They called me a unicorn—one of a kind, because I was a bilingual, bicultural, male of color in social work. Social work in Minnesota is about 87% female and 90% white, and predominantly monolingual English speaking…Being an undocumented worker taught me that employers care about their bottom line. As a school social worker, I’m committed to impacting lives. I haven’t, however, bought into the idea that I’m supposed to be loyal to my workplace.
— Daniel Alberto Perez
Childhood in Mexico
My story is that of an immigrant. I’m a Mexican-born citizen, who currently has dual citizenship. I was born in Tepic, Nayarit in 1986. I lived there until January 2002 when I immigrated to the United States. I was born into a loving home family. The harsh realities of neo-liberalism and being so close to the United States—what that means for the Mexican economy—meant we struggled every day. Those factors, as well as our own traumas and challenging stories, pushed my family to migrate to the U.S.
My dad came first, traveling back and forth beginning in 1993. He would go primarily to California and Minnesota, be here for a year or two, save money, return to Mexico, try to start a business, and return to the U.S .when things didn’t pan out. In 1998, he finally decided to immigrate permanently and then send for the rest of my family. My mom and younger brother joined him in 2000. I chose to stay in Mexico. My brother was seven. I had more understanding of just what this move meant for me if I chose to come with my parents. I was leaving the rest of my extended family, my friends, the girl I had a crush on. It meant leaving tradition, culture, and neighborhood, for a world where I didn’t speak the language and I knew I would be marginalized because I was undocumented. I wanted to pursue higher education and that is where I was headed in Mexico. I wasn’t sure that would happen in the United States. I told my mom I loved her but I want to stay in Tepic.
An Aptitude for School
I was very studious as a little child. I went to a private Catholic elementary school. My parents could afford it for the first three years. After that, I had to apply for scholarships, which were merit-based. I was able to earn a lot of scholarships, and that instilled in me this belief that I excelled in academics. School was a great place for me to be. I loved learning and having friends. I always saw myself pursuing higher education. My mom finished a two-year technical degree. She was a secretary. My dad finished high school but not college. He had more physical jobs or taxi driving, but among our numerous extended family-–my mom is one of eight and my dad is one of seventeen—we have accountants, lawyers, teachers, researchers, so I grew up without a deficit lens. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with being Mexican or Brown. I saw Mexicans who were janitors and presidents. I did not associate myself with low intelligence, low socioeconomic status, low performance, or the tropes we have here in the United States.
My biology teacher identified me as gifted in biology and selected me to represent my school and my state at a statewide biology competition where I placed fourth, and was able to travel to Mexico City to meet with students from all over Mexico and be greeted by former Mexican President, Ernesto Zedillo. For a while, I wanted to be a biology teacher. That changed when I came to the US..
Getting to St. Louis Park, Minnesota
Eventually, family dynamics—trauma and drama—caught up with me and I was forced to come and reunite with my parents. I joined them in February of 2002. Before coming to Minnesota, I spent a month with my aunt in California. It was a different world than Mexico in terms of clean streets and highway lanes and traffic jams, but there were lots of Latino folks. Language and food reminded me of home.
Coming to Minnesota in February—holy smokes. It was hella cold and very, very, white: snow, ice, and culture. I was fifteen, going on sixteen, with very strong traditional Mexican values and a communal orientation and disposition towards the world. I had to get used to the fact that public transportation is not convenient here. I was not used to many or most homes having their own yard, whereas Mexican single homes typically look like townhouses, sharing a wall with the next door, so there’s always people out and about. And I couldn’t go to the corner store because there were no corner stores. To get groceries here you have to drive to a Cub or a mall. The car culture, the cold, the individualistic nature of Minnesota—I was an adolescent and experiencing a huge culture shock.
It was a hard period. I was an undocumented immigrant who did not speak English. I had a secret that I couldn’t tell anybody. I had to pretend. I couldn’t drive and I didn’t have access to all these things that most people who were documented had. High school was a very turbulent time. The saving grace was my ELL classes, where I formed friendships with other immigrant folks—not necessarily Latinos—who, like me, were trying to learn English and this new system. It was a haven for me. And the ELL teachers helped with my high school experience as well.
