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I inherited the skin color of my mother, and subsequently grew up as a white passing Latina. My father and grandfather, two proud immigrants from Chile, were adamant that America does not give a choice in how a person succeeds. There is only one American way of being: you get good grades in school, you speak the dominant language, you have one single identity and you will succeed. Due to the privilege that I inherited through no effort on my part, this system worked for me. I grew up in a very affluent neighborhood and had access to any and all resources that I desired - from material resources like clothing and technology to educational resources like SAT tutoring and a private college counselor. I was exposed to different places across the nation by going on annual family summer vacations from New York to Washington. Both of my parents worked 9-5 jobs during the weekdays, so they were able to enroll me in extracurricular activities and attended all of my sporting events. My mom specifically had the resources to be involved in my education, being the president of our school’s education fund. I had a single identity at the time and that was being white, and I naively assumed that all kids were living the experiences that I was.
Growing up in an affluent neighborhood in the Bay Area in Northern California, there was limited diversity. I remember my father being the only Brown person in our community, but we never spoke of it. I remember on sports teams, I was always the girl who had dark hair amongst a sea of fair-skinned, blonde girls. My mother would joke that it was always easy to spot where I was on the field because I was the only one with dark hair and darker skin. I knew that I was a little different from my peers, but at this age, I did not have the language nor necessity to fully express these feelings. Reflecting back, this was the beginning of the development of my social justice vision and perhaps my first feelings of marginalization. Although I knew I was somewhat different, I was white-enough to fit in. I went to public schools in the Silicon Valley for all of my life and unbeknownst to me at the time, they were considered some of the best public schools in the state of California. From these experiences, I quickly figured out how to succeed in a meritocratic system - you regurgitate information, you get good grades and you follow the rules. Because of this, I was a very “successful” student, receiving multiple academic awards and never missing an Honor Roll list. Each student at my high school had a breadth of extracurricular activities to choose from and everyone received free access to a college counselor, boasting a 93% graduation rate. English was my native language so I also was afforded the opportunity to choose any elective that I wanted, and enrolled in several honors/AP courses. I remember playing sports on wide open grassy fields and freshly painted basketball courts. I assumed that all students were given the same quality of public school education and extracurriculars that I received and it was not until college that I had my first glimpse into the disparity amongst public school education.
In 2010, I decided to follow in the steps of my brother and attend Loyola Marymount University (LMU), located in Los Angeles, CA. Having a previous passion for environmental awareness, without hesitation I declared a major in Political Science and minor in Environmental Studies. Similar to how I navigated high school, I had access to a wide variety of resources and found academic success by memorizing and regurgitating information on exams and following all rules imposed on us. My college education was essentially a continuation of the experience that I had going to public schools from Kindergarten to 12th grade. My original intention was to go to law school to pursue a career in environmental law, even pursuing internships such as working for then Senator Barbara Boxer and spending a summer in Washington D.C. for the Wildlife Conservation Society. When an opportunity came up to volunteer as a tutor at a local elementary school near LMU, I accepted without hesitation, initially excited to build up my resume. It was then that I first witnessed the disparity in public school education. I walked onto the school’s campus, expecting to engage with an elementary school similar to the one that I attended growing up. Upon entering, I remember immediately noticing the building being old and run down, with big metal fences surrounding the school. The play area was a large square of black asphalt, with no grass or vegetation on site. The classrooms were portables, the technology was outdated and the teachers were struggling to manage 30 students by themselves in cramped spaces. One thing in particular I noticed was the color - all of the desks, walls and floors were monocolored, appearing as though it had not been updated at least for several decades. This was my first glimpse into an imbalanced educational public school system. I reflected on my own experience in public school education and began to wonder why the students at this elementary school were not being given access to the same resources that I had growing up. I presumed that being in Los Angeles, a city known for its weather and riches, schools would reflect that. This feeling weighed on me as I continued my journey of pursuing a career in environmental policy. However, I noticed that I kept feeling drawn to my tutoring experience in LAUSD. I frequently thought back to the joy I found in my relationships with the students as well as an overwhelming sense of discomfort knowing that my elementary experience was vastly different from other student’s experience, which deeply resonated with me because of my feelings of marginalization when I was young. This inspired me to apply for Teach for America.
