2. Baudelia’s Leadership
CLAIMING SPACE FOR PARENTS IN SCHOOL DESIGN

On a Wednesday evening in October, one week after the Request for Proposals (RFP) release,¹ a group of parents and teachers met in the small library of Whitman Elementary to discuss plans for a new small school. The teachers had already met on several occasions, but this was their first meeting with Whitman parents, at the school site. The small school design team did not have the blessing of Whitman’s principal and, according to teachers, had met “in secret” until then. Now, thanks to the organizing work of a parent leader, Baudelia, the group had been granted meeting space at the school, and parents were brought into the conversation.

Present at the meeting were seven Whitman teachers, all women, sitting along one side of a long table, and ten parents, including Baudelia. There was also an OCCA organizer, Evelyn, a representative from BACEE, and myself. The meeting, which was called and led by Baudelia, was conducted almost entirely in Spanish, with periodic translations into English by Evelyn for two teachers who could not speak Spanish. The purpose of the meeting was to introduce parents to the teachers’ plans to date, and to devise ways for parents to collaborate in the design of the new small school.

The meeting began with one of the teachers, Linda, explaining that teachers had begun the process of creating a new small school. Although they did not yet know many details, they had definitely decided to submit a proposal. Another teacher added, “We do know that what we want to do as teachers, we can’t do in this school.”² A parent asked, what did they want as teachers? The teacher replied, “We want a sense of community and more participation from parents and the community in the school.”

From the outset, teachers publicly framed the design of the new small school in terms of a desire for greater participation from parents and the community. And yet the parents were made to understand that the teachers had already been meeting and planning for the school, without the participation of parents. Baudelia’s work to bring the two groups together was the first of many steps toward the elusive partnership between teachers and parents. This chapter describes the efforts of Baudelia to claim a space for parents in the design process, and highlights differences between her organizing strategies and those of the teachers. While the meetings called and led by Baudelia were interactive and participatory, privileging discussion of parents’ experiences and concerns, meetings directed by teachers consisted mainly of giving parents information or soliciting parent input in predetermined areas. I analyze these differences as a struggle over legitimacy in the social-change process, in which Baudelia fought for parents’ right to participate in school design based on their experience with, and not necessarily training in, their children’s education. Teachers’ failure to recognize parents’ experience as a legitimate source of expertise resulted in silencing parent voice and reproduced neocolonial relations between white professionals and parents of color.

Once teachers had made known to parents their intention to open a new school, Baudelia addressed them: “Do you have specific plans for the instructional program or philosophy of the school?”

A teacher responded with what sounded like a well-thought-out vision statement, including a list of beliefs about children, ending with “children have the power to create social justice in their communities.” This was the first parents were to hear about the “social justice” focus that teachers had chosen for the new small school.

Immediately responding to this vision statement, Baudelia asked, “What role will parents have in creating this education?”

Another teacher replied that they hoped that teachers and parents would design the school “together.”

From here on, a volley of questions was directed at the teachers from the parents, as teachers explained their ideas and the constraints under which they had to work. One father, wearing an Alameda County Transit cap, asked what would happen to Whitman Elementary School if a new small school opened up at another site. Would this school grow back to its original size? Would it have the same problems? How would children be selected to attend the new small school?

Baudelia, as a fellow parent, responded to his question by saying that this was a major concern, and that they would have to work to improve the education at Whitman, too, because they are all “part of the same family.”

She said, “We don’t know which of our children will attend the new small school, and we have to be concerned about all of our children. We can’t abandon this school.”

Throughout the meeting, Baudelia encouraged other parents to express their concerns and assured them that they would plan another meeting. As the meeting drew to a close, Baudelia announced that at the next meeting, teachers would hear from the parents about their concerns about new small schools. “During today’s meeting, we parents have listened to you teachers,” she said, “and now at the next meeting, the teachers will listen to the parents!” She suggested a list of questions, which she had evidently prepared ahead of time, that teachers should pose to parents at the next meeting:

What do you understand by “small schools”?

Would you like for your children to attend a small school in the future? How would you like your child’s school to be?

How can we organize as parents and participate in this?

What do you propose to make this dream a reality for the education of our children?

She said that they would write the questions on butcher paper, and parents in groups could write their answers. Of all the meetings on small schools I had attended, this was the first time I had seen a dialogue initiated about what the small schools should look like. It was significant that this dialogue had been initiated by a parent. Teachers then added to Baudelia’s list of questions:

How do you understand the “self-governance” (autogobernanza) of the school?

Here Baudelia asked whether everyone in the room would understand the word self-governance. The teacher who had proposed the question said that the point was to see what parents understood by it, and they would discuss it at the next meeting. Teachers then added the following questions:

If you could name the school, what would you name it?

What is the responsibility of the child, of the parent, and of the teacher?

How can we include parents of other ethnicities who don’t speak Spanish?

Baudelia took down all of their suggestions and assured them that they would be discussed at the next meeting.

In this first meeting, Baudelia worked to affirm and validate parents’ concerns, and to signal to teachers and parents the existence of a community in which relationships were paramount. As she had said to the father, all children at Whitman were “part of the same family,” not just those who would attend the new school. At the end of the meeting, she publicly observed that the teachers had controlled the meeting (“we parents have listened to you teachers”), and announced that this would not be the format of future meetings. To guide teachers in initiating a conversation with parents, she prepared a list of open-ended questions that teachers should ask in order to encourage parent reflection and discussion. The questions teachers added, by contrast, focused on specific areas that reflected their view of parents’ roles: in naming the school, for example, and reaching out to other parents. This was the first parents would see of teachers’ attempt to manage parent participation, a topic that will be explored further in later chapters.

Two weeks later, Baudelia called me to remind me about the next parent meeting. She told me she was not sure how many parents would come, because the school had scheduled another parent meeting for the same time. “Why?” I asked, surprised. Baudelia told me that City Councilman Ignacio de la Fuente had asked for a parent meeting at Whitman, and the principal had scheduled it for the same time as the small schools parent meeting. “The principal is always creating obstacles for me,” Baudelia said.

In spite of this complication, forty-eight parents showed up for the small schools meeting the next evening. Although Baudelia asked them if they were all in the right place, and gave them the opportunity to go to Ignacio de la Fuente’s meeting if they wished, no parent left. It appeared they had all come to talk about new small schools. In addition to the parents, there were nine teachers, two OCCA organizers, and myself. Baudelia had secured child care from the school so that parents would be free to concentrate on the meeting.

Baudelia was in charge of the meeting. She had an agenda, in English and Spanish, and a list of questions for the parent and teacher working groups, also in English and Spanish. “Today we didn’t come to listen,” she announced, “but to work together, parents and teachers.” Baudelia explained that parents would discuss in small groups the questions being passed out, questions that had been generated at the last meeting. She encouraged parents to express all their ideas in the small groups, to not feel embarrassed because no idea was silly, all ideas would be taken into account. They then broke into five groups, each with five to ten people, parents and teachers. Baudelia asked each group to appoint a note taker so that all their ideas would be recorded. Then, at a later meeting, they would put all their ideas together.

