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Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicane Struggle for Educational Justice. By Mario T. Garcia and Sal Castro. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xiv, 367 pp. $34.95, isbn 978-0-8078-3448-0.)
One of the most exciting areas of research in Chicano/a history is the Chicano movement, an era of explosive political and cultural activity in the Mexican-origin community in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Historians, political scientists, and other scholars are documenting and interpreting the causes and consequences of this movement on the Mexican American community and American society in general. Mario T. Garcia provides a sensitive and engaging oral history - a testimonio - of Sal Castro, one of the most important leaders of the Chicana/o student movement. Implicit in this book is Garcia's notion that Castro played a determining role in the walkouts, although Castro states that he was only one of many.
Castro, a charismatic public school teacher at Los Angeles's Lincoln High School, is credited with inspiring...