I saw how the media portrayed immigrants as people who steal other people’s jobs or were leeches, taking from the system. I saw portrayals of Mexicans as the scum of the earth. I had a hard time figuring out to whom I could tell my secret. I trusted my Spanish teacher. Mrs. Jorgensen and my ELL teachers, Ms. Seeling and Ms. Ranney, but in general, when it came to white people especially, I didn’t know who to trust. I realized that the system was for white people. That system had power over my life. It could deport me. It could deport my family.
I led a dual life, trying to integrate into the system, while trying to remain true to who I was. I didn’t want to stand out and call attention to myself, yet as a young person I wanted to be seen fully for who I was: to be acknowledged and accepted. Yet just being myself was scary.
When I was in high school at St. Louis Park, I decided I wanted to be a Spanish teacher. I love the aspect of being bilingual. Also, I wanted to work with my people because of my struggles here in the States, my own family dynamics, the trauma that my parents were experiencing, and the lack of safety nets for undocumented immigrants. Being a Spanish teacher seemed like the way to do it. That was my goal when I began pursuing an associate degree at Normandale College. But when I was introduced to social work classes at Normandale, I discovered my calling.
My family had had help from a St. Louis Park program called STEP. They provided food aid and sometimes assistance with bills or rent. A social worker from STEP went above and beyond for my family, doing some brief therapy with me and my mom, and just checking in. That experience stayed with me. When my life was in shambles emotionally with my tumultuous relationship with my dad, this social worker impacted me positively. I wanted to support people like that. I wanted to do systems work. I wanted to be a safety net for others.
Undocumented in College Before DACA
I was still undocumented when I started at Normandale. There was no DACA then, and in St. Louis Park I didn’t know anyone working on the Minnesota DREAM Act. My family was very alone and in the shadows. I was only able to go to college because my aunt from California saw a lot of potential in me. She’s a real estate agent. When I was a kid, she said, Daniel, if you want to be an astronaut, I’m pretty sure you could do it. I will support you. She paid the tuition for my associates degree at Normandale.
Normandale was a wonderful experience. I got to see other Black and Brown people, other Latinos at college, and I bonded with some of them. I commuted there from St. Louis Park, on the bus three or four hours every day. Luckily, I didn’t have to work. My job was to study and do well, with my aunt paying my way. I continued to love school, and continued to excel; my English kept getting better and I kept reinforcing my Spanish with college courses. I was making friends and I was falling in and out of love.
But I saw peers from high school who wanted to go to college who couldn’t go, for financial reasons, or because they didn’t do well in their GPA; or they started college but didn’t make good grades, or family situations got in the way. So many peers were not able to do what I was doing and that weighed on me. I saw the systemic barriers that many undocumented immigrants faced.
In 2008, the housing market collapsed, and my aunt was unable to sell homes. My safety net for pursuing more studies fell apart. I started working. My aunt continued to help as much as she could, loaning me money, while I pursued private scholarships. I graduated with a $20,000 tuition bill on my aunt’s credit card. I began monthly payments until eventually I paid that back.
A friend—Emma Paskewitz—advised me to stay at Normandale for a third year instead of transferring to the U of M, where I would be charged twice as much for tuition. She told me the policy was changing the next year, saving me thousands. After my third year at Normandale, I took a year off to work, starting at the U in the fall 2009, where I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Family Social Science in 2010.
Pursuing a Master’s in Social Work (MSW) and Immigrant Rights at the U of M
I began pursuing private grants and scholarships for an MSW, thinking if no one wanted to support me, I’d move to Canada or another country that would grant me papers and support my education. I finally got fellowships and scholarships for a dual masters in Family Social Science and Social Work.
I didn’t know what social work was until I was applying to grad school. I didn’t know the choices the degree brought: to work in hospitals, in schools, for the government, nonprofits and for-profits. I didn’t know I could have my own private practice as a psychotherapist.
Before grad school, I volunteered at my old high school and at the Sexual Violence Center. I was researching about HIV and sexually transmitted illnesses in minority populations. I wanted to do advocacy work for sexual minorities. But my first internship ended up being at St. Louis Park Senior High School. I continued volunteering outside of my internship around the issue of HIV prevention, harm reduction drug use, and syringe exchanges.
