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Students Not Soldiers:
The Work of Inner City Struggle
in Los Angeles
Inner City Struggle is a community organization working on educational and economic justice issues in the Boyle Heights, El Sereno, and East Los Angeles communities (see www.innercitystruggle.org). Nancy Meza is a youth organizer for ICS at the Roosevelt High School campus, and works in ICS’s youth group United Students. She has been working with the organization for about four years and is currently a community college student.
War Times/Tiempo de Guerras talked with Nancy about the economic pressures facing youth in working-class, immigrant communities in L.A. and how those pressures related to military recruitment.
Nancy Meza: ICS works in poverty-level communities. Most of the households make less than $22,000 a year in combined income. These communities also have the “worst” schools: schools that don’t have adequate funding and are overcrowded, schools where a high percentage of students don’t make it through their senior year to graduation.
Boyle Heights and East LA are 90% Mexican or Latino, El Sereno is a little more diverse. El Sereno has more of the 4 th generation, 5 th generation Latinos, and Boyle Heights has more of the 1st generation, 2 nd generation Latino immigrants.
WT: What do the youth you work with say about the war?
Many of the youth we work with are against the war. They feel it’s an unjust war. They’re against it because of the way it affects them. They see how funding for education has gone down, they see more military recruitment in their schools. Instead of being recruited to go to college to have a future, most of the students are being led into the military.
United Students has a college and educational justice week every year. One of the workshops we had this year was Students Not Soldiers, and we asked students about the war. Most of the students said, “Oh that’s just Bush’s little war.” These are just regular students who were consciously against the war.
WT: Do you have any friends or relatives that enlisted or who have seriously considered enlisting?
One of my friends signed up after 9/11. He was a really good student; he played varsity sports, and took AP classes. His thing was, “my grades are okay but they’re not that great. So even if I get into college, I’m not going to be able to pay for it.”
My other friends who are thinking about enlisting didn’t graduate from high school. So they think, “I can’t get a good job, the best I can do is work at McDonald’s making minimum wage. Why not go into the military and get good job training.” They’re being tracked into it because they can’t get a good job, because they were in a public school system that didn’t prepare them for a 21 st century job or for attending college. [Editors' note: The Army recently increased by 25% the number of high-school drop-outs it was willing to accept as enlistees.] E ven if they do graduate from high school they can’t pass the tests to get jobs with a livable wage.
My friend who enlisted went to Garfield High. It has close to 5,000 students, and they only have one college counselor. Maybe there were resources out there to pay for college. But since there’s only one counselor, most students don’t know those resources are out there. The only people that are actually giving out information in these schools are military recruiters. You don’t see college recruiters or counselors out there during lunch time or doing classroom presentations on how to get into college, how to get financial aid. But you see at least two military recruiters out there during lunchtime every week. So he just didn’t have information about what was out there to pay for college.
WT: What is the drop-out rate in the schools ICS works in?
Those schools have a 68% drop-out rate, so less than 40% are actually graduating.
Roosevelt High School , for example, is the most overcrowded high school in the nation. It has about 5,200 students on a campus built for 2,500. It has a lot to do with funding. Schools are doing the track system because they are so overcrowded. So students go in for two months, they have vacation for two months; go back in for two months. There are not even enough desks in the classroom or even enough books in the classroom for every student. The student-teacher ratio is 32 or 34 to one if you’re lucky, and most classes have up to 40 students. Students can’t find a learning environment in this.
Students who do graduate from these high schools don’t graduate with the college pre-requisites. So most go into fast food or construction with their parents, any kind of job that they can get without taking a test. One of my friends, she’s really smart, she was an A and B student, but she didn’t have any honors classes. She took all regular classes. After graduation, she applied to be a tutor at the middle school she went to, and she couldn’t do it because she wasn’t able to pass the test, because the test includes Algebra II, and she wasn’t given Algebra II because it’s not a high school requirement, it’s only a college requirement.
These problems been going on for decades. Recently it’s actually gotten a little better. Now you see students that did graduate from the public high school system coming back to the communities, as teachers, as counselors, as tutors. They’re the ones really helping students, giving them encouragement. But a 68% drop-out rate is still outrageous.
WT: In a lot of communities of color, there’s a tradition of military service. I’m thinking of second or third generation Latino communities, the African-American community, the Filipino community or Samoan community. Do you find folks talking about the military as less racist than the rest of society?
