Linda Esperanza Marquez High School
[4] The site of the school was previously used as a storage yard for used tires, then became a building materials recycling facility that drew community opposition, especially after it was used to store some 600,000 tons of concrete ruins (standing some 60 feet high) from a portion of the Santa Monica Freeway that collapsed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.[5] Linda Esperanza Marquez, for whom the school is named, is a community activist who fought to have the site (which she called the "mountain of death") cleared and reused."La Montaña" was made up of concrete rubble that created dangerous amounts of pollution.After a lengthy struggle they led a winning campaign in 1996 and in 2004 the cleanup finally began.[11] In the 2012–13 school year, Marquez enrolled 460 students and was 0.2% Filipino, 0.2% Black, and 99.6% Hispanic.