I draw inspiration from my lived experience of growing up with a Mexican immigrant mother and a proud union ironworker father.
In college, I joined my classmates to address societal disparities on our campus. The workers, primarily People of Color, were underpaid and had no voice, and I became involved in the effort to get them representation and a living wage.
I had the chance to serve as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives, where I got an inside look at governing—and a system designed to give everyone a voice that too often gives power to just a few.
Through those experiences, I came to believe that organizing people to take collective action could bring about change, and I committed myself further to those causes.
Now, I’m a second-grade teacher in the San Antonio Independent School District. My job affords me the opportunity to do what I love—inspire students— while working with the families of our working class community of color.
I never forgot my union roots. I became active in NEA and in my school and was a founding member of a group focusing on social justice issues.
We are working hard to improve the district curricula—which ignore the experience of children of color, who make up 97 percent of our students. We’ve worked to address the safe return to in-person learning during the pandemic because students, educators, and their families deserve safe schools.
I’m also involved in a lawsuit filed by our union to keep one of our neighborhood schools from being taken over by a national chain of charter schools. The corporation hasn’t adequately supported its other schools across the country, and the district has never invested sufficiently in ours.
We have faced challenging times in recent years as educators and especially as members of the Latinx community, but I am optimistic that the best times for our students, our schools, and our communities lie ahead of us.
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