CARA ESQUIBEL
By Kiana Maldonado Muñúzuri
If we don’t speak up for the people in our society that are not represented, then we do not have a society that is fully engaged and functioning and healthy. And to me it’s very simple, we all have a responsibility, every single human being, for seeing how we can help people in society that are not able to either help themselves or not able to speak up, or don’t have rights, […] all the things that [my father] did were to defend people’s rights so I guess that’s just in me. To me, I don’t understand any other way of being. Cara Esquivel has been a teacher at Monte del Sol Charter School, on the South side of Santa Fe, since 2001. She teaches Spanish/English Language Arts to students with Hispanic backgrounds, and she is also part of the City of Santa Fe Immigration Committee. I went to her classroom to interview her about her work and her story: Some students are there hanging out between classes when I go through the door with a sign that reads Los artesanos. Cara comes in and waits for all the students to go to class before we sit down at her desk and start the interview; I ask her about her years in college, her dreams and interests. Cara tells me that she studied at the University of Illinois in the early nineties, she was majoring in Urban Planning when all of a sudden she ran into a protest at her school against the mascot of the university, the Fighting Illini, who dresses as a Native American in full headdress. The protest was organized by Native American people who were against the mascot’s misrepresentation of their culture, and the tradition of having the mascot go out into the field before the games and dancing as if he were drunk. At the protest she saw the regents of the university: “these men have a lot of power and I remember looking at them and they weren’t listening to anything that the people were saying in the microphone, they were just completely… they didn’t care!” The apathy that Cara saw from the regents made her decide she wanted to do something different, so she chose Journalism as her minor to help make the voice of the people stronger. When she finished college she felt like she needed to get out of the Midwest, so she joined the Peace Corps in Costa Rica. In Costa Rica, Cara met very special people and participated in incredible trainings. She learned about the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, and his ideas of empowering the poor and improving literacy for communities that don’t have a voice. Thanks to that inspiration, Cara got into teacher training for the Ministry of Education in Costa Rica. “When I finished the Peace Corps I decided I wanted to work with immigrant students”. Cara’s classroom has a funky, colorful style that gives it a cultural and comfortable atmosphere for her students. The room is full of Mexican crafts, skeletons, flowers, celebration flags, devils, maps, and candles, as well as a lot of dragons, the mascot of the school. I asked her to recall what experiences impacted her to focus her work on immigrant teens, she answers that it was her family, “I do it for my grandparents.” Cara’s mother’s side of the family comes from Mexico City and Patzcuaro, a town in the southern state of Michoacan; they came to the U.S. before Cara was born. Her father’s family is from Ireland. Because of her family’s immigrant status, Cara has been a close witness to the struggle, racism, and oppression experienced by Hispanic people and other minority groups in the United States. “We’re still in that era where we see immigrants as a scapegoat for why our society isn’t working, instead of really looking at the deeper issues”. Her first year at Monte del Sol, Cara taught Spanish 1. Her class was made up of a group of students from diverse cultural backgrounds. In the beginning, she noticed that learning Spanish in the classroom was not the most effective way for her students to grasp the language, “They come back and they can’t say ¿cómo estás?”. She decided to organize trips to take them to Spanish speaking countries so they could experience firsthand learning a different language through immersion. She quickly realized that there was a larger lesson to be learned from these trips, and saw an opportunity to not only teach the students language skills, but to teach them how to develop different cultural perspectives, and to empathize with the experiences of some of their classmates and community members who live everyday in a new culture. “I just know that when your family lives as an immigrant in another country […], when you don’t know the language, when you aren’t able to feel safe because you’re not documented, you live with that fear.” Cara’s background allows her to connect with and understand what some of her students are going through. “Anybody that has had to learn another language or lived in another culture knows that is a daily exhausting chore, you are not understanding the vast majority of what’s going on around you, you’re constantly feeling inept because you can’t communicate”. The first year of the trips, they took eighteen students to Oaxaca, Mexico. It was a transformative experience for both the teachers and the students. Cara especially likes to see how the trips influence her students over the long term, “because while you’re in it you don’t know how it’s affecting people”. She recalls the stories of two students who were greatly affected by the trip in 2002. One of them had trouble adapting to the region - he noticed that everybody stared at him because of the way he looked: very tall, blond and blue eyed. Cara had a hard time with him during the trip but: “that kid ended up going to the United World College, graduated from there and then he ended up moving to Oaxaca [as part of his graduate program]”. Cara loves these small stories, the type that show how experiences can shape a student’s future. She also tells me the story of a student named Ross Condon in that same trip: “he loved Oaxaca so much, he went back and he took his brother, Zach Condon”, who is the lead singer of the internationally known band, Beirut, ”they went down the next year and then his brother ended up making a CD called the March of the Zapotec because of that influence”. The Zapotec are an indigenous group of the state of Oaxaca and are very well-known for their bands and their music with German influence. If you listen to songs like The Shrew, La Llorona, and the folkloric song Pinotepa Nacional you can easily hear where this comes from. During the trips, American students stay with host families in Oaxaca where they take Spanish, Arts, and other subjects with American teachers. Most importantly, students get engaged with projects and organizations in the state that focus on sustainability and social justice. Working in these fields makes them aware of the core issues in the world and empowers them to take better care of our planet. After participating in this program, the students have a new understanding of Mexico. In Cara’s opinion, Mexico is portrayed in a negative light in the United States through Hollywood movies, images, and news stories. Cara finds that this narrow representation of the country creates negative stereotypes about Mexican and Latin American people. Cara states that her “idea is to change those ideas of Mexico, change the way people see Mexico, instead of thinking of it as dirty and narcotraficantes. […] So that’s how I feel part of my job is; to take people so they can see something different". Cara also thinks these beliefs are slowly changing in the U.S.A. For example, Congressman Joaquin Castro, who is of Mexican descent, has been empowered in Washington. She sees it as a big step for how the Hispanic population is seen here and it starts to break down harmful stereotypes. Cara has been planning trips with the school for almost fifteen years, and this year she started the Language Institute for Sustainability and Transformative Education in Oaxaca (LISTO). LISTO began out of wanting to combine her passions of sustainability, opening the perspective of people from different cultures, and her love of Oaxaca. She was planning to take students to Oaxaca with LISTO but instead, this experience will be for teachers. She hopes this new program will help her move forward with her work and her mission to create a different and bigger impact on students; “I’m really excited about affecting teachers because, honestly if I can help teachers have a better understanding of the students in their classes and they can stop seeing them with deficits (for example if they don’t speak the language), then that will have a bigger effect”. This program aims to motivate teachers to get out of their comfort zone, enter a new space, and connect with a different culture, language, and the process of learning. Cara hopes that at the end of the experience, teachers will have the tools and personal experience they need to connect with their students at a deeper level of understanding. Already, there are teachers from Monte del Sol and other schools in town that are signed up for the LISTO program, and Cara has been working with the Santa Fe Community College to promote the opportunity to teachers there. To close out our conversation, I ask her what she had learned from her students in terms of the best way to help teenagers move on and up. Her answer was simple: “It’s as individual as we are as human beings. You cannot standardize what a kid needs; every kid in a class is in a different place academically, socially, personally.” She recommends trying to recognize the unique stage that each student is in, and helping them progress at their own pace. “I have learned that making more connections with parents and families is super important in this process, hearing the whole story to understand the whole person”. She believes that instead of ignoring a student who is acting up or not paying attention, educators should feel an obligation to understand the student’s story: “I have several kids whose parents have been shot, killed, so what is that like when you’re fifteen years old and you’re walking around every day? […] That is real and that is super heavy, and it’s really gotta be hard to then focus on school and do all your homework. So I think knowing all those stories is what makes people better educators, it’s essential.”
