On Tuesday, Nov. 5, 1968, 20-year-old Juanita Tamayo gathered up her books in a sociology class at San Francisco State College and walked out the door. She did not walk back in for five months.Tamayo, up until that day a rule-abiding graduate of Mercy High School raised in the strict Filipino, Roman Catholic tradition of San Francisco, was suddenly on the other side of the law as she walked round and round the campus quad carrying a handmade sign that read, “Not Radical, Not Militant. Just the Wretched of the Earth.”

“I realized that most Filipino kids didn’t have all the privileges that I had. That’s why I went on strike,” she says, noting that during the strike she still lived at home with her parents, in Cole Valley.

Her dad was a union janitor and her mother a hairdresser. They worked hard so that Tamayo did not have to, and there was the $50 per semester student fee at State to consider. But she was also a member of Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor, one of six minority student organizations forming the Third World Liberation Front, which led the strike. Their main demand was that a College of Ethnic Studies be established, with minority faculty and admission of more minority students.

This led to a standoff with the campus administration that only worsened on Dec. 2, 1968, when interim college President S.I. Hayakawa, a future U.S. senator, climbed onto a truck to rip the wires from a loudspeaker during a student rally. Both sides dug in and the strike ultimately became the longest, and maybe the most successful, student strike on any campus in America during a year when it seemed that they all had a strike.

Students from the Black Student Union, which had already been established at San Francisco State as the first BSU on any campus in the nation, were the militant leaders, but Tamayo made her own impression.

A picture that appeared in the Chronicle on Jan. 13, 1969, under the headline “Many Voices at S.F. State,” shows her looking stylish in a scarf and gloves as she walked the line.

“We had to look good,” she says, “because we were the model.”

Tamayo hosted strategy meetings at her parents’ home at night. Classes where held in the homes of supportive faculty, so that strikers would not fall behind in units.

“We were disciplined because we belonged to several institutions,” she says. “One was the military. Another was the union movement. A third was the Catholic church. A lot of us came out of the social justice movement.”

She rode the M-Ocean View to strike duty, only breaking for Christmas, “every day, rain or shine, even on weekends when classes weren’t held,” she says. “The tac (tactical) squad was there. The horses were coming at you and you could get beaten up. They didn’t care if you were a girl or not.”

Though there were some close calls, Tamayo avoided injury and jail. “I was lucky,” she says.

The strike finally ended on Thursday, March 20, 1969.

The strikers got their College of Ethnic Studies, the first academic department of its kind at any major university in the country. Tamayo was among students enlisted to develop the curriculum.

In June 1970, Tamayo graduated with honors, and on time. She was then hired as an administrator in the College of Ethnic Studies. She left to pursue a doctorate degree on a fellowship to the University of Chicago.

But she never finished, having married fellow grad student Robert Henry Lott and moved to Washington, D.C. After a long career as a government statistician/demographer, mostly with the U.S. Census Bureau, Tamayo Lott retired. When her husband died and her children grown and on their own, she moved home to an apartment near Japantown in San Francisco.

Fifty years after the fact, Eastwind Books of Berkeley published her memoir , “Golden Children: Legacy of Ethnic Studies, SF State.” She regularly goes back to Mercy High School, a few blocks from State, to talk to the all-female student body about careers. She recently returned from a lecture at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

“I go around to college campuses, and students ask if this can happen again,” she says. “I tell them ‘I don’t think so.’ You have to sacrifice, and this generation is not into sacrifice.”

Related articles