Feature — Sylvia Medina tells her history of protests, strikes and racial tension in LA
Sylvia Medina has lived in LA county her entire life. She recalls a history of civil unrest and racial tension, and has learned where it all began.
Medina was born in 1964 in Huntington Park, CA, and lived in Los Angeles for most of her childhood. She grew up the youngest of four sisters, a single mother and an absent father.
Growing up in Los Angeles, she saw protests, strikes and racial tensions between Caucasians, Latinos and African-Americans.
“During the week of Martin Luther King Jr. day around 1974, my sisters and I could not go to school,” Medina said. “Blacks would gang up on Latinos because we were moving into their neighborhoods. They hosed my sister, Martha. They pulled my hair and ran away.”
She also saw the bus driver strike of 1976, as bus drivers protested for better wages, hours, benefits and security.
“They were picketing, and that affected us because the bus was our only mode of transportation. My sisters couldn’t go to school,” Medina said.
She met her husband, Robert Medina, in 1989 and they married in 1992.
In 2003, Sylvia Medina began working for the Long Beach Unified School District at Los Cerritos Elementary school as an office assistant. She plans to continue working for LBUSD until her retirement.
As she worked for the district, she began to see what causes people to become so divided at an early age.
“There were a lot of predominately white, wealthy families at that school, and the children and parents felt that rules did not apply to them. They played this expensive sport and began to put down minority families who could not afford it,” Medina detailed. “As a result, the children began to show signs of racial superiority.”
Medina said that these kids stated keep minority children from playing with them. They bullied and harassed Latino and African-American students.
“The parents were very dismissive of the issue, even as we told them they were forming a gang of superiority,” she said.
Medina traced the source of the children’s superior attitudes back to their parents.
“It’s the parent’s example that gives the kids this mentality,” she said.
Medina believes that parents set an example for their children, then their kids become more like them and adopt their beliefs.
She watched as children got into trouble and started fights while their parents were dismissive of their child’s issues.
Medina recalled one instance where a child brought drugs to school to follow in his father’s footsteps of leading a gang.
“I kept my son from falling down going down this path by staying involved in his interests like my mother did for my sisters and me,” Medina said. “That’s what I recommend for parents to do, stay involved in your kids’ lives, so they know you care.”
