LOS ANGELES _ Something was about to go down and no one wanted to make the first move.
My best friend Art and I stood in the quad at our usual lunch spot: near the fountain, under the big trees. Jocks and nerds, stoners and band geeks, cholos and artsy types milled about.
Finally, one kid walked to the chain-link fence that separated Anaheim High School from the street. He threw over his backpack and climbed. Then another. More. Dozens. So many the fence collapsed from the weight. A stream of students swelled into a flood that converged with a political tsunami.
On Nov. 2, 1994, more than 10,000 teenagers across California walked out to protest Proposition 187. The initiative sought to punish "illegal aliens" by denying them certain services, including access to public health care and education.
Proposition 187 split the psyche of the state like few things before or since.
Californians, confronted with a more diverse state and battered by the state's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, came to believe the problem was those so-called illegals and their children.
Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, facing an uphill reelection campaign, led the charge, releasing campaign ads that showed grainy footage of people swarming across the San Ysidro border crossing as an ominous voice intoned: "They keep coming."
Many Latinos, whether here legally legal or not, saw the proposition as an existential threat. Wilson's "they" looked an awful lot like them.
The student marches were the culmination of a month of anti-Proposition 187 teach-ins, debates, letter-writing campaigns and some of the largest protests California had seen since the Vietnam War.
It didn't work. The initiative easily won. Pundits declared Wilson a genius and predicted his victory, and the ballot measure he tied his fortunes to signified a major political realignment in California.
For a time, it seemed like it.
The true battle of Proposition 187, however, was just beginning. By the time it was over, the state that gave America conservative icons Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan was on the road to becoming a progressive powerhouse. Within 20 years, California was officially a "sanctuary" state, one where immigrants who lacked legal status could get everything from free health care to driver's licenses, and even serve on state commissions.
And many of the young Proposition 187 protesters were now leaders running the state.
"What 187 did is spawn a new generation of politicians," said Kevin de Leon, the former president pro tem of the California Senate, who was in his early 20s when he helped to organize a rally outside Los Angeles City Hall that drew more than 70,000 people. "There's no question about it. There's no ambiguity. There's no vagueness. There's no room for misinterpretation."
But Proposition 187 did something else: It gave Republican politicians a template with which to win elections and nativist hearts across the United States.
The hard feelings against immigrants _ most notably those in the country illegally, but if we're honest, not always _ was tapped all the way to the White House by one Donald Trump.
Trump the candidate said of Mexican immigrants: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. ... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." As president, he speaks of invasions and criminals and "illegals" and "big, beautiful walls." And yes, that feels like deja vu. But the vocal and angry rejection of Trump's views across America also feels like an another byproduct of the Proposition 187 battle.
So many have found a voice.
"When I answer the question, 'Why are you so passionate about civil rights or combating inequality,' I tell them 'Prop. 187,'" says Adrienna Wong, staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. She attended elementary school in the San Gabriel Valley during the campaign, and learned about it when "kids that I've been in the same class with for years started saying things like, 'You and your family should go back to where you came from. You're taking our jobs.'"
Back in the fall of 1994, my first brush with immigration politics came when I was walking home from Anaheim High School and a truckful of white teenage boys yelled at me "187! 187!"
I had no idea what they meant, until I got home and turned on the news. Those white boys who yelled at me were all the explanation I needed about the proposition.
I wanted to fight back, but had no idea how. Then word soon spread around campus about an upcoming anti-Proposition 187 walkout.
No one imagined any of what would become the initiative's legacy when my classmates left campus en masse one November day.
All we knew was that many adults had spent all of 1994 accusing our parents of destroying California.
And we weren't going to stay quiet anymore. And so many of us climbed over that fence. But not me. Not that day.
I hung back. My friends ended up on the local news, while I was one of maybe six students in my fifth-period history class.
We didn't say a word about what had just happened. We were ashamed for not being out there.
