When We See More Than We Were Taught To See

By Anonymous / Winter 2023

I vividly remember the first time I realized that the world can be a cruel place. I was in second grade.

I attended Adelante Charter school, formerly known as Cesar Chavez Charter School from kindergarten to sixth grade. Over the years people have said that when they hear Adelante Charter School, they do not know what to expect, maybe a nice charter school. The only similar thing we shared with those schools was probably uniforms. Adelante is a very small dual immersion elementary school that does not even have the luxury of having its own campus on the eastside of Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is a well known vacation town, with mountains on one side of the 101 freeway and the beaches on the other. Montecito and Hope Ranch house some extremely wealthy people from celebrities, uber wealthy, and even two members of the royal family. On the other side of Santa Barbara’s wealth, is the lack of it. I saw this disparity first hand everyday. 

My parents were warned about sending us to Adelante and later judged for it because they were exposing us to “drug dealers, gang members, too much violence, and a poor education.” This, as it turns out, was entirely false seeing as I ended up doing a lot better in school later on than most of those kids whose parents were horrified with my parents decisions. They now make comments on how much they wished their kids spoke another language. Also, Adelante provided me with amazing and unique opportunities that all kids should have access to growing up. Ironically a lot of the opportunities my classmates and I experienced were donated to us because of how poor our school was.

We stayed overnight at Wishtoyo, a native Chumash village, where we learned how they used to live before their livelihoods were taken from them. They educated us on what life was like before mass consumption or before our waters and lands began suffering from mass pollution. This is not taught in depth in school because it would be acknowledging a lot of the horrific events that occurred in the United States. Why would we be taught these things when it can easily just be swept under the rug by those with power? We went to the Channel Islands of California six times, again connecting us with the beauty that nature can provide. We learned about the individual ecosystems on the islands and saw native animals that cannot be found in other places. Most people I know have never been to the islands. We had yearly Dia de Los Muertos festivals to celebrate the day of the dead and ensure people were able to connect to their culture not just at home but in public and feel supported. It was open to everyone in the community and usually had a great turnout. There was dancing, sugar skull decorating, art raffles, and my favorite part: freshly made pan dulce.

I wrongly assumed that everyone would want their kids to have these experiences instead of just sitting in a classroom copying what the teacher wrote down on the board. Do not get me wrong, all of the ‘traditional’ things we learn in school are vital to our success as a contributing member of society, but the world is about so much more than finding variables and writing five paragraph essays. Adelante showed me this in so many ways especially by giving me the chance to learn about a culture so in depth that was not mine. Although I had not developed this perspective so wholly yet because I was only seven in second grade, that year was a big moment in which I was exposed to this flawed way of thinking that is reinforced day after day in society.

The makeup of Adelante was primarily Latino and most of my friends and peers were first generation Mexican-Americans. Spanish was the main language spoken at home and until older grades at school too. The school followed a ninety/ten model (90% taught in Spanish, 10% taught in English) in which every year the percentages changed until fifty/fifty. This allowed us to learn both languages together and develop our skills as necessary. Attending a dual immersion school rather than just having classes in Spanish did come with extra work. One major difference was that instead of just having to take the standardized test in English, we also had to take them in Spanish. No one likes taking these tests in the first place so taking them twice was indeed frustrating. That being said, it was also all that we were used to. The yearly standardized tests however not only presented problems for students (having to take them in the first place) but for the school as a whole as well.

My classmates were not stupid and my teachers were not bad at their jobs (well most of them weren’t anyway) but coming from homes where English is hardly spoken, it turned out to be an issue for the school district and consequently Adelante as well. Our standardized test scores in English were not high enough for the school districts' liking. Our test scores in Spanish however, did compare with the test scores of other schools in English where the first language of the majority of kids was English. What about the lack of test scores in another language at other schools too? None of this was taken into consideration, none of it mattered. That is not to say that learning English should not be a priority, I just do not agree with how nothing else was put on the table when looking at the scores.

