soon accepted a position at
Epiphany’s Social Action Training Center, a program designed to keep youth off the
streets by getting them involved in more positive activities.
“We tried to find out what was going through their minds, their dreams, what
bothered them,” Risco said of his responsibilities at Epiphany.
It was through his work with the neighborhood youth that the idea to start the
underground community newspaper, La Raza, began in 1967.
“One of the things we discerned was that there was no communication
between the barrios,” Risco said. “The only communication available was the one
between the newspapers and they only represented society’s prejudices.”
The community paper would deal with topics concerning the Mexican-
American community, and was critical of the local government who promised
change but failed to deliver.
Regarding a 1967 conference on police brutality, La Raza reported:
“The conference went on as scheduled, the Police “show” went on and, in the streets,
frisking, harrassment, name calling, and brutality by the police continued.”
Initially, Risco used his paycheck from the Social Action Training Center to
print the first edition of La Raza, but when funding for the program ended after just
one issue, the church was there to help.
“Father Luce said, ‘There’s the basement. It’s not being used as it should be,
why don’t you guys use it until you find funds for another place?’” Risco said.
16
Due to the paper’s lack of resources, La Raza was short staffed and those
who worked for the paper did so voluntarily.
“The first day he showed up he recruited me to his staff,” Esparza said. “Of
course, nobody got paid; it wasn’t about that. But there was always money for some
burritos and there were always beers and those of us who liked cigarettes…”
“It wasn’t a newspaper of journalists, but of the community,” Risco said.
“There were four people who seriously worked at the paper, like working the press,
developing photos, cutting and pasting articles to paper so we could send it to the
printers...”
Meanwhile Luce recruited other youths, like Carlos Montes, to help distribute
the paper. A student at East Los Angeles College, Montes began coming around
Epiphany when he was hired as Teen Post director.
“One time Father Luce walked in, I think with Eliezer Risco, and they laid a
stack of newspapers and said, ‘Here pass them out to the youth,’” Montes said,
remembering the first time he came across a copy of La Raza. “I was kind of like, ‘I
ain’t gonna pass ‘em out, let me read it first.’ So I look at it and I was like, shit, what
the hell is this? La Raza? Damn. This doesn’t make sense… Then I was like, hey, I
like this shit.”
A member of the Mexican American Student Association at ELAC, Montes
was impressed by the paper’s commitment to social justice, and even more so with
the church’s support of it. He began interacting more with Luce and Risco and was
soon drawn to another of Epiphany’s youth organizations, Young Chicanos for
17
Community Action, a rudimentary version of what would later be known as the
Brown Berets.
Influenced by the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets were a group of
young Latinos seeking a more active approach of dealing with the problems of
inadequate education, police harassment, the large number of Latinos being drafted
to Vietnam and the overall racist conditions plaguing Latino neighborhoods around
L.A.
The self-described militant group did not believe passive organization was
always an option when dealing with a racist government that didn’t always play by
the rules when it came to Latinos. Once formed, the Brown Berets quickly became
police targets, but so did the church of the Epiphany and Luce. Police Chief Edward
M. Davis publicly accused the priest of having created the “avowedly communist
organization.”
“Davis was critical of the Rev. John Luce” for having “‘spawned’ the Brown
Berets,” reported the Los Angeles Times in 1971.
The Episcopal Church and Chicano leaders were quick to rebut the police
chief’s statements, ironically crediting provocations by police with being the driving
force behind the formation of many of these activist groups.
“They tried to indict everyone and bring them to court and put them in jail,
but that just brought more and more people and polarized everything,” Luce said.
“And thank God for them because we knew they’d do something stupid and we
wouldn’t need any organizers or outside agitators.”
18
“They’re making rebels,” Ralph Guzman, then a professor of political science
at California State University, Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times in 1968.
“When they see police clubbing them, it’s the final evidence that society is against
them—that existing within the system won’t work.”
Neither the priests nor the church were deterred by the police chief’s
accusations and Epiphany remained supportive of the changes the community was
trying to bring about. So when students decided to protest against unfair school
conditions, Epiphany again acted as a base for young Latino activists. The
organization of students from various high schools led to the walkouts of 1968,
commonly referred to as the East L.A. Blowouts.
“I can’t believe we did all that organizing in that little place,” said
Crisostomo, a former student at Lincoln High and the inspiration for the lead
character in Esparza’s 2006 HBO movie Walkout. “In my memory it was huge.”
During the walkouts students from Roosevelt, Wilson, Lincoln, Garfield and
Belmont high schools came together to demand improvements in their education,
more Latino representation in their schools, and the freedom to speak Spanish,
among other things.
“There were 50-some-odd demands pounded out by the kids, without the help
of the adults except maybe this old man here” said Castro, by then a teacher at
Lincoln.
When the Chicano teacher heard students were getting ready to protest, he
made sure they got themselves organized first. Anticipating the police’s reaction,
19
Castro went to nearby college campuses, recruiting Mexican-American student
groups.
“They asked if we wanted help organizing, but I said no, the kids already had
it down,” Castro said. “What I wanted them for was to get their heads in the way
once the police start swinging the batons. That was the role of the Brown Berets
too.”
While high school students acted as the brains of the operation, the members
of the Brown Berets helped get things going by running into the five high schools,
alerting students of the walkouts.
Epiphany’s youth groups worked in unison, and while the Brown Berets took
on the role of body guards, Risco and the people at La Raza were in charge of letting
the public know the students’ point of view.
In the end, an estimated 30,000 Latinos participated in the blowouts, leaving
many stunned at the high school students’ ability to organize.
According to the Los Angeles Times on March 17, 1968, Julian Nava, the
only Mexican-American in the Los Angeles Board of Education, said to Los Angeles
Superintendent Jack Crowther in the midst of the walkouts, “This is BC and AD. The
schools will not be the same hereafter.”
But this accomplishment came at a price. Predicting they would be
unsuccessful at prosecuting high school kids, police concentrated their efforts on
