War of the Flea: Fight for Xicano Studies

Story of an eight-year student movement that created, through direct action and persistence, a Xicano studies program at Michigan State University in the 1990s. War of the Flea: The Fight for Xicano Studies is a real-life David v. Goliath story of Xicano students at Michigan State. Through their involvement with Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano de Aztlan (MEXA), agitation, and grassroots community organizing they forced a major university to establish a Xicano/Latino Studies program. Beginning in 1991, with the police murder of twenty-one-year-old Lansing local Cipriano Torres, Jr., these students and their small and increasingly marginalized community were barraged by attack after attack