During the fall semester of 1992, Governor Pete Wilson was threatening to triple tuition at community colleges. Needless to say, many students were pissed off. A campaign to fight the fee increases began with the formation of a student coalition. The Coalition was led by radicals in the group MEChA (a self-empowerment Chicano/a group) and people in the UAF. We produced info about the fee hikes and anti-Pete Wilson posters that we put up all over school. We organized a rally at school and blasted the school government for not representing the students' needs.
The student government said we were on the same side, but denounced our tactic and our goals and created obstacles for us to organize. The school administration began harassing members of the coalition. After a very popular and radical rally, during which a picture of Pete Wilson was burned, an effigy of a politician was throw around and kicked, calls for students reclaiming the school and a debate between a student government representive and a coalition represetative about anarchism (with the crowd of students
cheering for anarchism), the adminstration made threats.
Most of the speakers at the rally were Latino/a and there were two white speakers. The two white speakers who didn't actually know each other were called into the Dean of Students' office and a story was fabricated that the two students had vandalized the school late at night and a janitor identified us from photos taken of us at the rally. While we had put up posters and used chalk to write slogans many times, we didn't do this vandalism - regardless, the point was they wanted to scare us. They said that we would be expelled, fined 600 bucks, our units made non-transferrable and we'd be arrested at some point while we were in class. The lead organizer, David Rojas later told us that the administration was trying to prevent multiracial coalitions to form. The Coalition fought back, supportive Latino/a professors began investigating the situation and the threats stopped.
UAF members along with others in the Coalition started an underground newsletter called Molotov Cocktail that writes about student organizing and an end to domination. The MC is currently on its 9th issue.
During summer break members of the UAF and MEChA started up a study group reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The study group fell apart after a few meetings, but some of us read the whole book.
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