Amanda Matles
Assignment 4 – Zooming Out
Youth & Social Change:
Connections Across Places, Time and Cultural Material Traditions
The National Assessment of Educational Progress—commonly called “The Nation’s Report
Card” tells a dismal story: Only 2% of high school seniors in 2010 could answer a simple
question about the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. And
it’s no surprise. Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights
history.
Teaching the Movement, The State of Civil Rights Education in the
United States, a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, 2011
The problem is that constant efforts by governments, states, societies and institutions to deny the
historical formations of impoverished conditions have simultaneously denied our claims to
humanity, to having a history, and to all sense of hope. To acquiesce is to lose ourselves entirely
and implicitly agree with all that has been said about us. To resist is to retrench in the margins,
retrieve 'what we were and remake ourselves'. The past, our stories local and global, the present,
our communities, cultures, languages and social practices - all may be spaces of
marginalization, but they have also become spaces of resistance and hope.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 2012
One generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, …but the new generation will
have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come 'from' anywhere…the new
generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, and reproducing many
aspects of the organization, yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently…The cultural
tradition can be seen as the continual selection and re-selection of ancestors…
Raymond Williams, 1998
Introduction
The research project Sonia, Laurie and I have been calling “Centro in a Suitcase” is a
toolkit for public school educators that has developed into a curriculum about reading the images
and historical legacy of collective social justice action related directly to East Harlem, El Barrio.
The curriculum is geared towards middle school classes in history, social studies, English,
geography, urban studies and civics. It’s main pedagogical goal is to situate East Harlem youth
into just a few of many possible streams of collective political history and cultures of El Barrio.
Our hopes for the project are for it to be useful for educators in facilitating meaningful energetic
intellectual work that connects collective political efforts by and for youth in the recent El Barrio
past and highlights the need for more collective youth organizing at present. In El Barrio
longstanding patterns of dispossession are all too easy to see. We hope our toolkit teaches that
there is hope and belonging in collective solutions to dispossession and disillusionment. Through
exploration and honing of critical analytical tools for deconstruction and liberation pedagogy, we
hope our toolkit can be a small contribution to the ongoing process of decolonization and
liberation.
Having worked in a number of New York City public schools over the last 8 years, and
recently reviewing the literature on the neoliberalization of public education for this class, I am
anxiety stricken and angered by policies that overvalue a market driven fetishization of
standardized student testing, teacher surveillance, increasing law enforcement of young people,
ever more nuanced disciplinary apparatuses and increased privatization of public school budgets
(Miner 2013; Carol, Hainds, Hilgendorf, Jankov, et al. 2012). These conditions appear to be tied
to larger political economic circuits of state retrenchment in areas of social reproduction most
exclusively. For example Fabricant and Fine’s research shows “the loss of a commons public
sphere is not without historic precedent”, and that this state retrenchment “delegitimizes public
institutions in the eyes of individuals struggling to carve a better life out of ever-more hostile
environments” (24, 2012). Additionally,
“[M]any poor parents of color come to an understanding that their schools
in their neighborhoods and the fate of their children are braided to a “disaster.”
Thus, they choose to decouple their child’s fate from the degraded public
education in the larger community in an attempt to ensure individual
survival…the movement from collective efforts to solve collective problems to
individual exit to charter schools” is precipitated by neoliberal “policies of exit
[that] ultimately reinforce the phenomenon of survival of the fittest” (27, 2012).
Reading the education literature along with the critical subaltern literature from the
course, further shapes an understanding of the many ways that indigenous groups (Roy 2011;
Smith 2012), girls and women (Lynch 2007), and people of color across the world (Queen 2008)
are uniquely positioned to remain the most disenfranchised, dispossessed, disciplined, devalued,
neglected, and most cut off from culturally and ethnically appropriate and empowering
educational spaces.
We are thus interested in pushing the boundaries of what can be taught in public school
classrooms, despite the common core restriction and every other disciplinary measure at play on
the grounds of public education institutions today. Can radical content about effective direct
action and activities deemed illegal by the state, still be taught and learned about with pride and
criticality, despite the disciplining restrictions of content standards, social norms, and other
forms of surveillance and disciplining practices found at every level of our neoliberalized
education system? We hope to find out that the answer to this question is yes.
Curriculum Part I.
We have tried to develop a multifaceted, interactive, and self reflective curriculum that
utilizes both tactile and digital materials that range from packets of archival photographs and
maps, to Youtube videos of archival tapes, El Barrio soundscapes, podcasts, and movement
posters. We strongly believe that the integration of digitized knowledge sharing and tactile,
kinetic, and real space pedagogical materials constitute a rich and creative learning opportunity
for differently positioned learners in the classroom. We also believe this approach will enhance
the usability of the curriculum in differently privileged schools, providing flexibility for
educators who may have either difficult or easy access to computers and technology in the
classroom. We also hope that the integration of both digital and physical streams of data will
spark the imagination of students about a variety of contextual ways to use tools of learning and
communication for social change. It is important that what youth contribute to their communities
can be accessible to variously positioned members, age groups, and class positions within the
community.
The curriculum builds on a temporal continuum from past to present to future. It begins
with analyzing a set of photographs, texts, and graphics of The Young Lords and The Black
Panther Party, grassroots Civil Rights organizations who organized around social reproduction
issues and state retrenchment in their communities. To begin here is to immediately think about
relations of power, race, ethnicity and the production of history through the critical analysis of
historical documents.
Long before and certainly since the Civil Rights Era in the United States, numerous
scholars, activists and social justice organizations have produced compelling research that shows
the wretched range of deleterious material and affective dispossessions of public goods wrought
by capitalist and neoliberal ideology that systematically devalues, privatizes and thus prevents
access to collective resources not limited to schools, libraries, community spaces, housing, free
or affordable healthcare from intimate to global scales (Addams 1911; Marcuse 1985; Katz 2001,
2004; Fine and Ruglis 2009). From this literature, we see that endemic to the capitalist mode of
production, the struggles over all social reproductive necessities are systemic, constant, and
spatialized, precisely because accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2008), and risk
externalization of social reproductive activities (Katz 2011) are essential to capitalist profit
expansion. Tragically, because they are essentially tied to human needs of community, home,
health, connection, love, care and joy (Katz 2001; Lynch, Baker, and Lyons 2009; Smith 2012).
The above summation of the social reproduction literature is just another way of saying
what the inequality and political economy literature also says -- that the equality gap between
human beings is already dangerously wide and widening - the assets and products of social
reproduction increasingly serve only those who can afford to buy them, the actual life costs and
risks are increasingly externalized onto poor and marginalized people across multiple
generations (Katz 2001). This asymmetrical arrangement, David Harvey pointedly says, “cannot
be construed as anything less than a massive form of class confrontation (8, 2008). But Linda
Tuhiwai Smith gives further nuance to the class analysis when she writes about the psychological
dissonance and despair generated by uneven, imperialist political economic conditions:
“[M]any indigenous communities continue to live within political and
social conditions that perpetuate extreme levels of poverty, chronic ill health and
poor educational opportunities…they may live in destructive relationships which
are formed and shaped by their impoverished material conditions and structured
by politically oppressive regimes. While they live like this they are constantly fed
messages about their worthlessness, laziness, dependence and lack of 'higher'
order human qualities. This applies as much to indigenous communities in First
World nations as it does to indigenous communities in developing countries.
Within these sorts of social realities, questions of imperialism and the effects of
colonization may seem to be merely academic; sheer physical survival is far more
pressing (4, Smith 2012).
The systemic disinvestment described by both Harvey and Smith particularly fails young
people of color, and therefore society as a whole, in ways that range from very material aspects
like housing, education, healthcare, and mass incarceration, to the more tender, affective, and
vulnerable places of relationship, home, family, belonging, and safety, especially in all the ways
these seemingly separate areas of life overlap completely in everyday life ( Katz 2004; Cruz
2008; Fine and Ruglis 2009; Lynch, Baker, and Lyons 2009; Roy 2011). For example,
gentrification and displacement at times produces the sense of personal and community failures,
real material insecurities that in turn produces psychological dissonance that is difficult to
combat under such conditions. Such devaluation helps creates the political climate for weakened
community resistance, and increased frenzy towards privatization (Aponte-Parés, 1995; Goetz,
2010, Fabricant and Fine 2012).
Curriculum Part II.
After connecting the often less than adequate past and present conditions of El Barrio and
understanding the systemic causes through photo analysis and writing activities, the next group
of activities center around community asset mapping/mental mapping, what we are calling
“human sculptures”, and writing reflections. We want students to spend time identifying the
strengths and resources of their neighborhood and how they seem themselves situated in their
communities and the physical space of El Barrio. Groups of students collaborate to embody
social and political dynamics they see around them. We then have an activity that asks students
to reflect on how they feel about their own rights and abilities to act as cultural and historical
agents for social justice individually and collectively.
As architect Teddy Cruz has made clear in his work, both now and then, the gap between
what institutions do and what communities need has been vast and is growing larger still. There
is crisis and conflict between top down planning and bottom up knowledges and expertise of
immigrant and marginalized communities. In the discussion during our course last week, Cruz
theorizes that these conflicts may eventually result in the “pixilation of top down institutions”
(2013). The Young Lords and The Black Panther Party, for example each collectively organized
around ideas of community control and self determination in order to precipitate a more just
redistribution of reproductive resources like health care, child care and food distribution, that city
institutions withheld from their communities (Abramson, 1971). Seeing the activities and legal
concessions gained by the Young Lords Party, for example, through architect Teddy Cruz’s
work, reveals a common ground across time and place, where “the intelligence of community
based practices,” and “the hidden value of informal development” along with “the positive
impact of immigrants in American cities” represents innovative ways of meeting social needs
and making lasting political change, places where top down and bottom up “create change
through conflict” (Cruz and Waldorf n.d.)
Curriculum Part III.
The curriculum ends with and an imagining and visioning activity expressing the many
futures that East Harlem youth envision and want to create for themselves. Reflection and
imagining activities help the class think about and express the many interconnections of youths’
shared and individual histories. The curriculum also conveys a strong message that El Barrio
needs young people to be active in community building, politics and social change.
In line with Cindi Katz’s project of identifying the exploitative dynamics at play between
the sickening phenomena where certain raced, classed, gendered youth’s lives are devalued en
mass – “the child as waste” against other equally exploited valuations such as “child as
ornament” (Katz, 2011), our project works against the valence of the “child as waste” mentality
and we hold the conviction that the youth residents of El Barrio have important societal roles as
participants who will theorize a more just and equitable city in their own likenesses. Further
inspired by David Harvey’s insistence that “the right to the city is one of the most precious of
human rights” and that “the right to the city…is a right to change ourselves by changing the city
(1, 2008), we aim to bring a sense of purpose, honor, self determination, ancestral connection,
visioning and creativity to the curriculum we have created for El Barrio classrooms.
Conclusion
Inexcusably, the same issues of poverty, housing insecurity, health care inadequacy, child
and elder care inaccessibility, and harsh policing are still issues to organize around today in El
Barrio. The past and present connections of dispossession in El Barrio are all too easy to see. In
an attempt to contribute one act of resistance and the reworking of a well-worn capitalist,
patriarchal tragedy, we hope our toolkit both confronts and ameliorates some of the enervating
tremors of massive dispossessions experienced in El Barrio (and too many other locations)
through the use of critical tools for decolonization and liberation pedagogy. Calling to mind
Fabricant and Fine’s evocation of C.L.R. James in chapter one of The Changing Politics of
Education, “some tools are intellectual ideas; others are tools of the imagination and other
possible worlds; still others are our human bodies, but most importantly they are social and
political organizations for a more humane future (33, 2012). This is the kind of knowledge
stream we desire to swim in.
Addendum: On the Community Partnership with El Centro and Issues of Accessibility
The general content focus of the curriculum has shifted and developed from our earlier
approach that had centered on trying to build a community partnership with The Center for
Puerto Rican Studies. Initially we had high hopes for forging a lasting partnership at the
archives of El Centro. We were impressed with the story and mission of this “community
archive” (Hernández, 2012) The Centro archives were born out of student struggles and victories
for broader access to higher education by Black and Latina/o New Yorkers. Of the young
people’s collective demands, the formation of ethnic studies departments throughout CUNY and
a space for documenting and preserve the history and struggles of the Puerto Rican Diaspora in
New York (De Jesús and Pérez 2009) were a large part of the formation of El Centro Archives
(Hernández 2012).
According to senior archivist Pedro Juan Hernández, Centro’s mission is still a work in
progress (2012). Though, Centro does state that they are interested in bridging academic
institutions with the local community, but Hernández also recognizes how this relationship has
been thwarted, in part, by their location in the basement of Hunter campus’ Silberman building,
with restrictive building access and regular business hours, ending their more radical open-door
policy of the past (Hernández, 2012). Once we began visiting the archive, pulling boxes and
listening to tapes and trying to coordinate with Pedro Juan and other inner department heads, it
became disconcerting to find out that they do not have copyright or copyleft policies for most of
their holdings, making it very difficult for us to get permission to use any materials in the archive
without going through what seemed like a very tedious, long term, arduous, and possibly
expensive process of permissions.
Moreover, an absence of a clear policy for licensing, digitizing and sharing the contents
of Centro archives with the public, in the end didn’t fit with our vision of free/libre intergenerational knowledge transfer we were excited to find in Centro, but did not yet find. We have
shifted to developing at least the prototype for the traveling archive by partnering more closely
with NYCoRE educators to build up the curriculum using materials from internet digital
commons sites, culling archival materials from open source and creative commons licensed
digital repositories (Cammaerts 2011).
It’s important that we produce the toolkit in a way that aligns well with the curriculum
topics of our toolkit. I hope that Centro someday embraces the idea that, given the physical
constraints of their location, for their amazing collections to ever be useful and accessible to the
public, they would digitize with complete metadata large parts of their collection so that more
scholars, students, and community members can have a chance to view important legacies and
histories of the Puerto Rican American experience.
Our current process for citation within the toolkit also follows best practices for the
digital commons, including all metadata and proper citations so that anyone may explore similar
kinds of materials at their own pace and for their own purposes, with the rules of remixing
clearly established (Davidson and Goldberg 2009). Even though most of our materials will
begin as digital copies of originals, we will be printing them and designing the toolkit to
encompass a range of tactile and digital versions of materials.
Perhaps once we develop this prototype we can approach Centro with the idea again and
rekindle the possible use of some of their archival materials. We were recently directed by
NYCoRE educators to try partnering with the Museum of the City of New York. We are excited
about this possibility because the Museum often does teacher trainings and they are very active
in the cultural and aesthetic enrichment of El Barrio public schools. I used to work there in
exhibitions and I hope that my previous connection to the institution might help with a possible
partnership.
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