I was pursuing a master’s in a profession that had a mandate to work with—and advocate for—marginalized and oppressed communities. We were supposed to change systems. For me, social work felt very personal; it wasn’t just a profession, it was part of my identity. I’m a social worker all the time, and—if you look at the description of what a social worker does—I had been doing social work since I was a teenager, helping my parents navigate the system. Sometimes I was their case manager, sometimes I was the person filling out their applications, for rent assistance or whatever.
I got connected with La Raza Student Cultural Center at the U of M. It was powerful to be in a safe space with friends, documented and undocumented, who were committed to justice and academia. I became active in the immigration rights movement, joining Navigate Minnesota. Many Mexicans here in the States and particularly in Minnesota are people who came here escaping poverty, persecution, and trauma. I come from a very communal culture. Everything revolves around my family and community. The immigrant rights movement was a natural place for me to be, not only personally but, in terms of my life’s work.
Without Mentors, Finding Help in Unorthodox Places
I’m 35 and I think one of the things that I’ve been grieving over the last few years, with my wife and my therapist, is the fact that I haven’t had mentors. I didn’t live in Minneapolis or Saint Paul where there are neighborhoods with a predominantly Black or Latino population. I didn’t go to an urban institution like Metro State. I went to Normandale which is out in Bloomington. I felt very alone and very much like a trailblazer. Sometimes I felt like, why can’t there be models for me? Sometimes I wish I would have emigrated to Los Angeles or Tampa where there’s a larger Latino population. When I finally did get involved in the immigrant rights movement, I met peers who told me they had mentors, they had been connected to this non-profit or that organization.
There were a few people who were essential to me. Mrs. Jorgensen, my former Spanish teacher, would sometimes stay after school and let me be her assistant, while making space for me to talk about life and the struggles and then she would drive me home and we would tell jokes. Emma Paskewitz provided crucial information and support. But none of these folks had walked in my shoes. Unless you are undocumented, and can’t get a driver’s license, you’ll never really comprehend the fear of seeing a cop right behind your car.
My wife is a Canadian immigrant. While she was never undocumented, there was a time when her dad, who was a computer programmer, lost his job and family could have been deported. Kendra knows that fear in her body, so I don’t have to explain it.
DACA
In June 2012, I was active on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and other social media. When I woke up to the news that President Obama announced DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, I tweeted about it and somebody from the Star Tribune saw it and asked if I wanted to be interviewed. I was featured on the front cover, saying I’m going to benefit from this. I might now be able to practice social work in the States!
This public announcement had many upsides. I was able to receive funding from my Family Social Science Program and work as a Research Assistant. The U of M Social Work Department also said they could support me if I applied for their Diversity Social Work Advancement Program (DSWAP). However, I had to change my social work concentration.
So, I ended up switching gears for my second year, from Health, Disability and Aging, to the Clinical Mental Health program. I finished my master’s in August 2013, passed my licensure test and began working at a non-profit—The Family Partnership—as a psychotherapist.
Working as a Therapist for a Non-Profit
As a professional of color and a psychotherapist, I had a really strong, healthy work environment at The Family Partnership. I felt supported, seen, and valued. My supervisor knew I was DACAmented, and supported me, doing things that would help me get a more permanent status. Overall, I felt great about the people that I worked with and the work I did.
But working for a non-profit, which only gave me 20 days of paid time off, meant I couldn’t get sick if I wanted to go two weeks to Canada and two weeks to Mexico. After two years, when my former supervisor from St. Louis Park called me and said, hey there’s a full time social work position at the high school, my first thought was that school social work would be really family friendly, conducive to my partner and I being able to go to our respective birth countries during the summer.
School Social Worker at St. Louis Park
I came back to St. Louis Park High School in the fall of 2015. We had a house in Minneapolis. We were also working hard at paying off our debt. I became debt free (except for our mortgage) in December 2016, a month before our first child, Sebastian, was born. School Social Work was family friendly. I was able to take a three-month paternity leave.
I stayed at St Louis Park High School for three years. I expected to stay much longer. I expected to love it. I did, for the first year and a half or two, but then the shine started to fade. As a person of color who is very communal, I needed to work with people who were willing to wrestle with conflict in healthy ways, not in the Minnesota way where you talk behind people’s backs, and you act like family to their faces. The way people held grudges and could not really deal with conflict in healthy ways, started eating at me. The animosity, silos and cliques felt like high school for adults in the worst possible sense. Then you add the layers of white supremacy, white fragility, patriarchy and sexism and I think eventually I grew very discontented—not with my position I loved working with the students. I was really good at working with high school students. I grew discontented and angry with anti-racist lip service. I got tired of hearing. “I just want to teach! I don’t need to teach about anti-racism.”
