To begin our blog we would like to first and foremost start off by introducing ourselves, our names are Brenda Gonzalez and Ivone Santana, we are UCLA undergraduate students who were also a product of LAUSD schools. We both knew from the get go of our Oral History and Collective Memory: Research Methods and Applications of 21st-Century Narratives course at UCLA that we wanted to shed light on the strike as it touches many aspects of our personal lived experiences in receiving our k-12 education within LAUSD.
Our research is centered on the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) against Los Angeles Unified School District. On January 14, 2019, 30,000 teachers walked out in what was the first teacher's strike in Los Angeles since 1989. Teachers stood at the picket line to shed light on the need for bettering our public educational system in Los Angeles the second largest districts in the country which serves approximately about 64,000 students who are predominantly students of color.