17
THE SAME STRUGGLE
Immigrant Rights and Educational Justice
– José Calderón –
Pitzer College and Latino/a Roundtable of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys, Pomona, California
José Calderón describes how he has made the connection between the struggles for immigrant rights and educational justice in his work as an activist scholar in the city of Pomona, in Los Angeles County. José begins by telling his own story of arriving as an immigrant to this country and the role of public education in opening opportunities in his life. He discusses a number of overlapping campaigns: ending police checkpoints, fighting for voting rights, creating alternatives to gang violence, and promoting community schools. He discusses the deep relationship-building processes that occurred through these campaigns that created multiracial coalitions with a united vision combining immigrant rights and educational justice.
MY PASSION FOR BUILDING BRIDGES between the struggles of our immigrant communities and educational justice lies in my own history as an immigrant. I came to the US at the age of seven with my parents, who worked in the fields as farmworkers all their lives. We lived in the barrio above a gas station in one room with a wood stove and no indoor plumbing. I started school with seven other students from Mexico who, like me, could not speak English. We all faced the dual problem of being poor and unable to speak English. Thanks to a teacher who stayed with me after school, I was able to learn English and find some success that led to my graduation from high school, from college, and ultimately from a doctoral program. The other Mexican-origin students in my class were not as fortunate; all of them eventually dropped out of school.
When I graduated from the University of Colorado in 1971, I took a bus to Delano, California, in order to meet Cesar Chavez and join the farmworkers movement. When I arrived during a grape workers strike, I heard the words that changed the rest of my life. At an evening rally at Forty Acres, the central headquarters of the United Farm Workers Union, Cesar challenged the young students there. He told us that there is only one thing for sure, and that is death. Between now and when you die, the question is how we will use our lives. We can easily throw it away on drugs, selfishness, and material things, thinking these will bring us happiness. But he assured us that if we commit our lives in service to others, to empower others, when we grow old and look back on our lives, we will be able to say that they have truly been meaningful.
Transformed by this experience, I returned to my hometown of Ault, Colorado, and created a school with eighteen young English language learners in an old garage in my parents’ backyard. When the local school board told our students to go “back to Mexico” if we wanted bilingual education in the schools, thirty students and I organized a four-day, seventy-mile march to the state capitol. Hundreds of supporters met us along the way and cheered us on. When my students returned, they took the lead in organizing schools throughout the county, resulting in some of the best bilingual programs in the state.
Because most of the English language learners came from immigrant families, the issues of educational justice in the schools became intertwined with the struggle for immigrant rights in our communities. Hence, some of the same parents who organized for bilingual education in the schools also organized to protect undocumented residents. They won a commitment from Sheriff Richard Martinez and the Weld County Sheriff’s Department that they would not actively stop and detain undocumented immigrants. These experiences led me to make a fourteen-year commitment to organizing in Northern Colorado for both immigrant rights and educational justice.
I left Colorado to pursue a PhD in sociology at UCLA, but it was through these community organizing experiences that I truly came to understand the connections between the inequities in our communities and the problems that underrepresented students face in the classroom. My struggles with learning English and growing up in a poor immigrant farmworker family laid the foundation for the connections that I ultimately came to make, as a graduate student and professor, between immigrant and education rights issues and led me to become an activist scholar. As an activist, I have been part of efforts to build coalitions between parents, teachers, students, and community-based organizations to organize for both immigrant rights and educational justice. As a scholar, I conduct community-based research in support of these organizing efforts. As an activist scholar, I combine research and organizing to create change within the schools and in the neighborhoods where parents and students reside.
Fighting English-Only in Monterey Park
An early example of connecting the movements for immigrant rights and educational justice occurred in the city of Monterey Park, where I resided with my family while completing my sociology doctoral degree. Monterey Park, located just east of Los Angeles, is a city with over sixty-two thousand residents. It has gone from being 85 percent white in 1960, to being a majority-minority city today. According to the US Census, in 2015 about 65 percent of the population was Asian Pacific, 30 percent was Latino, and just 4 percent of the population was white.1 Many members of the Asian Pacific community and almost all the Latinos are immigrants.
I worked with other organizers in Monterey Park to build trust between community partners and researchers as a basis for making social change. Too often, researchers have gone into a community simply to gather their research and then leave when it is completed. Trust building takes longer. It requires that community partners see researchers contribute to community efforts, then embrace the research as a tool to advance their goals. In my case, I combined the roles of researcher and organizer and built trust by making a long-term commitment to the Monterey Park community.
In 1986 Monterey Park’s all-white city council passed a resolution requiring English-only in city literature and public signs. I was part of the Coalition for Harmony in Monterey Park (CHAMP), a multiethnic group of residents that brought together immigrant parents from the Latino and Asian Pacific communities to defeat the ordinance and eventually vote out of office its main proponents. Later, in response to right-wing politicians and individuals who blamed the Chinese community for street congestion and overbuilding in Monterey Park, our coalition elected candidates who called for planned development without casting the issue of growth in anti-immigrant terms.