The room buzzed with activity. Parents were being asked about questions that mattered to them, and they had a lot to say. In addition to the questions generated from the last meeting—including “What do you understand by ‘small schools’?” and “How would you like your child’s school to be?”—were some new ones: “Do you have any concerns about the education of your children?” “If you could choose the principal of your school, what qualities would you want that person to have?”

The following excerpt from my field notes reveals some of the rich discussion that occurred:

Baudelia asked me … to join a group that was all parents, to help lead them along. (All of the other groups had at least one teacher.) This group was in the midst of an animated discussion about the importance of small classes, citing all the things that go wrong when a teacher has too many students to deal with. The one father in the group, Don José, who sat in a wheel-chair, was taking notes on his questionnaire. The other three parents were Ana, Maria, and Veronica. All three women were very articulate and impassioned about the problems their children face at Whitman. One complaint they had about Whitman was that students are not treated with respect. Children are moved from classroom to classroom abruptly, with no explanation. “They move them from room to room as if they were monkeys!” Ana said, and the others laughed, and wrote down that phrase. Ana said, “My daughter is not a puppet.”

We were not even halfway through the list of questions when Baudelia called time. It was already 6:30, and she had promised the group that the meeting would not take longer than an hour. Several groups wanted to continue working, but some teachers started to get up and one of them flashed the lights on and off to indicate that the meeting was over. The child-care lady let out the kids, who came streaming into the room. “Not yet!” Baudelia tried to say. “The meeting isn’t over yet!” But it was too late. She told the group to turn in their sheets, and that we would continue this at the next meeting, the same time next week.

Baudelia

Baudelia had three children at Whitman in PreK, first, and third grades. I first met her at a local organizing committee meeting for OCCA, where she immediately began talking to me about the conditions at Whitman. As an OCCA parent leader, Baudelia had been invited to accompany a delegation to Chicago to tour the small schools there, but she didn’t know whether her husband would let her go. She had never been separated from her children. She told me she was trying to convince him that it would be a great opportunity. “¡Yo voy a preparar la maleta aunque sea!” (I’m going to pack my bags anyway!). This first interaction illustrated a great deal about Baudelia that I would later come to appreciate: her public status as a recognized parent leader, set against the conflict she faced at home with a husband who was not always supportive of her public role. Yet, far from being a constraining force on her activism, her ability to negotiate and navigate between multiple identities was a resource for her mobilization, providing a strength and a political savvy that would be useful in confronting a range of obstacles at the school. Analyzing Baudelia’s organizing as an example of what feminist Cherríe Moraga (1981) termed “guerrilla warfare,” a “way of life” for women of color, illuminates her engagement with teachers as part of an “eclectic paradigm for political mobilization” (Hurtado 2003, 265).

Baudelia immediately strikes one as articulate, confident, and self-assured. Before immigrating to the United States, she was a social worker in Guadalajara, Mexico, and had begun a law degree. She dropped out of law school to accompany her husband to Oakland, in what was intended to be a short trip to “fix his papers.” They ended up staying ten years and counting. Still, Baudelia had not become a U.S. citizen, and did not consider her stay in this country permanent. Although her husband was also highly educated in Mexico, he now worked as a janitor at the Coliseum, the city’s baseball stadium. Baudelia and her husband still talked about returning to Mexico, but she was committed to staying at least until her children learn English well:

Me gustaría que mis hijos … aprendieran bien el inglés, que agarraran una carrera, porque yo no quiero que ellos pasen por lo que yo estoy pasando. Para mí ha sido bien difícil, del idioma … Y no me gustaría que mis hijos pasaran por lo que yo estoy pasando ahorita en este país … O sea, yo estoy pensando en mis hijos, ya no en mí.

I would like for my children … to learn English well, to get a good career, because I don’t want them to go through what I am going through. For me it’s been very difficult, because of the language … And I don’t want my children to go through what I am going through now in this country … I mean, I’m thinking about my children, not about myself anymore.

Baudelia was committed not only to her own children. In the five years that she had been living in her neighborhood, across the street from Whitman Elementary School, she had been active in neighborhood affairs, from getting more streetlights installed, to getting a liquor store closed, to getting a roving patrolman for the neighborhood, where crime and drug dealing were major concerns. She was a volunteer for the Neighborhood Action Team, the Unity Council, and the People’s Clinic. She was also a member of St. Isabel’s Catholic Church, where she was first introduced to OCCA. It was through her involvement in OCCA, and because of the need that she saw at Whitman, that Baudelia first became involved in the small schools reform.

Baudelia was one of the parents who gave a testimony at the November 8 action for new small schools, and she remembers this as a pivotal experience:

Yo me acuerdo que me dijo Eric [de OCCA], “¿puedes dar un testimonio?” Y yo, ¡no! Pero ay, ¡no! Con 2,500 personas y todos enfrente, y yo llegué y Dios mío, veía a todo lleno allí en el gimnasio, y yo me sentía nerviosa … Estaba nerviosa, pero dije, “Bueno, yo voy a hablar lo que yo pienso, a mí nadie me está diciendo que yo tengo que decir algo, yo voy a decir lo que piensa.” Como que yo sola me di el valor, y aprendí, desde ese momento yo siento que aprendí a dejar el miedo a un lado.

I remember that Eric [an OCCA organizer] asked me, “Can you give a testimony?” And I was like, no! No way! With 2,500 people and everyone in front, and I arrived and my God! I saw the gym all full, and I felt nervous … I was nervous, but I said, “Well, I’m going to say what I think, nobody is telling me that I have to say anything, I’m going to say what I think.” Like I found the courage within myself, and I learned, from that moment I feel that I learned to put fear aside.

Her courage and passion compelled other Latino parents at Whitman to seek her out when their children were having problems. Baudelia had many stories of parents coming to her with problems: from frozen cafeteria lunches that made children sick, to classrooms without air conditioning or drinking water on hot summer days, to teachers who were physically and psychologically abusive to children. In each case, Baudelia advised the parents to confront the administration, accompanied them to meet with the principal, or confronted the principal herself. She also encouraged parents to come to the school’s parent meetings, where they could air their concerns or hear critical information about the school. As Baudelia explained it, helping parents was what she most loved doing.

En primer lugar, lo que se trata de la comunidad o de la gente, allí estoy yo. Si me ponen detrás de un escritorio, no funciono, pero … algo que sea por el bien de la comunidad, allí estoy yo. Los niños, la gente … eso es mi mayor satisfacción, la gente, la gente, la gente.

First of all, whatever has to do with the community or with people, I am there. If you put me behind a desk, I’m useless, but … anything that is for the good of the community, I’m there. The children, the people … that is my greatest satisfaction, people, people, people.

