Students demand a Chavez holiday

About 500 middle school and high school students skipped classes Friday in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles and marched to demand that Cesar Chavez’s birthday become a broader holiday.

Cesar Chavez Day is a holiday for state employees but is not a county or school holiday in Los Angeles. State courts were closed, but county employees reported to work.

The walkouts were smaller than last year, when nearly 40,000 students across Southern California protested by marching, blocking freeway traffic and circling Los Angeles City Hall. Last year’s protest occurred weeks after huge demonstrations across the country in favor of immigration reform.

Friday’s protests included students primarily from Roosevelt High School and Hollenbeck Middle School in Boyle Heights and Garfield High School and Belvedere Middle School in East L.A. Students from East Los Angeles College also participated.

The march supported a variety of causes, including a holiday in honor of Chavez, co-founder and longtime leader of the United Farm Workers labor union. Marchers also called for an end to immigration raids, amnesty for illegal immigrants and making the state a sanctuary where illegal workers would not be prosecuted.

Many called on the Los Angeles Unified School District to recognize the holiday as equivalent to Martin Luther King Day and to give students the day off.

Alma Soriano, 16, a junior at Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School in Lincoln Heights, said she was marching for the second year.

“Cesar Chavez should be recognized as a holiday in Los Angeles,” she said. “He fought for all the farmers. He fought for all of them to get paid equally. He helped his people. This is not just a day to miss school. It is a fight for equal recognition.”

In Santa Ana, about 180 students walked out of high schools. Angela Burrell, a spokeswoman for the city’s school district, said most of the district’s 15,000 high school students stayed in class. The district has held assemblies in recent weeks honoring the farmworkers’ late leader, who would have been 80 on Saturday.

“We planned it to be proactive, to celebrate the life and times of Cesar Chavez and what he stood for,” Burrell said. “It was a positive day.”

Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton said Friday he was glad that relatively few students participated and that there were no serious incidents.

With “a school system that has a 50% dropout rate and a phenomenal problem educating students, they would be much better off in school learning instead of walking around the streets,” he said.

Waving U.S. and Mexican flags, protesters in L.A. marched to City Hall. They were greeted by cheering shopkeepers and the honking of car horns from supporters in passing vehicles.

Daniel Garcias, 18, a senior at Palisades High School, said a day off in honor of Chavez would raise awareness about him.

“People have no idea who Cesar Chavez is, and it’s a shame,” Garcias said. “The stuff I’ve learned I had to look for myself because I was interested.”

tami.abdollah@latimes.com

Times staff writers Patrick McGreevy, Seema Mehta and Charles Proctor contributed to this report.