I was really good at doing suicide risk assessments. Some peers would wait for me to be done with one student, so they could send me another student who had a crisis, even though we are both mental health professionals. Just because I was good at dealing with crises because my life has been in crisis and I have that extra empathy level, didn’t mean I should be doing all the heavy lifting, all of the time. White people also have a responsibility to care deeply within their bodies and their bones and their souls for other human beings. And that requires some leaning into discomfort to be able to gain the skills and tools to sit in people’s messes and crises and then be able to walk with them, and hopefully, you know, keep them safe. I am not a martyr. I am not a savior. I needed to leave.
I started looking for other schools. I got an offer from Hiawatha Academies which I turned down after I looked at the details of their school calendar, their daily hours. The work and the pay were not conducive to family life or work/ life balance. A former student in the MSW program was working for Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). She alerted me to openings there in the fall of 2018. I ended up being placed at Green Central Elementary, which is a dual language school in South Minneapolis.
What an Undocumented Person Learns About Work in the United States
I had lived as an undocumented person for 11 years, during which time I definitely didn’t get paid what I deserved. I was there to make my bosses’ lives easier. I think those experiences when I was undocumented informed the way I’ve navigated my professional life having papers. When you are undocumented, seniority and tenure don’t hold as much value as the ability to have a valid Social Security number and be able to get a job legally. You hope they will treat you fairly and pay you well. You know if they don’t treat you well, you have a SS number that is not valid and can’t go wherever the fuck you want.
I could have gotten tenure at St. Louis Park. But by 2018 I was documented; I had the freedom to leave. HR really wanted me to stay. They called me a unicorn—one of a kind, because I was a bilingual, bicultural, male of color in social work. Social work in Minnesota is about 87% female and 90% white, and predominantly monolingual English speaking. When you put all those identities together, plus the fact that I am definitely competent in my job—nobody was firing me.
Being an undocumented worker taught me that employers don’t usually care about their employees. They care about their bottom line. As a social worker, I’m very grounded in that piece. I’m exchanging hours of my life for money, but I’m also doing our work. At the school I’m impacting lives. I haven’t, however, bought into the idea that I’m supposed to be loyal to my workplace. I had to pay over $20,000 over 11 years to finally get my Social Security number, and eventually, become a U.S. citizen. I’ve worked hard to get something that people are just born into by luck.
I will use my power and privilege to fight for a good life because it’s not just my life now. I’m one of the breadwinners in my household and I have a family to support; I have a community that I invest in. Resigning from St. Louis Park without having a job lined up speaks to my plight as an immigrant. I don’t put a lot of faith in the system; I put faith in communities. I’m alive because people have kept me safe—my parents, social workers, neighbors, friends and sometimes strangers, always people—not systems. We don’t have many safety nets in the United States.
Finding Workmate Solidarity as a School Social Worker at Green Central Elementary School
After my last day at work in St. Louis Park, I had my interview with the principals at Green Central. They had to endure 45 minutes of MY questions. Two hours after my interview, they called me, and I accepted the job. I have been at Green Central since the fall of 2018 and I have really enjoyed it. It’s challenged me and restored my faith in education. The love, affection, devotion, care, and advocacy I see from my colleagues towards kids of color—and all kids—has been really moving and reinvigorating. I see people challenging each other, being humble. A teacher will say to me “I have no idea how to deal with a kid who’s telling me their immigration journey. What do I do?” That’s wonderful. Even seasoned teachers with lots and lots of experience, saying, I don’t know. I need to learn. That’s been a lot of my experience at Green. I’m a valued colleague. We are a collaborative team. I saw from people’s demeanor—the way they treated me, the way they walked the walk—that they were welcoming to immigrants and Black and Brown students.
Soon after I started working at Green, we had our second-born. It was in the middle of summer break. I still took paternity leave:6 weeks off and more time off during the holidays. I became a U.S. citizen in September 2019. My colleagues supported me, when I said, “I’m going to be missing work because I’m going to my ceremony.”
