Along with other UCLA students and community members, Mario Escobar marched in downtown Los Angeles on May 1 to celebrate International Workers’ Day and to rally for worker and immigrants’ rights.
Since the march, Escobar, a fifth-year Spanish literature and Chicana/o studies student, and other students who attended the march, have gathered to organize a town-hall style meeting for students to discuss what actions they should take in response to the violence.
The Raza Coalition, a group composed of Latino and Chicana/o groups on campus, met last Thursday to plan the forum as well as to discuss the emotions members felt after attending the march.
Christian Diaz, president of Latino fraternity Gamma Zeta Alpha, said the forum would be held at the beginning of next week.
The coalition is set to meet again on Thursday to finalize plans for a forum. Diaz was unable to attend the march.
Carlos Cazares, a fifth-year Chicana/o studies and political science student, said the forum would be used as a way to explain to the campus what happened.
“Students live in a bubble. Students are uninformed. … (They) tend to token it as a Mexican issue, a Latino issue … (but) it’s an issue that encompasses everybody. It’s a human rights issue,” Cazares said.
Escobar said he joined the march on Olympic Boulevard and everything was going smoothly, but when the crowd reached Parkview Street, they were met by L.A. police officers who told them to disperse.
“Police started pushing people with motorcycles. … (The police) came in and started hitting people with batons,” Escobar, who was videotaping the incident as it ensued, said.
Since the violence, LAPD announced it will conduct an investigation which will include reviewing tapes of the march and interviewing organizers of the march. The city announced Monday that the two top-ranking officials who were at the scene would be demoted and transferred.
“There was clearly a breakdown in the command structure here,” L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in an interview on CNN on Monday. “There was without question bad tactics.”
Escobar said he was struck, both figuratively and literally, by the violence that day. He stayed in MacArthur Park for hours taping the scene, and said he was also hurt when the police began shooting rubber bullets at the marchers.
“I thought they were real bullets. They sounded like real bullets. I felt a hot sting on my upper chest. … I saw a guy in front of me fall to the ground, and he screamed,” Escobar said.
Cazares said the forum would foster a dialogue between the community and the student body, and he hopes it will be used to decide what stance the student body will take concerning the police.
“The community looks to see what college students are doing. We need to say something,” Cazares said.
Escobar said the actions of the police reminded him of the military force in his homeland, El Salvador, which he fled following the country’s civil war.
“I was going through the same thing here. I thought, “˜My God, I can’t believe this,'” Escobar said.
Similarly, other students attending the march said they could not believe the police’s actions and have compared the march to war-like situations.
“For many people it was very dehumanizing,” Cazares, who also attended the march but was not hurt, said.
“It was very militant and it seemed a lot like warfare. … There was no safety whatsoever.”
With reports from Bruin wire services.