Chicano youths over age 18 who they considered main organizers in the blowouts,
including Montes, Risco, Esparza, and the popular Castro. In all, 13 people were
20
arrested and indicted before the grand jury for conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor
and disrupting a public school.
“They were basically indictments for having organized the walkouts,”
Esparza said. “And they turned a misdemeanor into a felony by alleging conspiracy.
And so we were facing 66 years in jail because of the multiple counts.”
Garver voiced his opinion on the arrests while giving a sermon at Pasadena’s
All Saints’ Episcopal Church. In his speech he condemned the authorities
responsible for the apprehension of the Chicano activists.
Graver was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times on July 15, 1968, that
the police “engineered after-dark, gestapo-style arrests of those accused of being
protest leaders.” He said the focus became the walkout instead of the reason for the
walkout – a “50 percent dropout-kickout rate.”
The charges were eventually dropped and the East L.A. 13, as they came to
be known, were set free. But Castro was barred from having any contact with
students as a result of his participation in the blowouts.
“When they banned Sal Castro from teaching in the classroom and they told
him he was going to be in a basement writing manuals, the people revolted,” Risco
said.
The walkouts had transformed a youth movement into a community
movement. “The men and women of the once conservative older generation jammed
school board and civic meetings, shouting their approval of what their children had
done,” a Los Angeles Times article reported in 1969.
21
La Raza articles were accompanied by pictures of parents picketing alongside
their children holding signs that read “NO CASTRO, NO SCHOOL.”
No strangers to the picket line, Wood, Garver and Luce joined Chicanos in
protesting Castro’s removal from the classroom. When the community decided to
take over the board of education, the priests were right there performing mass. A
total of 35 people were arrested during the mass sit-in, including Wood and Luce.
But people had made themselves heard.
“After they took over the board for five days and many arrests happened, I
was finally brought back to the school as a teacher,” Castro said.
The collaboration between the generations was nothing new to Epiphany,
which often saw the advantage of pairing up Latinos coming of age with those from
previous generations.
In 1970, when Chicano youths again wanted to come together, this time to
form a Chicano Moratorium to protest the large number of Latino fatalities during
the Vietnam war, they found a great deal of support from the adults at Epiphany.
“There were members of the parish that were very key members of the
moratorium committee, especially the two Rudy’s, Rudy Tovar and Rudy Salas, who
were part of the older generation,” said Muñoz, the Moratorium’s main organizer.
“They were in their 40s and I was in my 20s. They came from the Zoot Suit era…
the Pachuco era, and they represented to me a continuity of our movement.”
Rudy Tovar, a former member of Epiphany’s parish council, said, “The
figures were that Chicanos were 26 percent of the fatalities in Vietnam and 15
22
percent of the population, something along those lines. That’s why it was very
important to me personally that the Raza react.”
Tovar readily accepted the role of monitor, working to keep the crowd of
Latinos from becoming unruly.
But the attempts at keeping the peace failed when police received a complaint
from a liquor store owner who worried his business might be burglarized due to the
large number of people going into his store. Police equipped with riot gear made
their way to Laguna Park, now Ruben Salazar Park, where marchers had gathered to
hear Chicanos speak against the disproportionate number of Latinos dying in the
war.
“When we came down to the park shortly after we got in, Rosalio was up on
top of a truck speaking… and all hell broke loose,” Tovar said. “As we were
marching into the park I could look down to Indiana Boulevard and see all the LAPD
… all over the place. The police came in, the sheriff came in, swinging clubs hitting
women, hitting men, hitting boys, hitting everybody.”
What was supposed to be a peaceful march soon became a violent scene
ending with three fatalities, including that of Salazar, the renowned Latino Los
Angeles Times and KMEX newsman. Police shot a tear gas projectile at Salazar’s
head after he and others refused to vacate the Silver Dollar bar.
“Father Luce was riding on the flatbed truck with Ruben Salazar while the
march was going on, then later they split up and that’s when Salazar was killed,”
Von Laderbach said.
23
Muñoz and others stayed on at Epiphany long after the 60s were over,
working on various programs designed to improve Latino communities.
They helped establish a tenants’ rights movement; demanded the new
director of the Legal Aid Foundation hire more Spanish speaking and bilingual
lawyers that could provide services to the undocumented; and worked with One-Stop
Immigration to fight for immigrant rights along with Bert Corona, an influential
labor and civil activist leader who had been fighting for the rights of Mexican-
Americans since the 30s.
“It wasn’t just ’68, ’69, it was ’70, ’71, ’72, ’73, ’74, ’75, ’76, ’77…” Muñoz
said. “The church was very involved in immigrant rights (and) in major
developments for the empowerment of Mexican-Americans.”
ROLE MODELS
Both Corona and Chavez were part of the long list of Chicano “celebrities”
that passed through Epiphany’s doors. Luce went out of his way to network with
Chicano leaders because he thought it was a good way of exposing kids to the things
Latinos were able to accomplish.
He naturally developed a close relationship with Corona, the son of a
Mexican revolutionary who had himself become a union labor leader by his late
teens and early 20s. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, organizer of the first Chicano
leadership conference in 1969 and author of I am Joaquin, was also a friend of Luce
and Epiphany; as were Chavez and the farm workers, with the union leader even
performing a sermon at the parish.
24
And when prominent Chicano leaders were too far to make it to Epiphany,
Luce made the effort to take Latino youths to them, as he did when he planned a
field trip to New Mexico so kids at the parish could meet Reies Lopez Tijerina, a
Chicano activist who had fought to restore land grants to the families of Spanish and
Mexican owners who had been unfairly displaced.
There is no doubt meeting these already accomplished Chicano activists
shaped how young Chicano leaders saw the world.
“I credit father Luce for providing me extraordinarily inspirational moments
in my life. He ran a delegation of local kids, “The Delano Walk,” to Sacramento the
very first march with Cesar Chavez; so I get to say that I was there because of Father
Luce,” Esparza said. “We went to meet Reies Lopez Tijerina in New Mexico … and
there were meeting of other civil rights groups with which he brought us together. He
was someone who was always making connections for us and encouraging us to
participate.”

