Back From the Front : Young Hunger Striker Returns to San Fernando High School

Norma Montanez, the San Fernando High School junior who spent two weeks on a hunger strike to force UCLA to bolster its Chicano studies program, wasn’t eating on her first day back at school Monday.

But that was normal for her. “I usually don’t eat at school,” she said during her lunch break. “When I get home, I eat. It’s because I don’t really get hungry (at school).”

But the 16-year-old knows hunger well from her recent experience of fasting at UCLA where, along with nine other protesters, she camped out at the center of the campus and refused food until administrators agreed to create a separate Chicano studies department. The protest ended last Monday after a compromise was reached.

“It was really difficult,” she said. “A lot of times, I just felt I wasn’t going to make it through.”

Montanez, who said she has regained the eight pounds that she lost during the strike and had suffered no side effects, spent the past week recuperating at home and easing her way back into a normal diet.

“I didn’t eat meat until (Sunday) when I had a hamburger,” she said. “The first few days, all I had was bread and tortillas. Vegetables, I couldn’t eat until the fourth day.”

Her doctor told her Saturday that she was fit to return to school and, while her voice was faint and her eyes distant a week ago, she appeared full of energy Monday. “She looks great,” said Ione Schoenwald, her counselor in San Fernando High’s magnet program. “I think the adrenalin, the excitement of the whole thing kept her going.”

“She looks the same,” agreed a classmate studying with her in the school library.

Montanez said it was “a little strange to come back (to school) because of the fact that I hadn’t been here for three weeks.” Her classmates, she said, had not been treating her any differently, although a few had asked her why a high-school student would join the UCLA protest.

“I just tell them that I really felt I had to be there and I wanted to support my sister,” a fellow hunger striker and a UCLA student.

The teen-ager, who has a B average, said her main concern was getting back on track with her studies so she can graduate next June. “I need to finish school, and I don’t want to repeat the last semester of 11th grade,” she said.

“If I really put the effort in and if my teachers let me have the time to make up the work, I feel I can graduate on time,” she added.

As part of the compromise that settled the standoff, UCLA 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.

While the strikers didn’t get everything they wanted, Montanez is still certain the protest was worthwhile. “I don’t regret it at all,” she said. “I believed it was a cause. I’m really happy that we got (the settlement).”

And her activism may not be limited to the college arena. “I think we should have Chicano studies in schools from the beginning,” she said. But don’t expect her to fast for that too. “If it was that difficult to get it in a college, imagine what it would be like in an elementary school.”