Becoming a Union Organizer With MFT
When I got hired at St. Louis Park, they honored the fact that I had done 2 degrees and placed me at a masters plus 30 (MA+30) on the teacher contract (or MA+45 on a quarter credit-based contract). If I had stayed through 2018, I would have gone up to MA+40 (MA+60), which is as high as you can go, unless you move into the PhD lane. When I transitioned to MPS, I assumed that they would have a similar process. To my surprise, MPS counted my two degrees and experience differently, so my new contract (MA only), while a pay increase, wasn’t what I expected. I was still making a decent living and making much more money than I ever had, so I went for it.
Shortly after I started at MPS, I formed a group of service professionals: social workers, school counselors, speech clinicians, occupational therapists, physical therapists, school psychologists and nurses. We would have monthly meetings. We talked about pay discrepancies. We asked for HR to open their process up. We had conversations about pay equity and transparency within MPS. We unearthed a lot of pay inequities.
When Greta Callahan got elected as MFT President, I saw more communication from the union, and that got me excited. I felt like, now I know we have a union! I got involved with our union in several ways and I was identified as a leader of MFT, committed to fighting for justice. Shortly before COVID, I sent Greta an email about how I got screwed by the system and I don’t think I’m being compensated fairly, and by the way I’ve been leading this work for a while with other related service professionals, and we want to bring this to the union so you can fight for us at the next bargaining session…
After hearing my story, my fire, my passion for justice, and that I was already leading so much work around pay equity and credentials, even though I wasn’t a steward, Greta asked me, “Do you want to be a candidate to be part of the bargaining team? If elected, you will be on the team who will negotiate the next teacher contract”. I said yes. I was selected by over 90% of members, who came to that meeting to elect bargaining team members. I think I got 93% of the vote. That’s how I officially got involved in the union.
On the Bargaining Team During the Teacher’s Strike of Spring 2022
In February of 2020, just before the pandemic, we started meeting with MPS leaders for public bargaining. Throughout the pandemic, we were engaged in this process with MPS. We put out proposals and MPS dragged its feet, rarely countering with anything. We showed up ready for every bargaining session. We demanded pandemic safety agreements and protocols, to which MPS kept saying no. Eventually they filed for mediation which takes the negotiation process behind closed doors. The public negotiations were not good for MPS. The public could see how ill-prepared they were and the way they misled and manipulated us throughout the whole bargaining sessions. They were not winning public support.
We started private mediation before winter break 2021. We had one in-person session at the Bureau of Mediation in early 2022 before COVID numbers went up. MPS’ team was composed of leadership from multiple departments, including Associate Superintendents, Employee Relations, Legal, Human Resources, and Board Members. Even though they probably are not all from Minnesota, they acted like white Minnesotans do; very friendly, but not interested in actually getting to know you. They talked nicely through their teeth, but they didn’t mean it and you could feel it. For me, it was a jarring experience. I saw that this was just lip service, talking pretty things but it was all BS. When it comes to actually implementing policies that are good for students and staff, they wouldn’t do it. They said they were handicapped by money, or that it was too difficult to operationalize, but they wouldn’t counter with what they could do. It was always what they couldn’t do, the kind of deficit-centered thinking that does serious damage to students in our classrooms and schools.
After that, we negotiated online until we filed to go on strike. The private bargaining that happened prior to a strike was a bit more productive. We thought the employer was going to be more cooperative with us. For almost a year, we had been working under an expired, though continuing, contract, which, in practice, meant we worked without a raise or any improvement to our working conditions, while we engaged in fruitless negotiations. This experience had been happening for years and we could no longer continue as we had in sessions previous. Our members were fed up, as was our community. With an affirmative vote of over 95% of the membership, we went on strike.
Once the strike began, we were told by the mediator, just because you’re going on strike, doesn’t mean you’re not going to be at the bargaining table. I can call you to the bargaining table at any time. I will tell you when we end. You don’t tell me when to end things. So, we were prepared for grueling hours. The first three days of mediation, MPS didn’t talk to us. They wasted that time. We, of course, had our rallies. And our bargaining team—our teacher chapter, including our adult basic educators, and our Education Support Professional (ESP) chapter—were at the Davis Center, crafting proposals and strategies, bargaining as a united force for the first time in MFT history.