As a first year teacher in TFA, I was placed at a Bay Area charter elementary school only a few miles away from the suburban city I grew up in. It was here where I continued to witness the disparity between the educational opportunities given to me and those to my students, and further my social justice vision. I specifically remember a student named “Joseph”. Every morning, he casually sauntered into class, then immediately rolled on the carpet, proudly ignoring most of my directions. The school system was quick to place any students like him in a Student Success Team (SST), and the process was set up for urgently judging his behaviors without understanding the context of the student nor his family. Problematically, these misdiagnoses were not uncommon at my school, with staff often simply affiliating limited English proficiencies and learning disabilities. Only when I began to build relationships with his mother, I learned that they had recently moved from Guatemala and that the language barrier was hindering his ability to demonstrate his excitement for school and engagement in class. Reflecting on my experience in elementary school, every student I knew spoke English as their first language. I wondered why there were populations of students 10 miles from where I grew up that only spoke Spanish, and how this could be possible because we all lived in the lucrative “Silicon Valley”. This built the foundations for my social justice vision, yet I still did not have the awareness of systemic inequities that caused this nor language to express these sentiments.
I quickly came to learn from my experience in this East San Jose charter school that this singular instance was reflective of larger, problematic systems at my school site. Having taught Kindergarten and TK for years, I saw first hand the impact on our students as young as 4 years old. As a member for 4 years of our Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) team, I noticed that the majority of our students who had Behavior Documentation Forms (BDFs) were LatinX boys, and that the majority of such behaviors were minor offenses that were classified by the teacher as “egregious”. Based on the student behavior, the appropriate consequence was at the subjective discretion of the teacher. The corresponding consequence frequently was more severe than the behavior itself or took away much needed socialization time such as recess. After identifying this need to investigate and reform our disciplinary system, I took the initiative to research how our school could lead with equity and pioneered a shift towards a restorative justice approach. I led a team of six staff members to design and facilitate school-wide professional development on the basics of restorative justice, facilitate workshops on exploring staff identities, and track BDFs. After implementing this restorative justice program and aggregating the end of year data, we noticed that although there was a decrease in BDFs and thus a decrease in disciplinary actions taken against our students, there were several factors that inhibited the stark decline that we were anticipating, with one element being the largest hindrance: implicit bias. Through no fault of their own, our teachers’ mindsets were a result of decades of experiences in an oppressive system focused on compliance and control. I frequently heard the phrase, “all actions have consequences”. However, this problematic mindset only tells one story, usually lacking the student experience, and does not account for the varying physical, emotional and social needs of our students. This was just one example of how I directly witnessed how systems within a school were perpetuating inequities that we were trying to address. Through this experience, my social justice vision transformed from a general awareness of some disparities in education to how systems within our schools were problematic.
Seeing how systems at large were manifesting itself in teacher mindsets and how our own structures were perpetuating inequities, I jumped at an opportunity to help found a charter school in the Pico-Union area in Downtown Los Angeles. I was excited to help create a vision for an elementary school that was grounded in equity, and build systems from the ground up that I thought were going to address some of the inequities that I was seeing, such as our special education referral system and our support for multilingual students. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we were forced to shift our plans to ensure that our students were still being offered a high quality education, even in a remote setting. When I had the opportunity to join UCLA’s PLI program, I built on my social justice education vision and learned more about greater systems in society that were actually transferring over to our schools. Our schools were actually microcosms of a greater capitalistic and meritocratic society, where efficiency and production are valued and rewarded without any acknowledgement of systemic barriers that exist for people of color. The founding of our entire nation was built on colonization and we are still seeing that alive and well in our schools, from our curriculum to our discipline systems focused on compliance to our lack of support for multilingual students and value of English proficiency. Knowing that it’s the systems that we create which impact our students the most, my social justice vision now has shifted to implementing anti-racist systems that start to shift and re-callibarate power dynamics between students, staff and families.
When I started at my current school site, I taught Kindergarten and in our 2nd year of founding, I began by teaching 1st grade and being an instructional coach. However, in February of 2022, I transitioned into being interim Principal at my school site. While I am simultaneously balancing a wide range of emotions from grief to joy, I am anxious and excited to move from theory to praxis and apply all of my learnings along my educational journey to my leadership at Equitas Academy 6. Perhaps the most salient lesson that I have learned that I hope to implement is that systems can perpetuate or mitigate oppression. Throughout my educational experiences, I have witnessed the complexities of systems alongside the duplicity of privilege and oppression. I firmly believe that when we listen to the stories and voices of our students and families to inform how we create the structures of our school, we can be co-conspirators and lead alongside our communities and I am excited to engage in this work this year.
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