VALIDITY CHURCH GAVE THE MOVEMENT
Though facing the same obstacles their children were, parents sometimes had
a hard time accepting their kids’ involvement in the movement.
“It was the sixties; it was our way of growing up to a way of thinking about
how we were going to live, and what we were going to fight for, and the injustices
that we were not going to accept,” Lopez said. “There was a sense of unity amongst
25
the people who were working together, like it’s us against the world…and there was
very little tolerance for anybody who didn’t think like that.”
For many parents, being Latino in the U.S. caused them a lot of heartache and
they didn’t have many opportunities to succeed due to their ethnic background. So it
was hard for them to understand why their kids refused to assimilate and opted
instead to antagonize the powers that be by defiantly embracing their culture.
“For mother it wasn’t this romantic notion that her daughter had, ‘Rah-rah
viva La Raza’ and all that stuff, for her it was a lot of pain,” Lopez said.
It was a while before kids were able to make their parents understand they
were taking part in something significant.
“Later on, when I settled down and showed more compassion to her as I talk
about this, she then starts to do food drives to support the farm workers,” Lopez
said. “And I have the most beautiful pictures of my mother shaking hands with Cesar
Chavez when he came to Epiphany one morning to preach, and its one of my
treasures.”
One thing that helped ease parents’ minds was that their kids were spending
time at the church.
“I knew a lot of kids at Lincoln…whose parents only let them go to Teen
Post,” Crisostomo said. “And only because it was at a church, they didn’t care that it
wasn’t a Catholic church, but it was a church.”
Having the church involved gave the movement a sense of legitimacy within
the community.
26
“To have someone there who is a priest, wearing the collar,” Montes said.
“(It showed) that we weren’t just a young militant angry Chicano group protesting,
that we had adults there, we had priests there, we had the church there, you know, we
were on the right track.”
In 2005, the Church of the Epiphany, built in 1887, was declared a national
landmark by the Los Angeles City Council, being recognized more for its historical
significance than for having been a nucleus of much of the activity surrounding the
Chicano Movement.
Once a site bustling with Chicano activists, the small Episcopalian Church on
2808 Altura St. still sits quietly in its corner, as if waiting for the new generation of
Latino activists to walk through her doors again.
“Epiphany was the incubator, the guardian, the care taker of that small little
flame that was in each of us that could grow into a roaring fire of social activism and
transformation,” Esparza said.
The real accomplishment of the Chicano Movement, Epiphany and its clergy
was not only that it allowed regular people to realize they were capable of conducing
change, but that in doing so, they awarded that power to each succeeding generation.
“Although there is a lot more work to be done, we can’t say that we’re
without voice anymore, we can’t say that we’re without power, we can’t say we
can’t help ourselves, we can,” Esparza said. “And that was the change.”