This coalition created a level of trust that also helped solve conflicts in the city’s schools. When racial tensions erupted between Latino and Asian Pacific students in the Alhambra School District, immigrant parents worked together to create a district-wide Multi-Ethnic Task Force comprising parents, students, PTA members, the teachers union, staff, and administrative personnel. To counter the claims of some school officials who denied the existence of racial tensions in the schools—blaming tensions on “machismo” or the natural “hormones” of teenagers—I worked with the task force to carry out a survey of fifteen hundred students, including three hundred limited-English-speaking students. We found that 86 percent of the students perceived racial tensions as a very serious problem in the schools. We used the research to get the school board to adopt a policy for dealing with hate-motivated behavior, to institutionalize classes in conflict resolution, and to create the option of mediation as an alternative to student expulsions.
We knew that conflicts in the schools and the community are linked. As a large influx of Asian Pacific immigrants, primarily Chinese, had settled in Monterey Park, the unity with Latino parents and students was brought about by finding common ground rooted in their histories as immigrants. By advancing a strategy of coalition building, the two groups were able to collectively use research as a tool to advance a multicultural curriculum and conflict resolution programs that benefited both groups.
The experience in Monterey Park helped to solve a dilemma that I faced in connecting my position in the academic world with community-based participatory research, teaching, and learning. Rather than perpetuating the traditional idea that researchers should not participate in the organizations they study, this participatory research and action experience allowed for my involvement as both an organizer and researcher in the community. When I accepted a faculty position at Pitzer College and moved to the Pomona Valley in Los Angeles County, I took the lessons learned in Monterey Park and began organizing in the city of Pomona. Here again, I combined research and organizing to help parents and students build connections between the immigrant rights and educational justice movements.
Ending Police Checkpoints in Pomona
My students and I first joined parents and community leaders in organizing a broad-based coalition to build a local social justice movement that exposed the unjust use of police checkpoints to target immigrants. Over the past twenty-five years, the city of Pomona has experienced the demographic changes taking place throughout Southern California. According to the US Census, it is now a majority-minority city that in 2015 was about 71 percent Latino, 6 percent black, 9 percent Asian Pacific, and 11 percent non-Hispanic white.2 When the police in the city of Pomona began to locate checkpoints in front of schools and businesses and in neighborhoods that primarily served Latino families and immigrant workers, immigrant parents and supporters formed a coalition called Pomona Habla (Pomona Speaks). Through this coalition, we launched a research project that spurred organized actions against traffic checkpoints in the city of Pomona. Our research uncovered data that showed that fewer than .001 percent of the drivers being stopped at checkpoints were driving under the influence of alcohol.3 The statistics also showed that the majority being stopped were undocumented immigrants who did not have a driver’s license and could not afford to pay the exorbitant ticket, towing, and impoundment fees.
The Pomona Habla coalition launched a series of demonstrations and actions in which community people and students held signs alerting drivers to the checkpoints on the streets. Tensions in the city peaked when the police held a four-way checkpoint (covering four street corners) involving police from forty cities, resulting in the stopping of 4,027 vehicles, the impoundment of 152 of them, and the issuing of 172 tickets.4 In response, Pomona Habla led a demonstration of more than a thousand people and stationed students and community members at every checkpoint. The research and actions resulted in the city council’s agreeing to stop four-way checkpoints, to allow checkpoints only in residential areas, and to develop an ad hoc committee to review citizen complaints and recommendations.
The community-based research and organizing of this coalition became a model for the passage of ordinances in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Baldwin Park that permit an unlicensed driver to allow another licensed driver to take custody of the vehicle rather than having it impounded. These statewide efforts led to the introduction of a bill by California assemblyman Gil Cedillo, which was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in 2011, that restricts local police from impounding cars at a traffic checkpoint simply because a driver is unlicensed. This ultimately led to the passage of a bill allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Pomona Habla, which included community-based organizations as well as students from local schools and colleges (including students from my classes at Pitzer College), gathered more than ten thousand signatures in the region in support of this bill.
ORGANIZING AND RESEARCH IN VOTING RIGHTS
In reaction to these victories, the Pomona Police Association, together with other conservative forces in the city, targeted one of the leaders of this coalition, city councilwoman Cristina Carrizosa. They tried to oust her from office by placing a bill, Measure T, on the ballot in November 2012 to replace the election of city council members by district with at-large elections. The measure sought to turn back the will of the people in Pomona who, following lawsuits by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Southwest Voter Registration Project, voted in 1990 to scrap citywide elections in favor of single-member districts to bolster minority representation. Working with the coalition, my students and I carried out research that revealed a voting rights history of how the district elections came about and who was behind Measure T. Our research exposed how the police association had given over fifty thousand dollars to back this bill and uncovered their sponsorship of a leaflet depicting a white hand extended upward over brown hands reaching from below.5 A multiracial coalition of community members and organizations held a press conference, walked door-to-door, and on Election Day defeated Measure T, meanwhile helping elect two additional council members who were supportive of immigrant rights.
