5th Bi-Annual Sal Castro Memorial Conference on the Emerging Historiography of the Chicano Movement

The 5th Bi-Annual Sal Castro Memorial Conference on the Emerging Historiography of the Chicano Movement to be held Feb. 28-29, 2020 in the McCune Room of the IHC. The conference is named after Sal Castro, one of the major historical figures of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Sal Castro, as a high school teacher in the East Los Angeles public schools, inspired the Chicano high school students to engage in the East L.A. “Blowouts” or walkouts, the largest high school strike in American history. The students walked out of their schools for a week to protest decades of discrimination and inferior education administered to Mexican American students not only in Los Angeles but throughout the Southwest where the majority of Mexican Americans lived at that time. The 5th Sal Castro Memorial Conference will build on the successes of the previous four held in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018. The 5th Bi-Annual Sal Castro Memorial Conference will bring together 28 participants who in the two days of the conference will again bring to light many new and exciting aspects of the Chicano Movement. These conferences have made UCSB into the center of Chicano Movement Studies. Focusing on the civil rights struggles of the Chicano Movement is also a way in which these conferences help to revise the meaning of civil rights history by expanding it from a strictly black-white history to a multi-racial history including the significant role of Chicanos. At a larger level, the conferences help to further revise the meaning of American history to include and integrate groups such as Chicanos and other Latinos in that history. Chicano history is American history.