But Baudelia struggled with English and felt limited in what she was able to do in Oakland, compared to her previous experience in Mexico. In Mexico, she told me,

Me sentía más satisfecha en el trabajo, lo que yo hacía … no tenía ninguna barrera como aquí que es el idioma. Aquí aunque yo quisiera irle a acompañar, “O mire, vamos a tal hospital, vamos al MediCal,” ¿a qué voy? No hablo el idioma. Entonces me limita, es una limitación bien grande que tengo. Yo pienso que es lo único que a mí me limita mucho, porque yo con el idioma yo, no me importara que no tuviera el conocimiento, pero adquiría la experiencia como sea, ¿si me entiende? Pero el idioma, el idioma, la forma de entender con los demás, eso es lo que a mí me limita mucho.

I felt more satisfied in my work, what I did … I didn’t have any barriers like I do here, with the language. Here, even if I wanted to accompany someone, “Oh, let’s go to the hospital, let’s go to the MediCal office,” what am I going for? I don’t speak the language! So it limits me, it’s a very big limitation that I have. I think it’s the only limitation I have, because if I knew the language, I wouldn’t care if I didn’t have the right knowledge, I would find the experience one way or the other, you know? But the language, the language, the way to understand other people, that’s what really limits me.

Interestingly, Baudelia felt that any other knowledge she might need to help people get by in the United States she could easily acquire through experience: it was the English language that was most difficult for her. Baudelia had taken a series of English classes at local public colleges, none of which had given her the confidence to speak English well.

Then there were the challenges at home. Although Baudelia explained her organizing work in terms of her children and the community, it conflicted with traditional family expectations that her husband held. Before leaving for meetings, she would have to leave the house clean and dinner cooked for her husband. As she said to me, “No me gustara que mi esposo me llama la atención, ‘Oye, por andar en la calle mira cómo tiene la casa o la comida o la ropa,’ entonces es difícil para mí” (I wouldn’t want for my husband to say to me, “Hey, for gallivanting around, look what a state the house is in.” So, it’s difficult for me). Her husband did finally let her go on the Chicago trip, after much persuading:

Pues, traté de decirle, “Mira, es una oportunidad, piensa en nuestros hijos, yo lo estoy haciendo por mis hijos, no lo estoy haciendo por un paseo.” “¡No, no! ¡Ya te dije que no!” Y al día siguiente yo seguía … “Pero, mira José, dame la oportunidad.” “¡Qué no!” Entonces venía nuestro aniversario. Me dice, “¿Qué quieres que te regale para nuestro aniversario?” Dije, “¿Me vas a dar lo que yo te pida?” “¡Sí!” “¿De veras? Mi deseo es que me dejes ir a Chicago.” … Y me dejó ir.

Well, I tried to tell him, “Look, it’s an opportunity, think about our children, I’m doing this for my children, I’m not doing it just for a trip!” [And he’d say,] “No, no! I already told you no!” And the next day I would keep it up … “But, look, José, give me the opportunity.” “I said no!” Then our anniversary came. He asked me, “What do you want me to give you for our anniversary?” I said, “Are you going to give me what I ask for?” “Yes!” “Really? My wish is that you would let me go to Chicago.” … And he let me go.

On the Chicago trip, Baudelia visited small schools where students and teachers weren’t roving, where the buildings were clean, where parents, teachers, and students worked as a team, and parents told her they had excellent communication with the teachers. “You could see the difference,” she explained. She returned from the trip even more determined to make a difference at Whitman.

Baudelia encountered obstacles not only from her husband. Her work on the small schools design team brought her into frequent contact with the principal, and she had many stories of confusing communication episodes. Not all of those were caused by a language barrier—Baudelia’s English was better than she gave herself credit for. In Baudelia’s view, the principal was not supportive of any kind of parent organizing at the school and felt threatened by the prospect of change. Baudelia constantly encountered opposition from the principal. The first time she tried to post flyers about the small schools parent/teaching meeting, the principal told her that she could not distribute any flyers in the school that did not have the district’s stamp. Baudelia got around this by standing right outside the front door, and handing flyers to parents as they walked into the school. As she explained to me, “Yo sabía que estaba haciendo algo por el bien … Me bajaba la moral, pero yo también lo hacía afuera de la escuela” (I knew that I was doing something for the good [of the school] … It hurt my morale, but I just did it outside the school). On another occasion, the principal was not going to grant child care for a small schools meeting, because she said that Baudelia represented an outside group (OCCA). Baudelia had insisted that she was a Whitman parent and that the meeting was for other Whitman parents, and the principal finally gave in.

Baudelia did not hesitate to tell the principal exactly what she thought. As she frequently says, “Me gusta decir las cosas directas, lo que estoy sintiendo” (I like to say things directly, what I am feeling). One time, she told me, she had tried to tell the principal in her broken English that the principal needed to listen more.

Yo le dije, “¿Sabe qué? Usted le hace falta mucho escuchar.” Le dije, “Yo siento que usted me oye—you listen me! But no me escucha,” le digo, “¡no me escucha! No me escucha, porque no hace nada.” … Y no soy la única que lo siento, pero no todos los padres tenemos a veces el valor de decírselo a ella directamente.

I said to her, “You know what? You need to learn how to listen.” I told her, “I feel that you hear me, but you don’t listen to me. You don’t listen to me, because you don’t do anything.” … I’m not the only one who feels this way, but not all of us parents have the courage to tell it to her face.

Baudelia’s direct style was difficult for some teachers and administrators to take. However, she felt it was a way for them to know what other parents were simply saying behind their backs. Sincerity was a quality she highly valued and found to be in short supply at Whitman.

In the end, Baudelia’s refusal to tolerate the injustices at Whitman motivated her to work for a new small school. “Yo veo que necesitamos un cambio, necesitamos una escuela pequeña” (I see that we need a change, we need a small school).

Worrying about Parents in the Incubator

About a month after the Request for Proposals for New Small Schools was released, BACEE held its first “Incubator” session for design teams. The Incubator, in the words of the RFP, is “a unique organization designed to help new school Design Teams birth and nurture New Small Autonomous Schools.” A collaboration between the district, BACEE, and OCCA, the Incubator was intended to provide coaching and technical assistance to design teams as they responded to the RFP and planned their new small schools.

This meeting was to be a proposal-writing workshop, and design team members were discussing challenges and giving and getting feedback from each other and from BACEE “school coaches.” Thirteen teachers from the Whitman design team were present. No Whitman parents were present, and it appeared that no parents had been invited.

In my small group, Nancy, a teacher from Whitman whom I had not met before, shared that one of the main challenges their design team faced was how to involve the parents. I told her that surprised me, since I had been at the parent meetings and had seen a lot of parent interest. She then clarified that the challenge was to involve more non-Spanish-speaking parents. It is true that there had been no non-Latino parents at the meetings until now; and this was primarily because Baudelia was doing the organizing and she knew mainly Latino parents.

Nancy said that teachers at Whitman wanted parents to help in the writing of the proposal, and that this was a big challenge. The other member of our small group, a retired elementary school teacher, responded that parents probably wouldn’t want to help with the writing of the proposal, and that at most they could critique it once it was written. Nancy liked that idea.

