Activists Stress Chicano Studies, Concerted Push for More Latino Teachers : Education: Conference speakers encourage students to question traditional exclusion of their history and forebears’ contributions to this country. Speakers also offer tips on succeeding in college.

Betty Limon, 16, wished she had the courage to speak up when her history books ignore Mexicans’ contributions to the United States. She wants to learn from teachers who came here from Mexico, like she did. And most of all, she hopes she can be the first in her family to graduate from college.

The Anaheim High School honors student was one of about 40 students who attended the Chicano Youth and Community Conference on Saturday at Cal State Fullerton to discuss how they, as Chicanos or Mexican Americans, fit in the education system.

Community activists and professors encouraged the students to fight for more Chicano history and more Latino teachers in the schools by staging demonstrations, such as last year’s walkout and march at Fullerton College. On Sept. 16, Mexican Independence Day, about 300 high school and college students demonstrated near the college in favor of creating Chicano studies classes and departments.

Speakers also gave students specifics on which high school classes they need to get into college, and told them how to apply for college financial aid.

“Like they say, if you don’t know where you came from, how do you know where you’re going?” Limon said. “It’s so hard for Chicanos to succeed in college. There’s a cultural barrier.”

The conference was sponsored by the Solevar Community Development Corporation, which aims to increase solidarity among Chicanos.

“Liberation is our guiding principle,” said panelist Seferino Garcia, a Solevar activist from Anaheim. “Liberation will crush the chains of intellectual oppression.”

Garcia said he thinks violent teen-agers are the product of a school system that has ignored their background.

“We need our history taught now. It’s been 500 years of oppression,” he said. “If we do not bring in relevant Chicano education we will not be able to walk in the streets.”

Garcia and the other speakers said they hope the students realize the importance of working together to fight racism in the schools and the important role that public protests should play in their struggle to make education relevant to their culture.

Chicano studies classes, they said, would help Chicano students academically, because a focus on their heritage will make them feel worthy of attention in a system that usually just highlights Europeans’ contributions to history.

Organizers criticized Orange County school districts for the lack of Latino teachers.

According to 1992 statistics, 90% of the county’s teachers are white, while white students comprise 49% of Orange County’s student population from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Panelist Francisco Palacios, a freshman at Cal State Fullerton and a member of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA, told the teens that even seemingly trivial college customs can confuse an unprepared Mexican American student.

“After several days of a class my first semester, I saw the other students handing in papers. I said, ‘Why? The teacher didn’t tell us homework was due,’ ” Palacios said. “That’s how I learned what a syllabus was. The paper the teacher handed out turned out to be very important.”

Palacios had even more practical advice for the audience: “We get too hung up on partying, drinking, puppy love. Don’t let any guy or young lady tie you down.”

MEChA chapters at the university and several Orange County high schools helped put on the conference, which members said they hope will become an annual event.