A Los Angeles County elected official who caused an uproar by posting a video to social media calling on local street gangs to rise up and “protect” their “turf” against federal immigration enforcement agents is a leading official in the nation’s second-largest city’s school system. Unsurprisingly, LA public schools actively teach their students to resist “white supremacy,” embrace Marxist-tinged Mexican Chicano liberation theory, and learn how “to become anti-racist leaders.”
Cynthia Gonzalez is the vice mayor of Cudahy, a city located in the southeastern part of LA County. Her since-deleted video shows her challenging area gangs to join in on the often violent anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests that rocked the City of Angels in June.
“It’s everyone else who’s not about the gang life that’s out there protesting and speaking up,” Gonzalez exclaimed in the video. “We’re out there ... protecting our turf and protecting our people. And, like, where you at?” This “our people” rhetoric is the language of a Chicano La Raza ideology dating back to the social revolutionaries of the 1960s that declares much of the southwestern United States is “stolen land” that must be returned to Mexico.
Disturbingly, Gonzalez also serves as a key figure in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Teaching LA High School Kids to Hate
“She has served LAUSD students and families since 2002 in the capacity of classroom teacher, Title I/Bilingual Coordinator, and School Principal in the communities of Southeast Los Angeles, South Central Los Angeles, Florence-Firestone, and Boyle Heights,” her official Cudahy city government bio reads. “She currently works as the Director of Pilot Schools Support and Innovation, supporting 40 Pilot Schools in LAUSD.”
LAUSD actively indoctrinates students with the radical propaganda inherent to the Chicano movement. A description on a 2024 LAUSD High Schools Course on Chicana/o Studies found at the district website states: “[t]he course also examines the ways that race and racism, white supremacy, colonialism, settler colonialism, and intersectional marginalization have been, and continue to be, profoundly powerful social and cultural forces that have impacted the experiences of the Chicana/o people.”
The summary clearly identifies the course as designed for students in “grades 9-12.” It goes on to decry Chicano race categorization in America as perpetuating “ongoing struggles within a white-supremacist US context.”
The LAUSD also embraces Ethnic Studies as per legislation passed in California and signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021, requiring that state high schools offer such coursework beginning in 2025-26. The mandate has not been funded, so the courses are up in the air for now. LAUSD is ready to roll, however. In 2022, it adopted a strikingly belligerent layout of what its Ethnic Studies regimen would entail.
“This includes the self-determination of those who have ancestral roots and knowledge who have resisted and survived settler colonialism, racism, white supremacy, cultural erasure, as well as other patterns, structures, and systems of marginalization and oppression. The discipline uses culturally and community-responsive pedagogical practices to empower students to become anti-racist leaders,” LAUSD asserts.
This seems to be at the heart of the anger-filled rhetoric that fueled the anti-ICE street rioters in Los Angeles.
As educators like Gonzalez fully know, a sizable chunk of LA public school students are illegal aliens. “Though LAUSD does not collect information about students’ immigration status, an estimated 10% of LA County residents are [illegals],” local news site LAist wrote June 13 while reporting on widespread anti-ICE agitation at LAUSD graduation ceremonies.
The article revealed how routine it is for hardcore leftist activist groups to harness high school students to their cause, with Los Angeles police officers lending a helping hand as well. “Mau Trejo, an organizer with the activist group Students Deserve ... attended the Maywood graduation,” LAist reported. “They [Trejo and at least two LA police officers] beamed with pride while watching the student activists they’ve worked with receive their diplomas. Together, they’ve advocated to end policing in schools.”
Apparently, this is the typical public high school cultural setting in Los Angeles today.
“We want schools to divest from criminalization and policing,” Students Deserve proclaims on its website. “We want schools to invest in us as Black, Muslim, undocumented, indigenous, and queer youth in poor and working class communities of color. We follow the lead of Black Lives Matter in demanding that our schools defund the police and defend Black life.”
‘We Have Schools That Require Revolutionary Educators’
Students Deserve is a “grassroots coalition of students, parents, and teachers fighting for justice in education and beyond,” the organization’s Instagram page states. LAUSD instructors are openly hailed as fellow comrades for the cause.
Gonzalez seems to fit seamlessly into this radical milieu. She classifies herself as a “revolutionary educator.”
She is included among prominent editorial reviewers for a 2021 book titled Revolutionary School Culture: The 6 Principles of Unlocking Your School's Hidden Treasure.
“My name is Amen Mandela Rahh and I am a Revolutionary Principal,” its author, a black activist and former Compton City Council member, defiantly proclaims. He was the principal of a Watts high school at the time the book was published.
"If you see yourself as a Revolutionary Educator, this book is for you,” Gonzalez says in her featured blurb touting the book. “If you aren't sure if you see yourself as a Revolutionary Educator, but it is something you are striving for, this book is for you ... This book will guide you through practices in which you can engage, to make revolutionary education a reality at your school. This book matters because we have hundreds of schools that require Revolutionary Educators."
The FBI is probing Gonzalez’s shocking direct appeal to criminal gangs. Perhaps federal investigators should look beyond that for the moment and focus instead on how she is laboring to mold young, impressionable minds in the Los Angeles public school system, a great number of whom are illegal aliens, to surrender themselves to a militant worldview of racially charged grievance. And it is all being done at taxpayer expense.