Baudelia might have had something to say about this had she been there, but as it turned out, she had never been told about the Incubator meeting. The next morning when I saw her at the school, I told her about it. She said that parents had not been invited, and she wanted to know more about it. “I could have gone,” she said. It also turned out that she had not seen a copy of the RFP. Although she had been one of the two Spanish-speaking parents to make it to the RFP release, she had not been given a copy, and since the meeting was not translated, she didn’t understand what it was for. So she did not know what specific criteria teachers were working with. Without the RFP, parents were effectively excluded from participating meaningfully in the planning process for a new small school. Why had it not occurred to teachers to share this with parents? The RFP, a document from the district invested with supreme importance by all teachers who held it in their hands, had become a gatekeeper.

At this point Baudelia expressed her frustration to me about trying to collaborate with the teachers at Whitman. She said that she felt teachers were not taking her work into account. For example, she told me, the teachers had held an all-day planning meeting on Veterans Day, but did not tell parents about it until the day before. Baudelia did not know how to get to the college where it was being held, so she didn’t go. In her opinion, teachers should have posted flyers and gotten the word out to parents well in advance.

Listening to educators talking about parents at Incubator meetings brings to mind images of colonial officials discussing in hushed tones what to do about the “natives.” Although the comparison may seem far-fetched, a growing number of scholars have pointed out that education in the United States unfolds in the context of colonial relations (Moll and Ruiz 2002; Tejeda, Espinoza, and Gutierrez 2003; Valenzuela 1999). The relations between education professionals and parents in the small schools movement reflect racial and cultural politics that have been inescapably shaped by the history of colonialism. As I observed teachers struggling with how to include parents in their plans for reform, I thought of the question W. E. B. DuBois once asked of African Americans: “How does it feel to be a ‘problem’?”

Latino parents were a problem for education reformers in the small schools movement. They were a problem for reformers’ work, needing to somehow be “involved,” and they were victims of educational inequality and injustice that the reformers hoped to change. But they were often not present at the table when decisions about reform were being made. Why were parents so often talked about and not with? Why were the very real organizing efforts of Latino parents not seen or counted by the same teachers who aimed to involve them?

African American feminist scholar bell hooks (1989) writes of being excluded from the feminist movement by white women who claimed to be antiracist. White liberal women requested and longed for the presence of black women, yet “wished to exercise control over our bodies and thoughts as their racist ancestors had” (hooks 1989, 112). Liberal whites, like the progressive educators in the small schools movement, have become so used to speaking for the “Other” that they are not aware of how their speech silences those who most need to be heard. Hooks writes, “When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white-supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination … they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they profess to wish to see eradicated” (113). Hooks calls our attention to the deep paternalism underlying many progressive change efforts initiated by whites, where people of color are spoken about, rather than invited to speak as experts of their own experience. “Often this speech about the ‘Other’ annihilates, erases: ‘No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself’ ” (hooks 1990, 152). Recall Baudelia telling the principal, “I feel that you hear me, but you don’t listen to me.”

The construction of Latino parents as “Other” has important implications for the way educational policy is implemented, Enrique Murillo (2002) points out. Within this discourse, Latinos become objects of white benevolence or discipline. Describing the reception of Latino immigrants in a Southern town, Murillo writes, “Many who claimed to welcome the newcomers nonetheless tried to change them (using awkward presumptions of benevolence) and enjoyed the self-righteousness of not seeming overtly racist” (225). This aptly captures the contradiction Baudelia encountered between teachers’ professed goals for meaningful parent involvement and their attempts to manage that involvement to suit their own needs. Teachers requested the participation of parents in planning for new schools, but, as we will see, continued to act as if they preferred parents weren’t there. Bell hooks writes, “Our very presence is a disruption” (1990, 148).

Silencing Parent Voice at Whitman Elementary

I told Baudelia that I would translate the questions from the RFP into Spanish and bring them to the next meeting, which I did. But by the next parent–teacher meeting, Baudelia was no longer in charge. The forty-some parents who had come expecting a continuation of the previous week’s discussion found something rather different. The following description from my field notes illustrates how the agenda was taken over by teachers:

The parents’ responses to the questionnaire (from last week’s meeting) were written on poster board, posted all over the room. When it came to that item on the agenda, Cristina, a teacher who is bilingual, told parents she would give a summary of what had been said for each question. She did this in both English and Spanish. For some questions she didn’t read any answers at all, for example, the question, ¿Cómo le gustaría que fuera la escuela de su hijo? (How would you like your child’s school to be?). She said she wouldn’t get into the specifics, because there were many different ideas, and she invited parents to go read the posters after the meeting. But in my opinion that was the most important question, and it would have been well worth reading aloud all of the answers. For that matter, why weren’t the parents reading their own answers? Why was a teacher reading it for them? By summarizing and paraphrasing, and never reading parents’ answers in their own words, Cristina was taking the authority to decide what was most important; taking the parents’ words away from them.

During the reading (or summarizing) of the answers, the parents sat quiet. It occurred to me as slightly tragic that this exercise, which had started out being about parents’ generating their own ideas, ended up being such a boring drill! With all the energy seemingly stolen away from them.

After the review was complete, Baudelia spoke up to encourage parents who had not been present at the last meeting to add their ideas. “Por eso estamos,” she said. (“That’s why we’re here.”) One father made a comment about class size. But after that, Cristina moved to the next point on the agenda. No other parent had a chance to add anything. Cristina explained that part of the teachers’ vision for the new small school was to have control over their budget, so that no class would have more than 25 students. While this was relevant to the father’s concern about class size, it was unfortunate that this closed off the opportunity for other parents to add their ideas. Cristina had moved the meeting on to the “teachers’ vision.”

Following this was a question-and-answer period with the parents asking various questions about the school’s program. Finally, Baudelia held up the RFP I had given her and explained that it was from the district. She said that many of the questions they discussed in the last meeting are in the RFP and that that’s why they were discussing them. She also said that parents have the right to know what the teachers are proposing, and that she would make copies of the questions available for the parents.

At this point several teachers chimed in to say that they needed parents’ help in preparing the proposal. Cristina said, “We can’t submit this to the district without your help.” Marie said, “You have to sign off on the proposal!” Linda said that teachers had been working on their days off, and had started writing the proposal, taking into account the parents’ concerns, “but we feel that we can’t go on writing without your help.”

Linda told the parents that the teachers wanted to share with them what they had written so far, an answer to the question in the RFP about the school’s educational philosophy. She read aloud the description in Spanish. Another teacher read the same thing in English. Clearly, their choice of words mattered enough to them to want to read it out loud word for word. Why was the parents’ choice of words not equally respected?