27
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pulido, Laura. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Since the 1960s the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in Lincoln Heights has played an integral role in advancing Latino interests, providing many Chicano leaders with the space to organize and produce lasting pieces of Chicano history. -- Built in 1886, Epiphany is the oldest standing Episcopal Church in Los Angeles and was recently designated a Cultural Heritage Monument by the City. But the Church and its clergy have seldom been recognized for their role in the Chicano movement. -- It was back in 1967 when David Sanchez first organized the Brown Berets within the Church's walls. Epiphany's basement served both as a meeting place for organizers of the East L.A. Walkouts, as well as the birthplace of La Raza, a newspaper directed at the Chicano community. -- The Church and its congregation also played a role in advocating the neighborhood's cultural identity, often integrating mariachi, ballet folklorico, piñatas and Mexican food with church events.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Zamora, Rocío (author)

Core Title Spiritual activism

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Print Journalism)

Publication Date 04/23/2007

Defense Date 05/01/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag activism,Chicano,OAI-PMH Harvest,Religion,sixties

Place Name California (states), Lincoln Heights (city or populated place), Los Angeles (city or populated place), Los Angeles (counties), religious facilities: Episcopal Church of the Epiphany (geographic subject), USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor Gutierrez, Felix (committee chair), Castaneda, Laura (committee member), Cray, Edward (committee member)

Creator Email rociozam@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m452

Unique identifier UC1279087

Identifier etd-Zamora-20070423 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-484114 (legacy record id),usctheses-m452 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Zamora-20070423.pdf

Dmrecord 484114

Document Type Thesis

Rights Zamora, Rocío

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu