Project Vision 21

Francisco Miraval

Last week I attended a gathering of a group coordinated by dozens of Latina mothers who recently launched a project to educate the teachers of their children. Tired of seeing their culture and traditions devalued in the classrooms, the mothers will now send the teachers to take classes in schools in Latin America.

The project, obviously, is quite a challenge. This group of Latinas live in a neighborhood with a high level of poverty and they don’t expect to receive any kind of subsidies. And, of course, not all the teachers agree they need to educate themselves about the Hispanic culture.

Yet, for those mothers, whatever obstacles they may face are challenges to overcome, not problems to resolve. After all, they already organized leadership conferences at a place where nobody did it before and just recently they sent a group of teachers and students for a meeting at the White House.

The mothers are now actively organizing community events to raise funds to send non-Latino teachers to schools in Central America where they (the teachers) will live with local families. The goal is for the teachers “not only to learn about our culture, but to live it too,” one mother told me.

The trip is still several month away, but the project is already impacting the relationships between teacher and families at the school. For example, some teachers who previously avoided Latino families now even request pictures with Latino families. (The reasons for doing it could be debated.)

These mother took upon themselves the task of changing their community, regardless of their immigration status, lack of a high level of formal education, or poverty in the neighborhood. And they are not the only ones.

At a different school, a group of Latina mothers got tired of feeling disrespected by the principal and of seeing questionable actions affecting their children. They also got tired of not getting any response from the authorities. So, they implemented a campaign and they didn’t allow anybody to intimidate them. Eventually, the administrative and academic changes they wanted were implemented.

There are also examples not related to schools, of course. For example, the efforts by a group of Latina mothers in an economically challenged neighborhood successfully led to changes in the local bus routes to accommodate public transportation to the needs of the local community. In the process, the mothers had to learn to complete complex petitions and to do presentations to neatly dressed public officials.

After leaving their native countries and coming to the United States to provide a better life for their children, and after educating their children in a socio-cultural context very different from the one they left behind, all other challenges, regardless of how important they are, seem small to this mothers. They know and they get things done.

What politicians promise and never deliver and what experts should be able to solve but they can’t is what these Latinas achieve when they decide to work together for their children and families.