It was because she understood the power of written words that Baudelia had asked each parent group to appoint a note taker at the last meeting, and each parent’s thought had been painstakingly recorded. Yet the parents saw their words summarized or brushed over, while the teachers’ words were read exactly as written. Furthermore, parents might have wondered what had been the point of recording their views if the teachers’ vision remained separate, unchanged by the parents’ ideas? While the parents wrote in public, at a meeting designated for them to record their thoughts, the teachers wrote in private, at a place and time unknown to the parents, and ultimately it was the teachers’ written product that would become the proposal for a new small school.

After the teachers’ vision had been read, Baudelia asked the teachers for copies of what they had written to distribute to the parents, and she also said she would make copies of the translated questions from the RFP for parents. As the meeting drew to a close, Baudelia urged all parents to write down their ideas and bring them to the next meeting.

Because Baudelia understood that teachers were preparing written responses to the RFP questions, she went home and wrote out her own answers to the questions. When I called her on the phone one morning the next week, she read one of her answers to me. Although she said she didn’t know the proper terminology to use and that the teachers could edit her words, I thought what she read demonstrated no lack of eloquence. The following is her answer to the RFP’s question, “What serves as the impetus for you and your team to seek to create a school at this time?”³

El objetivo de crear una nueva escuela, es en base a la necesidad de un cambio en los aspectos de: organización, académico, de participación, de comunicación, de seguridad, de limpieza y estructura, en la que podamos tener una visión diferente del proceso de enseñanza, en lugar de que se considere al maestro como único responsable de manejar la educación de los estudiantes que esta responsabilidad sea compartida entre padres, maestros, directores, incluso del entorno comunitario.

Nuestra misión es despertar la comunidad para que se de cuenta cada uno de nosotros está aquí para servir, así como para que se sirva, para respetar y ser respetado. Todos trabajaremos juntos con un máximo compromiso de responsabilidad de vocación, para lograr escuelas autónomas y el mejoramiento de su calidad. Éste es un deber y un derecho de todos y cada uno. Tomando como base principal la comunicación, ésta será la clave del éxito, y esto sea reflejado a través del rendimiento escolar de los alumnos.

The purpose of creating a new school is based on the need for change in the aspects of: organization, academics, participation, communication, security, cleanliness, and structure, so that we can have a different vision of the teaching process, where instead of considering the teacher the only one responsible for the education of students, this responsibility is shared between parents, teachers, school directors, and the larger community.

Our mission is to waken the community so that each one of us realizes that we are here to serve, just as to be served, to respect and be respected. We will all work together with the maximum commitment and responsibility of our vocation, to achieve autonomous schools and the improvement of their quality. This is a right and responsibility of each and every one of us. Beginning with the foundation of communication, this will be the key to success, and this will be reflected in the academic performance of the students.

In this excerpt, Baudelia emphasizes the mutuality of roles and egalitarian relationships in her vision of a school community, offering a direct critique of the current hierarchical structure. Her use of the words “each one of us” and “each and every one of us” signals the equality between parents and teachers, posing school design and school change as a “right and responsibility” of both. It is important to recognize this vision statement as the product of an oppositional consciousness, in the terms of U.S. third-world feminist theory, reflecting Baudelia’s keen awareness of power differentials and her commitment to equalizing them. In this framework, Baudelia’s experience of marginalization was a privileged standpoint from which to envision an alternative school: put differently, her vision could only be articulated from the lived experience of injustice. Given this, Baudelia’s answers to the questions in the RFP should have been taken seriously by teachers who aspired to a school for social justice.

Baudelia told me that she had given her answers to the teachers at a meeting the Friday before (the day after the last parent meeting). The teachers had never officially invited parents to write responses to the RFP. And yet, Baudelia was meeting them on their own ground. In reading their statement of educational philosophy aloud to the parents, teachers had signaled that their privately written responses would be privileged over parents’ oral responses. Baudelia responded by also writing in private. Her words had now entered the mix. Bell hooks describes the bold and courageous act of writing for women who have been silenced. “For us,” she says, “true speaking is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance” (1989, 8). In submitting her written statements unsolicited, Baudelia was challenging the teachers’ domination of a process that was meant to include parents. “It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back,’ ” writes bell hooks, “that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice” (9).

Negotiating the Right to Speak at Whitman

For the fourth Whitman parent–teacher design team meeting, on its now regular Thursday evening, parent attendance dropped from about fifty to twenty-five. Teacher attendance was also low: although normally at least nine or ten teachers would be present, only five arrived for this meeting. The group had seemingly lost some of the momentum it had in the early meetings that Baudelia had organized. Whereas the meetings Baudelia led had been interactive and participatory, the last meeting had been teacher-driven, with parents playing largely listening roles. The following excerpt from my field notes shows teachers continuing to dominate the meeting:

Since I arrived a few minutes late, the meeting had already begun. Cristina, a bilingual teacher, was standing in front reading from a piece of paper, what sounded like a response to one of the RFP questions. She read in Spanish. I asked Baudelia whose response she was reading, and she said it was the teacher’s own response. I asked her if they had read her (Baudelia’s) response out loud. “No!” she said, as if surprised that I should ask such a thing. Had they said anything about what she had written? I asked. “No,” she said, “I guess they didn’t like it.” I told her she should ask to read what she had written. “Did you read it?” she asked me. “Of course! I typed it up for you!” I said. “Really?” She looked happily surprised, but darted off to the front of the room before I could ask her again to read it.

All of the parents had copies of the questions from the RFP that I had translated into Spanish. These questions got to the heart of starting a new small school, asking design teams to describe the needs of their community, the vision and philosophy of the school, the proposed instructional program, and the role parents and community partners would play. On the basis of their answers to these questions, the district would decide whether or not to grant the new small school. But throughout the whole meeting, these questions were never addressed. Instead, posted around the room were four questions written by the teachers, which the parents were to discuss in small groups. This was explained after Cristina had finished reading her piece. The questions were

(1) What are your thoughts about discipline? What will your contribution be to support our agreements?

(2) What do you need to feel comfortable and capable to participate actively in the development of the new school?

(3) Should we organize a group of parents to observe a multiage classroom?

(4) School schedule. What is most convenient for the parents? What is most convenient for the students? (My translation from the Spanish)

Each group of parents, with one or two teachers, was to focus on a different question and report back to the large group what they had discussed. This activity was on the agenda as “Break into small groups and discuss parents’ component of proposal,” or “Trabajo en equipo: el componente de padres de la propuesta.” So these four questions were “the parents’ component of the proposal”? Who had decided that? The parents’ role had swiftly been circumscribed to one of discipline, scheduling, and observing classrooms.

