Proposition 187 forced a generation to put fear aside and fight. It transformed California, and me
LOS ANGELES - Something was about to go down and no one wanted to make the first move.
My best friend Art and I stood in the quad at our usual lunch spot: near the fountain, under the big trees. Jocks and nerds, stoners and band geeks, cholos and artsy types milled about.
Finally, one kid walked to the chain-link fence that separated Anaheim High School from the street. He threw over his backpack and climbed. Then another. More. Dozens. So many the fence collapsed from the weight. A stream of students swelled into a flood that converged with a political tsunami.
On Nov. 2, 1994, more than 10,000 teenagers across California walked out to protest Proposition 187. The initiative sought to punish "illegal aliens" by denying them certain services, including access to public health care and education.
Proposition 187 split the psyche of the state like few things before or since.
Californians, confronted with a more diverse state and battered by the state's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, came to believe the problem was those so-called illegals and their children.
Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, facing an uphill reelection campaign, led the charge, releasing campaign ads that showed grainy footage of people swarming across the San Ysidro border crossing as an ominous voice intoned: "They keep coming."
Many Latinos, whether here legally legal or not, saw the proposition as an existential threat. Wilson's "they" looked an awful lot like them.
The student marches were the culmination of a month
