Fasters, UCLA Officials Meet to Defuse Protest : Education: 1,000 march to back hunger strikers’ bid for Chicano studies department. Talks resume today.

After hundreds of demonstrators marched 14 miles across Los Angeles to show support for nine UCLA hunger strikers, negotiators worked into the night Saturday but failed to resolve a nearly 2-week-old dispute over establishing a separate Chicano studies department.

A closed-door session in Murphy Hall on Saturday afternoon marked the first time that all nine hunger strikers had met with high-ranking representatives of UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young since May 25. They began fasting then to protest the university’s refusal to upgrade Chicano studies to an independent department. The 3 1/2-hour meeting was seen by participants as a positive sign that the 12-day protest might soon end with a compromise.

The hunger strikers, all of whom were weakened from their fast and some of whom were using wheelchairs, met with Chicano faculty and other supporters to consider offers from UCLA administrators, but no breakthrough was reported. Negotiations ended about 10 p.m. and were expected to resume at noon today.

“I think the process is very fluid here and it’s getting closer,” said state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), who met with the hunger strikers.

Similarly, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who also spent Saturday at the negotiating tables, said: “There are substantial areas that still need discussion.”

The evening session began after a campus crowd greeted a march that had grown from several hundred people to 1,000 nine hours after protesters set out from Olvera Street.

They all participated in an emotional rally at the tent city pitched to house the strikers and their supporters.

Among the speakers was Dolores Huerta, one of the founders of the Chicano farm labor movement in California. Huerta led the crowd in chanting the names of the nine hunger strikers and said: “They are giving a tremendous offering against the racism in our educational system.”

Earlier in the day, several high-ranking UCLA administrators were cautious, saying that a deal was close but that the complicated politics among the strikers might delay things. Clearly, UCLA wants an end to the embarrassing national publicity and the rising tide of Latino criticism of the campus. But the school’s leaders say they do not want to be perceived as rewarding pressure tactics only to find another ethnic group making similar demands next week.

Young remained nearby in his office while several deans and vice chancellors, along with Hayden, talked with the hunger strikers.

The bargaining focused on a plan to sharply increase the powers and freedom of the 20-year-old interdisciplinary Chicano studies program. Stopping just short of calling it a department, the compromise would give the enhanced program power to hire its own professors and allow professors from other departments to transfer into it.

An independent department not only has the power to hire full-time faculty and assign their teaching duties, but it also has significant control over its budget and administration. In contrast, interdepartmental programs have little control over budgets or hiring faculty.

In a late April decision, Young said the program’s interdisciplinary status should not be changed because it enriches the Chicano curriculum. But the protesters contend that it keeps Chicano studies as a second-class discipline.

The other crucial element Saturday was a letter that Young faxed to City Atty. James K. Hahn, seeking to address protesters’ demands. In the letter, Young asks that no charges be filed against the overwhelming majority of the 99 students who were arrested in a May 11 incident that allegedly caused $50,000 damage at the UCLA faculty center.

“The vast majority . . . are UCLA students in good standing and with unblemished student records,” the letter says. “I have no doubt that these students approached the events of May 11 with the noblest of intentions. Although I fervently believe that those engaged in civil disobedience must be willing to suffer the consequences of their actions, I respectfully submit that these students have already suffered an ordeal with lasting impressions,” Young wrote, referring to the fact that some were jailed for up to 30 hours.

Young nonetheless remained neutral as to the fate of seven students who may face vandalism charges. That looms as a major obstacle to a compromise because the hunger strikers want Young to seek clemency for those seven students as well.

“The issue of those charges could hang us up,” said Vivien Bonzo, co-chairwoman of a community group that has lobbied for creation of a department.

A university spokesman said Young would not budge on that point.

The marchers, who ignored Saturday’s rain to show their support for the strikers, said they hoped their action would be the beginning of a revitalization of a Chicano movement that languished in the 1980s.

“We’re here to stand up for justice. These kids who have put their lives on the line are a catalyst for a new movement--equality for all in Los Angeles,” said Armando Martinez, a history graduate student from UC Riverside, who shielded himself from the rain with a red plastic garbage bag.

“This is a question of power,” said Jose Antonio Sanchez, a UCLA dental student whose farm worker parents immigrated to the San Joaquin Valley from Mexico.

Many of the marchers were parents--some carrying toddlers on their shoulders--who believe the move to educate their children about Chicano culture and history is crucial to the self-esteem, identity and future of the next generation. Some said knowing more about one another will help ease racism in Los Angeles.

“The hunger strikers are suffering for all of our kids. I want my child to know our history, which so often is forgotten or twisted,” said garment worker Ramiro Garate, 42, who said he dropped out of a Mexican school in the sixth grade to help feed his family. Garate’s oldest child now attends USC.

“Our kids don’t know who they are. They have no role models. They see no leaders in their schools who are like them,” said Long Beach elementary schoolteacher Rosa Aderon-Salinas as she pushed her 2-year-old girl, Lumino, in a stroller past MacArthur Park. Aderon-Salinas said the Los Angeles public schools’ commitment to teaching about Chicano culture was minimal.

“The most they do is serve a burrito on the 5th of May.” She said she hopes the UCLA students’ actions will have a domino effect, prompting Chicanos to demand that their elementary and secondary schools teach about Chicanos.

“We have roots. We don’t want to lose them,” construction worker Jose Garcia, 48, said. “If people don’t have roots, they don’t have an identity. They are lost. They fall prey to gangs that can offer them an identity, and drugs.”