And yet, animated discussion was happening at each of the four tables. In each group, parents were discussing things that mattered to them, in ways that did and did not comply with the teachers’ questions. Teachers often had to steer the discussion back to the question at hand. In some cases, parents’ responses to the question seemed to deliberately resist the teachers’ intent. For example, when it came time for the groups to report back to the large group, the parents who had discussed discipline shared the following comments:

• all kids should wear a uniform

• teachers should require (exigir) their students to turn in homework

• homework should not only be sent to school signed by parents, but should be sent home signed (corrected) by teachers

• kids who don’t turn in their homework should be punished—made to stay in during lunch, for example

• parents should know the rules of their child’s classroom(s)

• kids should not be moved from one classroom to another

Although the question had asked parents what would be their contribution to support our (teachers’) agreements, all of the parents’ points referred to the responsibility of the school or teachers, who to these parents weren’t holding up their end of the discipline bargain. The parents had effectively subverted the teachers’ question. Where the question implied that discipline problems are at least partly parents’ responsibility, parents turned their critique to the school. In effect, parents were saying the school is not strict enough with their children. Baudelia added a comment about the homework, saying that while parents sign their children’s completed homework, they never see it again, so they never know what their child did right or wrong. How can they help their children in this case? Again, the consensus of the parents appeared to criticize lax teacher policies, which shortchanged their kids.

Baudelia facilitated discussion after each group presented, inviting other comments and passing around the microphone. There was some ruckus as the microphone was passed around, as parents laughed and joked at the prospect of speaking into a microphone. One mother came forward and joked into the mike, “Well, I’m not going to talk to you folks tonight, I’m going to sing!” (field notes, November 30, 2000; my translation from the Spanish). Everyone laughed. Often after a parent spoke into the microphone, other parents would clap. I wrote down in my notebook, “Does the microphone empower?” Parents were clearly reveling in the opportunity to speak their mind, and in the possibilities for voice and play that the microphone allowed.

There was a heated discussion about multiage classrooms, a topic of one of the groups. The parents appeared to be unanimously against these classrooms, which were a part of the teachers’ plan for the new small school. Parents expressed the concern that, if mixed in a classroom with two grades, some kids would lose out. As Baudelia explained to me, children were usually thrown into mixed-age classrooms because there was no room for them anywhere else. In other words, she objected to multi-age classrooms as a makeshift practice, not as an educational strategy. But other parents were opposed to it even as an educational strategy. Teachers would only teach to one grade level (the lowest), so some kids would be repeating content. One father said emphatically, “It doesn’t work to have two grades with one teacher.” When Baudelia asked the group at large whether they were in agreement with multiage classrooms, there was a loud, resounding “NO!”

The parents had communicated their opinion to the teachers. The teachers, represented by Marie, responded by saying that parents needed to visit successful multiage classrooms at Whitman and in San Francisco. But later, when Baudelia asked the parents who would be interested in making such a trip, Marie said, “That doesn’t need to happen now. That can happen in January or later, after we find out whether our school was accepted.” There was no attempt to win the parents’ agreement before the proposal was due, or to defend or explain the teachers’ educational vision for multiage classrooms in light of the parents’ concerns. I got the feeling this had already been decided.

And yet, I have tried to convey that this meeting was not a one-sided narrative. Although teachers clearly had an agenda, parents appropriated and subverted it in various ways and took advantage of having “the floor” to make their voice heard. Baudelia’s asking the parents whether they were in agreement with multiage classrooms was in a sense a rhetorical question, because she knew that they were not. But it gave the parents the opportunity to shout a unified “no!” in front of the teachers, communicating their opinion loud and clear.

And the loudest expression of resistance was still to come. The next day, Baudelia called an emergency meeting to express her frustration to the teachers. She told me what happened the following week. After the meeting, Baudelia had stayed behind to talk to Laura, an OCCA organizer who had been present, and two of the teachers. “I have to tell you how I feel,” she explained to the teachers. “I can’t continue working this way.” She said she felt that the teachers were working with the parents only as a requirement—“como un requisito”—and that they were working very separately. Baudelia said she expressed everything she felt and that Laura was amazed. The teachers offered to call an emergency meeting with the other teachers and parents the following day to discuss the issue. So, on Friday, seventeen teachers (far more than had been at Thursday’s meeting) and several parents showed up. Baudelia explained everything she felt to the whole group, and argued that parents have the right to know the information the teachers are using, and the way they are working on the proposal. She told them, “You think that we as parents can’t understand the process [of writing a proposal], but we do understand!” Furthermore, she said she was not going to keep organizing parent meetings if nothing important would be discussed. “I don’t want what happened last Thursday to ever happen again.” If teachers didn’t have the proposal to share with the parents, Baudelia would simply not schedule the meeting.

British social critic Paul Gilroy (1987), writing on race, says, “The idea that blacks comprise a problem, or more accurately a series of problems, is today expressed at the core of racist reasoning. It is closely related to a second idea which is equally pernicious … [that] defines blacks as forever victims, objects rather than subjects, beings that feel yet lack the ability to think, and remain incapable of considered behavior in an active mode” (11). The Whitman teachers would have certainly considered themselves anti-racist, but their practices reproduced racial politics that denied intellectual agency to Latino parents. Baudelia called this out when she said, “You think that we as parents can’t understand the process, but we do understand!”

In the meeting, Baudelia had wanted parents to discuss the questions from the RFP, which they had in front of them. But while she was doing the agenda with Laura, teachers had put up the other questions that had nothing to do with the proposal. “Where did those questions come from?” she had asked. She was angry, but didn’t feel that she could say anything until after the meeting.

At issue here was the parents’ trust for Baudelia as a parent leader, something she valued greatly. Baudelia told teachers that parents would start to think of her as a liar, “like the principal,” if she kept promising them that their input was valuable when it really wasn’t. Her comparison to the principal is telling, because the principal was almost universally mistrusted among Latino parents as a poor leader who did not respect parents’ rights. In trying to involve parents in the school, Baudelia had fought against this model of leadership and had struggled to create a place where parents’ voices could be truly heard. Baudelia knew that parents’ trust was a delicate thing, and she risked losing it if the teachers were not behind her.

But also at issue here, for Baudelia, was parents’ right to be informed about and to have a part in a process that would greatly affect their children. As Baudelia said to the teachers, “Quizás nosotros como padres no tenemos la capacidad, pero sí tenemos el derecho” (Maybe we as parents don’t have the capacity [to be involved in the proposal-writing process], but we do have the right). Interestingly, here she allows that not all parents might have the capacity to participate in substantive ways, a possibility she had previously denied. But rather than an acknowledgment of parents’ lesser capacities, this choice of words was meant to inform teachers that a parent’s right to participate in the process was not dependent on his or her qualifications. Parents had a right to participate whether they felt qualified or not.

According to Baudelia, the teachers had fallen silent, stunned, but eventually acknowledged that they knew the process hadn’t been right and that they needed to come up with better strategies to involve parents. Baudelia said she felt better after the meeting: “¡Me descargé!” (I unloaded!) she said.

When I asked Linda, a teacher, for her perspective on what happened, she replied:

It was a communication breakdown. And we felt so under pressure, and I can understand where [Baudelia] was coming from, and I also know how hard we were working, and it felt really bad at the time, that “God, don’t these people realize we’re up until 11 o’clock at night working on [this]?” But it was a communication breakdown, and I’m glad that it happened because I thought it brought us closer after we met.

The confrontation, as difficult as it was, was a form of catharsis, bringing parents and teachers the relief of finally being honest with each other. As Linda said, “I think that’s how people are brought closer together. There’s always going to be conflict.”