Then—and I don’t know if the public knows this—for most of the three weeks that we were on strike, we were at the bargaining table twelve to fourteen hours or more a day. One of the things that I told the mediator repeatedly—and I think you can see it if you watch the public bargaining sessions—is we, the MFT team, were the ones who initiated proposals. We were the ones who cared. After all, it is our students and their learning conditions, our working conditions, our livelihood, our communities, our schools and our own kids who go to these schools.
We did something historic. This was the first time in history that the two chapters from MFT negotiated together, breaking down those walls between bargaining units. In the past, we supported each other, stood in solidarity with each other, but bargaining together as a united front was monumental. We found out that MPS had been negotiating piecemeal with the Teacher chapter while doing the same with the ESP chapter–basically a divide and conquer approach. They would support this grant for outsourcing support for Black men who teach, but not invest in keeping teachers of color. They would say no to the good wages and benefits that would make critical school-based jobs tenable for low-income educators.
The way our days on strike and mediation went, we were on the picket line at 7:30AM, then went to various sites to engage with members, then to Davis Center for mediation sometimes as early as 9 and sometimes as late as noon. We would present our proposals to the mediator who then would pass them on to MPS, and then perhaps at 7, 8, or 9PM that day, they would send a counter proposal. They tried to wear us down. We were rarely in the same room and when we were, we rarely discussed the issues we sought to address, but rather listened to each other “walk through” our proposals to address the issues affecting our work.
At the start of mediation, members of the teams signed documents promising to keep the bargaining process closed to the public. We were not to communicate with our members nor the public about what we were discussing, how we were progressing, or why certain proposals were unacceptable. We took this to heart, while MPS broke all the rules. They started posting snippets and tidbits of our proposals – taken out of context or presented incompletely and therefore misleadingly – online. When we made the mediator aware of this, they said “MPS says that you are telling your members what’s going on in mediation so they feel like they could also inform the public.“
Earlier, we had filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) claim against MPS because they wouldn’t negotiate around COVID and its many effects on our working conditions, including the safety of ourselves and our students. It took months before we learned that the Public Employee Labor Relations Board—the PERB, as workers know it—issued a statement agreeing with our claim. The misleading communication put out by MPS in real time appeared to be yet another unfair labor practice. Our lawyer advised that filing another ULP claim would add another complication to an already grueling process that might lengthen the conflict between MFT and MPS at a time when we were trying to reach an agreement.
MPS was very shady and manipulative. What they released to the public were half-truths and distortions. For instance, they said that they were giving coaches a 20% raise, but they didn’t identify to the public which coaches, because they were giving sports coaches a 20% increase because they wanted to be more competitive, when it came to sports, but they were only giving academic coaches a 5% increase. They said, We’re giving ESPS close to $35,000. Here again, the devil was in the details. It was really more like $32,000 with bonuses included for a year or two, but not in the long-term.
We found ourselves in a hard spot. We saw how MPS utilized and weaponized white supremacy and capitalism and oppressive practices. We were trying to beat them by utilizing best practices. Why play with fire when you know it’s not healthy? I think we did the best with what we could. We eventually started informing our members what was going on. We didn’t utilize their tools of saying half-truths or lying to our members. We tried to share with our members enough information to note where there was progress and where there remained disagreement, without giving our political strategy away.
We recognized that more important than engaging in a petty PR fight, we needed to deliver results based on what our membership had sent us to demand. That’s what we eventually did. I know that we have the most progressive protections for educators of color in the country. We were able to secure contract language, which is forever permanent unless we change it or amend it, to protect teachers of color: modifying but not undoing seniority — something MPS wanted to do. MPS wanted to remove seniority because more senior teachers are expensive. They said they wanted to get more teachers of color. Some of us, teachers of color, who have earned tenure, are becoming expensive for the district. They’re not saying teachers of color are cheap but… I’m now a senior teacher of color who is very expensive. If we ended seniority, I would have no protections because I have become a financial liability.
The system doesn’t care about its workers. We become a cog in the machine. We are good enough until they can get someone cheaper.
We held our ground. There were major wins for ESPs. Teachers got the biggest pay raise we’ve gotten in 20 years—a 2% pay increase for this year and 3% for next. On the other hand, we’ve heard of other districts agreeing to significantly higher compensation increases.
