Their walkout at Menlo Park High School will be one of many that have been taking thousands of students out of the classroom and into the streets in protest of immigration bills being debating in Washington, D.C. The largest student walkouts since the 1960s, these students were not responding to any great call from a national leader and waited for no adult supervision. They just up and did it, and are making history as they go.

For a younger generation that just weeks ago had only romantic documentaries of the civil rights era to understand American mass movements, we finally have a point of reference of machine-stopping-collective action of our own. The faded black and white images of the March on Washington have been replaced and updated in the American consciousness by ones of Los Angeles buildings swallowed in a sea of brown faces and white T-shirts.

Young people like B-Dog are organizing in a fashion more reminiscent of the Zapatistas than the civil rights movement. It is self-organized, and turns out thousands without an apparent figurehead. The most commonly heard descriptor of the protests in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities is "spontaneous."

B-Dog's approach is consistent with the students I met in San Jose who walked out of school in the hundreds on March 27. They went from school to school, gaining numbers and momentum as they went, and marched over 15 miles in the rain to arrive at the seat of power in Silicon Valley -- downtown San Jose.

When I asked Joel, a 16-year-old junior at Silver Creek high school, how the word spread about the walkouts, he showed me his phone. They had been text-messaging each other during the day and posting messages on the popular Web site MySpace.com at night. The same technologies indigenous to youth culture that adults have said are isolating their children are being used to initiate a mass movement. And while we older activists get hung up on names, nowhere in these student protests did we see a "Coalition to" or "Students Against." At the San Jose walkout, when a news van would drive by, the students would just belt out their school name like they were at a pep rally.

But don't mistake a lack of hierarchy with a lack of political savvy. B-Dog even did a test run of the walkout. "I walked out of class and yelled down the hallways for others to do the same. When they came I asked if they knew why they were walking out. If they said no, I told 'em‚ to go back to class." Since the warm-up walkout, he and his classmates have been meeting during lunch to "educate each other" before the big day. Since many of the students are bused in from East Palo Alto, a city that was once predominantly African-American but is changing into a Latino-majority one, his focus now is on getting non-Latino students involved.

In San Jose, the most commonly heard way young people described the March 25 protests was that it was "like Cinco de Mayo." That connection was made not only due to the abundance of Mexican flags, but because that celebration was the only point of reference young people had of taking over the street. They even did it the same way, yelling and chanting while hanging out of cars. The difference now is that these San Jose youth are doing in coordination with youth all across the country, and the energy is being recognized as political.

As activist and advocacy organizations stumble over each other to place themselves in the front of a movement that was created without them, young people like B-Dog have already been transformed by their creation of collective action. When asked about where this movement, his movement, is headed, B-Dog says, "I can see a lot of people dropping out eventually, but once they've experienced the walkout, they'll always know what's possible."