On Social Justice: “Aren’t We Also Going to Talk about Us?”

The Whitman design team’s proposed new small school centered on a theme of social justice. Part of the teachers’ vision statement read:

We see social justice curriculum as the portrayal of history and current events from multiple perspectives, participation in community activism and service, and the cultivation of respect. Our school community will act as a model of a tolerant and just society through our ongoing efforts to celebrate our diversity, to offer an equitable education, and to govern ourselves through a participatory democracy.

In early conversations with teachers about the new small school, Baudelia did not understand what they meant by “social justice.” “They’re talking a lot about ‘social justice,’ ” she told me in our interview. “But I don’t understand it.” Finally, she had asked a teacher to explain it to her. Here she recounts the conversation:

Pues que los niños conozcan sus derechos, que esto lo apliquen afuera, y que tengan más conocimiento pues de lo que es una justicia social. Dije yo, “¿Pero no vamos a hablar también de nosotros, de lo que nosotros pensamos, de lo que nosotros queremos, de lo que nosotros queremos para esos niños?” Dijo, “¡Sí! Claro, también se va a hacer eso.”

Well, so the children know their rights, so that they can apply this outside, and so that they have more knowledge, you know, about what is social justice. So I said, “But aren’t we also going to talk about us, about what we think, about what we want, about what we want for those children?” She said, “Of course! We’ll do that, too.”

Here Baudelia challenges the teachers’ abstract notion of social justice with the need to “talk about us.” Her question to the teacher seemed to symbolize the conflict the design team was facing, as teachers experimented with ideas in the abstract, away from the immediate concerns of parents. And yet, Baudelia suggested, isn’t that what social justice is about? The inclusion of parents’ real-world needs, ideas, and concerns in the design of the school for their children?

Tejeda, Espinoza, and Gutierrez (2003) assert, “The ideology that pervades liberal notions of social justice is that of a hopeful Americanism. For all its talk against the social ills of ‘racism and economic inequalities,’ it fails to translate into a lived praxis that adequately contests the multiplicity of ways racism, capitalism, homophobia, privilege, and sexism are made manifest” (21). The authors caution against any notion of social justice that is divorced from the experience of those who most suffer from injustice. In order to enact a “decolonizing pedagogy,” they argue, social justice must be defined by historically colonized people; our notions of social justice must be “derivative of and informed by the experiences and interpretations of those living an internal neo-colonial existence” (ibid.). Like bell hooks, they urge us to be conscious of our “neo-colonial condition,” lest we believe that we have shed our racist past.

“Internal neocolonialism,” which characterizes the U.S. context today, according to the authors, is a condition produced by mutually reinforcing systems of colonial and capitalist domination and exploitation. This concept emphasizes the continuity of colonial relations from our colonial past, reproduced in new forms (neocolonialism) and within the same country (internal). In our context it amounts to a condition of white privilege and control. Drawing on Barrera’s (1979) definition of colonialism, they argue that “there continues to be a structured relationship of cultural, political, and economic domination and subordination between European whites on the one hand, and indigenous and non-white peoples on the other” (Tejeda, Espinoza, and Gutierrez 2003, 5). Within this context, “the forms of violence and ‘microagressions’ experienced by dominated and exploited groups in the context of everyday life are both normalized and officially sanctioned by dominant ideologies and institutional arrangements in ‘American’ society” (3).

Tejeda, Espinoza, and Gutierrez raise the inherent contradictions in white teachers’ attempts to implement a “social-justice” pedagogy without including the voices of Latino (and Asian and African American) parents who have most directly experienced educational and social injustice. In their view, the tendency of progressive teachers to think they know better than the parents themselves what parents need is neither a mystery nor an anomaly: it is the latest reinscription of colonial domination. It is made possible by cultural systems of knowledge and representation that construct inferior “Others” as the basis for domination, and by “historical amnesia” that encourages us to forget our roles as oppressors and oppressed. Importantly, “historical amnesia” can also mean the refusal to see the past in the present: a view of racism that consists in past atrocities, such as slavery and the extermination of Native Americans, and not in everyday life. Research by Lee Anne Bell (2003) showed that white professionals in the education and human-service fields went to great lengths to deny their own racist conditioning, maintaining a “color-blind” ideology that protected their innocence while seeing racism as a thing of the past. The importance of the concept of internal neocolonialism is that it highlights the new forms of colonial domination that are reproduced in our era: all of the subtle and not so subtle ways in which white privilege and control are still exercised. In the case of the Whitman small school design team, it can be seen as the violation of parents’ cultural and intellectual rights in the small school design. Tejeda, Espinoza, and Gutierrez conclude, “The integrity of the indigenous mind/body is the standard by which we measure the success of any decolonizing pedagogy” (2003, 33).

Baudelia clearly had a strong understanding of social justice; it just didn’t match the teachers’ concept. A strong sense of justice (or, more often, injustice) lay behind all of her interactions with teachers, with the principal, with other parents, and behind all of her decisions to confront school authorities when she saw something she didn’t think was right. Recall how she overcame the principal’s opposition to her posting flyers because, as she said, “I knew that I was doing something for the good [of the school].” Rather than explaining social justice to Baudelia, teachers would do well to listen to her. They then might notice how often she uses the words just and unjust, and, most importantly, rights, in explaining her experience at Whitman Elementary School.

“Maybe we as parents don’t have the capacity [to be involved in the design process], but we do have the right,” she had said. According to Baudelia, parents have the right to know about their children’s educational programs, to choose bilingual education and have their choice respected, and in general to be kept informed by the school:

Yo creo que los padres tenemos derecho a saber si algo está pasando en la escuela y que pueda afectar a los niños, como eso que pasó del moho, eso que pasó a la escuela. Yo creo que tenemos el derecho de saber, por ejemplo … si mi niño va a ser cambiado de un salón a otro, o de una letra a otro, yo tengo el derecho de saber el por qué, ¿si me entiende? … Yo siento que es un derecho, que nosotros tenemos que mantenernos informados.

I think that as parents we have the right to know if something is happening in the school that could affect the children, like what happened with the mold [in a contaminated classroom building], what happened to the school. I think we have the right to know, for example … if my child is going to be moved from one class to another, I have the right to know why, do you understand? … I feel it’s a right, that we have to keep informed.

Importantly for Baudelia, these rights are accompanied by responsibilities or “obligations” that parents have: for example, to attend meetings at the school. In her response to the RFP, quoted earlier, Baudelia writes that it is a “right and responsibility” of “each and every one of us” to work together to achieve better schools. Rights are thus connected to individuals’ obligations to the community.

From Baudelia’s response to the RFP and her interview, a rich picture emerges of her vision of a just community, where everyone is there “to serve and be served, to respect and be respected.” Respect and service to the community are important elements of this vision, and they are revealed clearly in her description of the “leadership model”:

The leadership model that we would like to have in the new school is Democratic. The director should:

(1) Have the capacity to understand the community context.