I don’t think they find it less racist, but they do find it as a way to fit into society. We saw this during the sixties, when African Americans were being recruited into the military, while outside they were segregated and they had no rights. I think they saw the military as a gateway into society. I think it’s happening also with these communities, because they don’t fit into demographics of the current society, just because of their culture or their economic situation. So here comes the military and it’s like, “Be American, join the military. If you join you’ll be fighting for your country.” People join the military because it’s a way to be accepted into society.
At school, teachers don’t teach you about your culture. And most people are below poverty level, struggling. To them, it seems like being poor is something to be ashamed of. Most of these people work two to three jobs just to make ends meet and they’re still below poverty line. I think many join the military as a way just to be viewed as a good member of society, a productive member. Also, for the immigrant community it’s so hard to get your legal status now, it’s so expensive. Many view the military as a way to get citizenship or an easier way to get legal status.
WT: I went to a conference in October on counter-recruitment and learned that even if you join the military you’re not guaranteed citizenship. They just speed up the process, by letting you apply immediately instead of waiting five years first.
It’s the same with money for schooling. Only 50% of veterans get those benefits. Students are being propagandized by the military, they’re being called every two years, there are commercials on TV, and at school there’s a big military presence. Students go in with these ideas that the military is going to offer them all these things. One of the things we’ve done is have students critically analyze the military. You know, so much money is being spent on the military that it detracts from education, housing, and health care. Out of one dollar [of government spending], fifty cents are spent on the military, only four or five cents on education, two on health care. We’re spending so much on the military that our social programs are not being funded, so you go into the military because they promise you all the programs you’re not getting as a normal citizen.
WT: And we see this at work with the JROTC programs. What’s JROTC like?
I’ve actually seen it at the middle school, but it was called Cadets. [Editors' note: The Naval Sea Cadets program is for youth aged 11-17. It is an affiliate of the U.S. Navy League, a citizen group that supports maritime military services.] Even students in the sixth grade are being trained to join the military, to be little soldiers. In high school you see it more; JROTC has its own buildings and its own facilities in our school district. At Roosevelt High School it has an underground shooting range.
At the beginning of every year, since our schools are so over-crowded, there’s not enough room to have everyone enroll in P.E. So the JROTC recruiters go into the P.E. classrooms and they outreach to everyone, saying, “Instead of doing P.E. you could join JROTC and it’ll be honorable, it’ll be considered as an extra activity, and it looks good on college applications.” They do this massive recruitment. Students don’t see other clubs going around, saying, “join this club to prepare for college.” All they see is JROTC.
And since there’s so much overcrowding, there’s no room in other classes, students are just put into JROTC to fill vacant spots in their schedule.
In JROTC you learn how to use guns, how to march. Most of the students who are in JROTC are from low-income communities. They are students who are in ESL, students who pushed out of the college track. These students are trained to go into the military right out of high school. Most students in JROTC go into the military after high school. [Editors' note: As counter-recruitment organizers have argued, JROTC actually constitutes a drain on a school’s resources and teaches a biased version of American history.]
WT: Jorge Mariscal of Project YANO was telling me that more and more Latinas are enlisting.
The military is recruiting Latinas; they’ve changed their message to target Latinas. They make it appear like if you’re a Latina , joining the military is a feminist act. You’ll be fighting alongside your brothers; you’ll be getting the power that a man is given now.
WT: The ability to be economically independent gives a sense of empowerment. Is that avenue getting closed off for women of color and is that pushing them to see the military as a feminist option?
That’s how the military’s putting it out there. But you know they say the same things about males not being able to get a job or pay for college. I think it’s more how the military is putting the message out there, and women are picking it up as “okay, I guess this must be true.”
WT: Does ICS work with other LA-based groups that focus on counter-recruitment work, like Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools (CAMS)?
Yes. Every time we found out military recruiters were going to be on campus, we did counter-recruitment the day before. We passed out brochures about the reality of war, the reality of the military, and what you should think about before joining the military. It was really cool because before the recruiters came onto campus students were already conscious about what the myths and realities were about joining the military. So recruiters would come in the next day and try to persuade students they would get money for college and students would say, “Well according to this paper we received yesterday only 50% of veterans do get that.”
That’s the same thing we did with Students Not Soldiers. This is a workshop that was given to over 45 classrooms in every high school. We let students know how much money was being spent on the military, and why students were joining the military. We gave them the facts and the realities, just so they could have more information before making a choice. Most of the students that were in the workshop changed their mind from, “Oh we want to join the military” to “I’ll go to college and try to get a good job.”
Interview by Lynn Koh.
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