The school district wanted to do everything in their power to close our school. The test scores meant more to them than anything else we were achieving as individuals and as a school. I was in second grade when we marched from the school to the Santa Barbara School District’s office. This was a peaceful march, and just like we had learned that Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. protested peacefully on a grand scale, we got to apply these practices on a much smaller scale. We were educated on what they did and why so we could learn to apply it in our own lives. One after another, people stepped up to speak about why Adelante should not be given up on, and why what they were doing mattered. As a young girl it did not make much sense to me why the adults in the room really wanted to shut down the school. What I learned later was that the reason specifically did not matter, it was just a way for them to take away something that was different. What mattered was the makeup of the school and what they were doing. It was the only school in Santa Barbara that was dual immersion but it was not viewed as an amazing opportunity. It was looked down upon, with an attitude of superiority from those on the outside.

Through the efforts of many many people we were able to stay open although there were some conditions. I am not aware of a lot of them but a big one was the change in name of our school. Adelante Charter School had replaced Cesar Chavez Charter School. Although this might not seem like much, I see a connection in what we have talked about throughout this quarter. Cesar Chavez played a huge part in working towards rights for migrant workers and all his work is already minimally taught in schools but to have to change the name seems like another tactic to erase a part of California’s history. At a school where so many families connected with Chavez’s story and those he fought to protect, it is something that to this day still does not sit right with me. It was just another connection they were trying to take away

My school was not the first “non-traditional” public school to have to fight and it will not be the last. I would like to think that now decades after the civil rights movement, after the mass immigration to the United States, after the civil war, people would get a chance to exist without having to prove anything. Unfortunately as discussed all quarter this is simply not the case. In Arizona, a state with high diversity in its population, has been pushing back against similar toxic thinking Adelante experienced. Hank Stephenson, a journalist for Politico magazine, explains that after spending years going after Mexican American studies, in 2010 “Republican lawmakers finally put a bill to ban classes that teach “racial resentment” and advocate “the overthrow of the government” on the governor’s desk.” Of course what they were referring to was Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American studies curriculum. Although my experience shares some similarities, as I was learning about this, shocked did not even begin to cover how I felt. Lawmakers publicly and shamelessly spread misinformation about the program and others like it claiming it was all really “a plot to indoctrinate children with ideas about white people as racists and people of color as their victims” (pg. 219). As ludicrous as this belief sounds, legislation was signed in 2010 to ban classes.

How are things like this still happening? Why is the fear of other cultures so high that laws must be put into place to prevent learning, connecting, and practicing cultures that belong to minorities? It is a double edged sword. People fear what is different because they know nothing about it and they consequently know nothing about it because they fear the unknown. If Arizona is too far from home, we can come back to UCSD. The UC system has not always been known for doing right by its students. We saw this here in San Diego with the establishment of Marshall College, lack of acknowledgement of George Winnie Jr’s death, and even with the TA strikes. Jorge Mariscal writes in chapter six of a book Professor Niall shared with me that “San Diego leaders were caught off guard when the Chicano Movement came to town” advocating for respect, desegregation, and “complete dismantling of the entrenched class racism of the La Jolla campus” (222). It just goes to show how rooted the beliefs of superiority and inferiority are. Takaki’s book is a beginning step in showing us all the history that has been so skillfully and tactically left out of the books and lesson plans. He creates the space and the words to tell the stories of those who have not been able to. Although the chapters were hard to read at times because of the grueling content, the lack of sugar coating or disguise is so important. This is what happened, this is the truth, it is what people experienced and it should not be shoved away.

Adelante experienced this battle albeit on a much smaller scale. Regardless, it impacted me more than I understood at that young age. Although we shared experiences, I am separated from some of it and so I am forever thankful for what I have learned. My world has expanded because of what I was exposed to in elementary school; I now can speak, read, and write in Spanish almost as well as I can in English (I need to get in the habit of practicing more again). Although the world around me is not always a good place, I have learned that I can still be good despite all of the bad. The more we look at people beyond our surface level preconceived notions and perceptions we see the complexity of an individual. When we see more than what we were taught to see, we can make change. This is how we challenge the structural flaws that have shaped society. This is how we fight back against a system that was created to keep everyone stuck.

Works Cited

Stephenson, Hank. “What Arizona's 2010 Ban on Ethnic Studies Could Mean for the Fight over Critical Race Theory.” POLITICO.

Mariscal, Jorge. “To Demand That the University Work for Our People (Chapter Six)”. Brown Eyed Children of the Sun.