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"Our unemployment is three times that of the whites in Los Angeles. Our economic situation is so bad that less than half of us are able to finish high school. That means we can't even break the language barrier with the whites, so we can't even begin to get the jobs we need—it's a vicious circle, but we'll break it any way we can. We have the leadership now, you know. Suddenly, our people are getting educations. In 1967 only 350 Mexicans were going to U.C.L.A.; now there are a thousand. This can make a revolution. We are demanding Mexican cultural studies in grade schools and high schools, and bilingual education. We are demanding better housing and jobs now. We will fight and picket and sit-in until we get them. And we will have our confrontations with the police, too, and they will be worse than those of the blacks because there are 2,000,000 of us here."
Cut to: Van Nuys Shopping Center
On my way to the center, a pretty girl (California bred, obviously) stands behind a table. "Exercise your constitutional rights," she urges. How can I resist? "I'm with the people's lobby," she explains. "We fill up petitions on contract for different kinds of groups. In California you can get most kinds of laws passed by the people without going near the legislature. The Clean-Air Council and a group called Write for Your Life are behind this one, but there are other smog groups, one called The Right to Clean Air, another called Stamp Out Smog—S.O.S.—and one called People Pledged to Clean Air. In that one, you pledge not to buy an internal-combustion car after 1975. Right now, there are 10,000 people in the state getting petitions signed against smog. The people of Southern California are madder than hell."
Cut to: San Fernando Valley
A lady I will call Joan Adkins lives in Mission Hills. On her color television set is a bowl of water with a statuette of Jesus submerged in it. She turns out to be the extreme in the antismog movement. "The smog here is very bad," she tells me. "I've been fighting it for twelve years. I have to put cream in my nasal passages, but sometimes my nose swells up anyway, and I chew gum. They say that helps. And I have to keep washing out my eyes. You know, they say that smog can affect your mental outlook, damage the brain.
"I've written to everybody about smog," she continues. "First I wrote my representatives; then I wrote the county supervisors and I wrote to Lyndon Johnson; and then I read where Nixon was gonna declare war on pollution, so I wrote him. I wrote Ronald Reagan and I wrote Mayor Yorty. I wrote the airlines, the car manufacturers and J. Edgar Hoover. Sometimes I picket. We had a couple of breathe-ins downtown; we wore health masks into the county supervisors' offices. There isn't much time left. We make more smog, inside our houses, you know, from all those jet cans: beer cans, shaving cream, hair spray. I often wonder if there's any Communist payoffs behind the smog."
Cut to: The Freeway North