Lessons From the Strike
I’m only 35 years old. I had never lived through a strike before. Through our action, the public got to see and learn about the learning conditions of our kiddos and the working conditions of our educators. They got to see the leadership of MPS, perhaps at its worst. I know that parents and the community rallied for teachers when Ed Graff sent an anti-union, anti-teacher email out to parents. That was his first major debacle during the strike.
I think the public, including even MFT members, didn’t know how anti-worker, anti-union, and anti-people our leaders were. I think people learned that though the administration said they wanted to protect teachers of color, and that they wanted more teachers of color, they really just wanted a more representative demographic data set. The data shows that Black employees in MPS are seven times more likely to be fired than white people (and for people of color who are not Black it’s four times more likely) so we have structural problems. We have structural problems that harm people of color in our system, leading to their departure from our district by choice at greater numbers than white educators. MPS didn’t want to look at remedies and ways to hold itself accountable. Rather, they wanted to report improved numbers and percentages on a PowerPoint slide.
I think the mass exodus that is happening across MPS leadership is indicative. If you’re only interested in utilizing MPS as your next political move, this is a good time to leave and give opportunities to those who support public schools a chance to lead our district into a new era.
We Need a Different Educational Model
In my dream world, there are no charter schools or private schools; public education is where everybody invests their time and energy. We start with a three-legged stool, where students, families and teachers—those who have a stake—form a table where power is shared collectively. Because ultimately it is our kids’ education—and it is our teachers who impart that education and who should be collaborating with parents around the curriculum—that is needed.
Parents need support. I know that becoming a parent in this world has required me to learn things I wasn’t taught by my parents. My parents didn’t grow up in the age of technology. They didn’t parent children during a pandemic. The murder of George Floyd was filmed. Countless Black and Brown people have been hunted down for years in the United States; now it’s televised and all of us know it’s happening. I’m parenting in an age where so many things are so uncertain and so I have to get different information, build new muscles, adapt my thinking to address my kids’ needs, and build a structure and foundation around love, consistency, predictability and basic needs. Kids need a lot of play.
Education hasn’t been led by teachers and families and students. Education leaders have become people who perform, who are good capitalists, and who impose their capitalistic view onto little kiddos. In their view, kids are supposed to know how to multitask, to perform in a very capitalistic world. I think we need to undo the rat race that we put our kids through and go back to the basics of play-based learning, focus on being connected to nature, and on having harmonious relationships: with nature and with each other.
We attach our self-worth to our networks, to our educational attainment, to the value of our homes, to the level of work that we do. Those things are superficial, yet we teach them at school. We turn our kiddos into competition machines, reinforcing kids who perform well according to the system. We destroy the spirits and self-esteem of kids who don’t perform well in the system. I think this is an even larger conversation, about supporting parents and guardians. We need living livable wages, work weeks that are not five days, and no more than 30 hours a week, so that parents have the energy, the time, and the mental capacity to partner in their kids’ education.
As a social worker who always thinks about development, I think our students need more downtime. They don’t need so many transitions. They need more play, more support, more time to integrate and more time to make things accessible. How wonderful would it be if public education was the one thing we were all invested in? So many more resources would flow into our schools and into our kids’ lives.
I’m Mexican. I come from a communal family and framework. Your liberation is tied to mine. Your pain is my pain. I’ve had a hard life, but now I’m living my best life but I’m not just invested in just living my life. I know my fellow human beings are suffering, dying at the hands of the system.
There is no other planet. I will die. I want all of us to have the best collectively. We could have one system where all of us are investing in our kids. We can start undoing the layers that have dehumanized us. We could create an educational model that is collaborative, where parents’ and students’ voices are at the center and educators’ voices are also at the center.
Moving Back to Mexico for Three Years: July 2022
When I got married to my partner, Kendra, and we decided to become parents, we knew we would eventually try to find jobs that would allow us to go to our respective Mexican and Canadian homes, in order to build a relationship between our children and their extended family members.
Having lived through immigration hell, becoming a U.S. citizen, and having three professional jobs in less than 10 years—now I am returning home. I am ready for some rest and for my family to experience Mexico with me. I’m also excited to continue this journey of living a good life while fighting for the best life for everybody, however each of us define our best life. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with my family, my culture, and Mother Earth. I’ll have a chance to slow down. I hope that the next chapter of my life continues to deepen my commitment to all human beings and to strive for justice—and creating just systems—because I believe a better world is possible. It will take all of us to make it happen.