GLR September-October 2025

ESSAY First to Riot: The Girls of Los Guilucos D ENNY N IVENS

A T SIX O’CLOCK on the evening of Thurs day, March 19th, 1953, 79 inmates entered the main dining hall at Los Guilucos School for Girls, a state correctional institution seven miles east of Santa Rosa in the tranquil Sonoma Valley. Los Guilucos was considered the gem of the California Youth Authority (CYA). The school housed 159 girls between ages eleven and seventeen from all over the state, each assigned private living quarters with pastel colored walls, bed, dresser, radio, and floral-patterned drapes. There were no barred windows and no locks on the dormitory room doors. It was intended to be homey. Fifteen minutes into the dinner hour, a fourteen-year-old girl stood up from her seat at one of the long tables and began swinging her arms at the girl opposite her, who rose and did the same. In a few seconds many more were on their feet, scream ing and overturning tables. The four adults in the room quickly lost control. Girls used chairs to break windows, and about fif teen climbed out onto the school grounds. Several were cut by broken glass. Once outside, they used rocks and sticks to smash the windows of the administration building and dormitories. Only one male attendant was on the property. School offi cials summoned assistance from the sheriff’s office in Santa Rosa and the Sonoma State Home, an institution for people with developmental disabilities. Eventually the calls for help would bring eight sheriff’s deputies, two security officers from the

State Home, two California Highway Patrol officers, several off-duty school supervisors and security officers, and a flock of reporters from local and Bay Area newspapers. When reinforcements arrived, they found sixty girls wan dering the 315-acre grounds, many of them crying, cursing, or calling for their mothers. About forty were engaged in vandal ism. Some had broken into the staff’s vending machine and stolen money and sodas, then pitched the empties at officers. A thrown bottle struck a lieutenant from the State Home’s security force on the nose, while another narrowly missed a reporter. There was no perimeter fence, so the guards formed a cordon around the grounds. By half past seven, most of the violence had been contained, but flare-ups continued until ten o’clock. Twenty girls had fled in a break for freedom. Fourteen were quickly rounded up and locked in the Observation and Treat ment ward—“O & T”—of the school hospital, which had be come a makeshift maximum-security wing, but other girls smashed the supposedly shatterproof windows from the outside. The girls inside broke toilets off fittings and used them to bash through the remaining windows, and they were free. Several eluded capture by hiding in bushes near the grounds. At half past nine, ten girls were found in the town of Kenwood, three-and-a-half miles away—they’d broken into a store and were taken back into custody, drunk and reeking of beer. Three more were picked up an hour later on the highway outside Santa Rosa. One turned up the next night at her foster parents’ home in San Francisco, sixty miles south. Girls who hadn’t taken part in the riot were sent to their dormitories. Those who’d missed dinner were given sandwiches, soft drinks, and candy. The more violent were corralled in the O & T ward, in a section where the windows were still intact. The school physician administered injections of a sedative but quickly ran out and called Sonoma County Hospital for a supply of Nembutal. Thirty girls had been injured, four badly enough to be sent to the county hospital. A sixteen-year-old was hurt seriously, with severe cuts from broken glass on her eye, arm, and leg, and was in a state of shock caused by blood loss. Doctors sta bilized her and reported her condition as “good” but warned she might lose sight in the injured eye. Damage to the school, mostly in the form of some 400 broken windows, was estimated at $5,000 to $6,000. Hardest hit were the buildings constructed in the previous year. In addition, furniture was smashed, dinner plates broken, bed linens torn. Nothing like this had happened in the nine years since the institution had opened. Reporters overheard school officials say the riot was caused by “a homo sexuality problem.” The Los Guilucos incident came amid a national wave of prison riots. Twenty-five major inmate uprisings had taken place in the previous year at institutions across the nation. After a massive disturbance involving more than 2,000 men incarcer

Santa Rosa Press Democrat , 3/22/1953. The caption reads: “Police handcuff rioting girl at Los Guilucos Friday Night.”

Denny Nivens is an independent researcher based in Hermosa Beach, CA, with a special interest in LGBT history of the early Cold War.

September–October 2025

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