(2) Have the desire to serve and make changes when they are necessary, not simply the desire to be someone.

(3) Be capable of directing, guiding, and understanding, with the potential for growth and necessary change.

(4) Be able to stimulate, encourage, and nurture supportive relationships between different people and to work on a team to support group decisions.

(5) Be secure of himself/herself, so that he or she can transmit this to others.⁴

Baudelia also believes that all children in the school should wear uniforms, and that they should receive civic education. She told me that she once approached Whitman’s principal to ask why students never sang the national anthem. The principal had responded that it was because students were from all different cultures. Baudelia said:

Yo entiendo, no les vayan a enseñar el himno de El Salvador, el himno de Canadá, sino el de aquí. Estamos en los Estados Unidos, es bonito que los niños se enseñan a respetar lo que significa la bandera, yo no digo que diario, ni cada ocho días, ¡pero una vez al mes! Un acto cívico, ¿cuándo les dan un acto cívico? Jamás.

I understand, we’re not about to teach them the anthem of El Salvador, the anthem of Canada, but of here. We are in the United States, it’s nice for the children to learn to respect what the flag means, I’m not saying every day, not even every week, but once a month! A civic ceremony, when do they do a civic ceremony? Never.

Although it may seem puzzling that someone who is not even a U.S. citizen should want her children to learn the United States’ national anthem, it became clear that this was part of Baudelia’s vision for a community, a sense of belonging that would bestow on children both the rights and the responsibility that she feels are currently missing. And these rights and responsibilities are granted not on the basis of nationality, nor language, nor individual “capacities,” as Baudelia made clear to the teachers, but by virtue of membership in the school community.

The parents’ insistence on a school uniform for children shows that Baudelia is not alone in this vision of community. The parents in the design team meeting proposed a mandatory uniform as a “discipline” strategy. This reflects their belief that good behavior comes when children feel they are part of a community. As Baudelia explained it: “Si un niño se sale, usted no sabe si es de la escuela o es de la calle. Y si usted lo ve pasando un niño por ejemplo de kinder que va con el uniforme, ‘Oye, ¿porque va solo?’ O ‘¿porque te saliste?’ O ‘vas a la escuela, ¿no?’ ¿Y cómo lo vas a identificar?” (If a child goes out, you don’t know if he’s from the school or from the street. [But] if you see a child passing, for example, from kindergarten who’s wearing his uniform, “Hey, why are you alone?” Or, “Why did you leave?” Or, “You’re going to school, aren’t you?” How [else] are you going to identify him?). In this view, membership in the school community means that others will care about students and hold them accountable for good behavior. The uniform denotes membership, and with membership come rights and responsibilities.

When talking about “social justice,” then, teachers need to be attentive to parents’ understandings of justice, not only because it is their children whose futures are being envisioned, but because it is often the parents’ experience that gives concrete expression to teachers’ abstract notions of justice. As Tejeda, Espinoza, and Gutierrez assert, “The question of social justice by whom begs us to ask the question: Social justice for whom? We move away from notions of social justice that seek to create social space for the poor, dark-skinned and indigenous to be more like their oppressors” (2003, 21). From Baudelia’s perspective, the first step toward a vision for social justice would be for the teachers to listen to and include parents’ voices in the planning process. To talk about “social justice” and “democracy” while continually silencing parent voices was a blatant contradiction.

Fortunately, the story did not end there. Baudelia confronted the teachers, as we have seen, and forced them to engage in real dialogue with the parents. What factors enabled Baudelia to confront teachers in this way? Teachers would often see her as exceptional, explaining her behavior in terms of unique personality traits: “feisty” or “confrontational.” Certainly, Baudelia had a strong personality: as she was fond of saying, “I always have to say what I feel.” But it is important to understand her behavior in light of her life experience as an immigrant woman. Baudelia had been a social worker in Mexico, with a passion for helping others and the training and ability to do so, before she arrived in Oakland and found herself constrained by discrimination and a language barrier. This transition, and her “outsider/within” status in Oakland, gave her a unique vantage point from which to view the exclusion of parents by teachers. Here, Baudelia takes her place in a long line of U.S. feminists of color who share, according to Chela Sandoval, a “common border culture” … “comprised of the skills, values, and ethics generated by a subordinated citizenry compelled to live within similar realms of marginality” (2000, 52).

If Baudelia’s experience provided the skills to engage with teachers, an essential factor in enabling her to continue struggling for parent voice at Whitman was the support of OCCA. At this point in my research, Baudelia talked again and again of how OCCA was an invaluable source of support to her. Importantly, an OCCA organizer had been there with her when she confronted the teachers. Baudelia credited OCCA with helping her learn to get past fear, and with legitimating parents’ right to organize and express themselves.

OCCA provided both motivation and support when things got tough. Baudelia recounts that in times of stress, there was always Laura, an OCCA organizer, to help her out: “Siempre ha estado OCCA atrás de mí, en cualquier cosa … Siempre ellos han estado como apoyo” (OCCA has always been behind me, in everything … Always they have been a support). In the face of opposition from the principal, from teachers, from her husband, and at times from other parents, the support of OCCA encouraged Baudelia to keep on.

At the last parent–teacher meeting before the small school proposal was due, eleven parents and eleven teachers sat in a circle with copies of “A Summary of our New, Small, Autonomous School Proposal.” This was a select group of parents that Baudelia had invited, because teachers had asked for a smaller group. The teachers began the meeting by reading aloud the proposal summary, in Spanish. They took turns reading, at times stumbling on the Spanish, at times correcting each other or laughing as parents giggled at their mistakes. For many of the teachers, the Spanish was a struggle. But their effort to read in Spanish, and their willingness to laugh at themselves and with the parents, created a feeling of closeness—a reminder that they were learners, too.

After the reading, the teachers asked parents to respond to three questions they had posted on the wall: What excites you? (¿Qué les emociona?) What worries you? (¿Qué les preocupa?) And, What questions do you have? (¿Cuáles preguntas tienen?) They asked parents to start by sharing what was exciting to them about the proposal.

Baudelia responded first, saying she was excited about the bilingual program and the project-based learning and community service. In the project-based learning piece, she liked the example of a community garden in which the children would harvest food that could be donated to a homeless shelter. Baudelia said that would teach children social responsibility, which she liked. A teacher responded by saying that the community-service idea is part of their vision for social justice.

“Oh, that’s social justice?” Baudelia exclaimed. She looked happily surprised, as if she finally understood what the teachers meant, and she liked it.

The feeling in the room that night was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. The parents were thrilled about many aspects of the proposal, and the excitement was palpable as people imagined a school like this becoming a reality.

Of course, this was only the beginning. But through the insistence of the parents and the commitment of the teachers, a space had been opened for honest conversation. Ultimately, Baudelia had helped move the teachers closer to their goal, stated in the proposal: “We believe that we can create a school where people can come together in their urgency and pain, with passion, anger, and dreams to speak to one another in authentic voices.”