COALITION BUILDING ON STREET VIOLENCE
After the defeat of Measure T, the issue of “gangs” and street violence emerged in the city. In response to a growing homicide rate, the police carried out a raid of alleged gang members that resulted in the arrests of 165 people. Our coalition believed that the most successful strategies for dealing with growing violence among youth needed to focus on prevention rather than criminalization and enforcement. My students and I, along with members of a progressive coalition led by the Latino and Latina Roundtable and the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1428, carried out research for a series of community meetings. We argued that gang violence would not exist if gangs did not satisfy the desperate needs of young people for family, education, mentoring, housing, employment, health care, and spiritual and social support. As we expanded the coalition to include parents, students, teachers, and community-based organizations, we championed a strategy of countering “gangs” with an economic justice plan and capacity-building strategies for quality jobs, housing, health, education, and preschool/after-school programs, particularly in low-income sectors of the community.
In this process, we studied successful gang-prevention models, including one developed by Father Gregory Boyle in Los Angeles. This model addresses young people’s needs by developing an alternative elementary school, after-school and daycare programs, community organizing, and an extensive Homeboy Industries economic development project, including Homeboy Bakery, Homeboy Silkscreen, and Homeboy/Homegirl Merchandise. We convened a community summit conference based on this model to advance the idea of addressing the structural problems affecting young people and their families in Pomona.
ADVANCING COMMUNITY SCHOOLS AND A BROADER MOVEMENT
This new direction in addressing youth issues led to the development of a partnership between the community-based Latino and Latina Roundtable organization, of which I am president, the Pomona Valley Chapter of the NAACP, and the Pomona Unified School District. As part of this partnership, a community development committee has held monthly meetings to implement various community building and educational transformation projects. This coalition has included parent leaders from the community-based initiatives on checkpoints and gangs. It pursued the proposals first identified at the summit meetings to shift away from law enforcement and toward strategies focused on youth and community development.
The coalition has started to implement the community schools concept, where schools provide education and health and social services to children, parents, and community members. After the Latino and Latina Roundtable and the NAACP spoke in favor of a resolution to implement the concept of community schools, the Pomona Unified School Board unanimously voted its support. Pomona Unified advanced strategic plans that include (1) culturally relevant and engaging curricula; (2) an emphasis on high-quality teaching, not high-stakes testing; (3) support systems that include health care and social/emotional services; (4) positive discipline practices, such as restorative justice; (5) parent and community engagement; and (6) inclusive school leadership committed to making the transformational community school strategy integral to the school’s mandate and functioning.
Following Cesar Chavez’s principle of using one’s life in service to others, I helped get the school district to join a coalition that has organized an annual Cesar Chavez Pilgrimage march and festival focusing on social justice themes. These themes, including solidarity with Black Lives Matter and with Mexican students gone missing in 2014 and supporting ethnic studies and sanctuary for all, offer examples of the broad-based understanding we have developed about the connections across the issues of educational justice and immigrant rights.
With this intersectional understanding, the partnership has implemented workshops for hundreds of students and parents in how to qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, how to obtain a Matricula Consular card (an official identification document issued by the Mexican government), and how to obtain a California driver’s license. More recently, as part of a College for All statewide coalition, this partnership has expanded to endorse and actively implement California State Senate Bill 1050 (whose passage was led by one of my former students, Senate president pro tempore Kevin de León) to create a kindergarten-to-college pipeline of educational opportunity and success for students from low-income, English language learner, and foster youth backgrounds. The partnership on these pipeline issues has led to a series of extraordinary developments, including educational workshops for hundreds of parents, many of whom then lobby with us at the state capitol for bills to provide safe schools for immigrant children and to ban the use of public funds to aid federal agents in deportation actions, as well as other legislation to protect vulnerable students and advance educational equity.
CONCLUSION: EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE AT THE HEART OF IMMIGRANT RIGHTS
My own life experience and trajectory show how the pursuit of education is fundamental to the immigrant struggle. I am an organizer, an educator, and a member of the community. I use community-based research and organizing to build bridges across immigrant communities and between the immigrant rights and educational justice movements. This type of engagement and research shows the intimate connection between the two. It emphasizes the systemic and structural aspects of inequality and involves activist scholars in working alongside excluded communities on common projects to tackle the root causes of racism, exclusion, scapegoating, and inequality in our educational system and in our communities.
Scholar activists build a foundation of trust with communities by making a long-term commitment to working in genuine partnership to find and implement solutions to the problems communities are facing. This type of action and research moves away from charity or service and toward creating new models of democratic participation and coalition building for social change. This intersectional model appreciates the structural foundations of inequities experienced by immigrant communities in the classroom and community and builds strategies that connect the struggles for educational justice and immigrant rights.