Young Hunger Striker Savors Difficult Victory

It was the sweetest candy bar Norma Montanez had ever eaten and it was her victory meal.

As the 14-day hunger strike at UCLA ended in compromise Monday, 16-year-old Norma celebrated with her first food in two weeks: a Hershey chocolate bar with almonds.

“Oh, it tastes good,” said Norma, her cupped hand holding a couple of chocolate-covered nuts that her 119-pound body could not yet digest. “I haven’t eaten in 14 days. I still can’t eat the almonds.”

A San Fernando High School junior, Norma was the youngest of the 10 protesters who camped in the center of campus and refused food until UCLA administrators agreed to create a separate Chicano studies department.

After two tense weeks, university officials on Monday agreed to fund the Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies, which will have many of the powers of a traditional academic department, but minus the title.

“I’m happy,” said Norma, a B student who joined the strike with her older sister, Cindy, to highlight the concerns of Chicanos. “I am really, really happy.”

Happy, she said, not only that the two most trying weeks of her life were over, but happy that she had made a difference, that her actions had changed things. And looking back, it was worth the hunger pangs and the weakness that became the only constant from day to day.

“This made me realize why people go on hunger strikes,” she said, her voice sometimes faint and her eyes sometimes distant, the lingering effects of shedding eight pounds in 14 days. “It was difficult, but I learned how people are.”

In two weeks without food or even vitamin-enriched water, Norma learned about herself too. She found a strength she never knew she had, a beauty that radiates from within. Even as her sister collapsed from weakness, Norma believed that she and the others would emerge from their protest unscathed.

“I knew I wasn’t going to die,” she said. “It didn’t really worry me that much. My dad taught me that the mind can move mountains.” Others saw Norma’s strength, earning her the Aztec name Ixtlapapayotl, or Heart of the White Butterfly.

A thin dancer with long dark hair and big brown eyes, Norma clutched the stuffed monkey her boyfriend gave her and said she felt well Monday. A little weak. A little tired. Very hungry. But otherwise fine.

Doctors said she was starting to develop minor liver problems, “but me, I don’t know about that,” Norma said, smiling. “I can walk and I can talk. None of of us are in really bad condition. My body feels fine.”

It will be several days before Norma and the other strikers will be able to eat solid food. And it will be several days before she will be able to return to the final weeks of school in San Fernando.

“I don’t know when I’m going back,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to carry my books.”

She is in no real hurry. She has learned in the past two weeks more than she has in months of school, she said.

“This will help me later on in school,” she said, adding that she wants to attend UCLA like her sister and brother.

Her experiences during the past two weeks, she said, amounted to a crash course in the history of her people. She learned more about labor leader Cesar Chavez, more about a culture she had taken for granted.

“I never thought it wasn’t a good idea,” she said. “I wasn’t fighting for something dumb. I was fighting for something for the community, something for the new generation.”

Even so, young Norma said she is not eager to repeat the experience.

“It would have to be for a really good cause,” she said.