As the 1968 Bilingual Education Act (BEA) reaches its 50th anniversary, we provide a critical historical review of its contradictory origins and legacy. By distilling the BEA's history into three periods that we label "power to the people," "pride for the people," and "profit from the people," we demonstrate that the bill was never meant to fully support 1960s Latinx activists' goal for a race radical bilingual education to confront racism and structural inequities, yet it offered a transitory moment in which aspirations for such goals were partially realized. This finding is significant, as the article concludes by exploring what possibilities there are to create new moments to imagine more in this neoliberal multicultural era of dual language education, where bilingualism and cultural diversity are too often commodified off the proverbial backs of Latinx youth.