Believe and dream’
SOUTH SIDE STUDENTS MAKE THEIR VOICES HEARD IN LENSIC PRESENTATIONS
Tired of stereotypes that are far removed from how they see themselves, students from Santa Fe’s south side are taking the stage of downtown’s major performing arts center to declare who they are in video, poetry, radio conversations, music and more.
“City of Dreamers,” coming to the Lensic at 7 p.m. Sunday, grew out of a project at Capital High School in which students complained of a fracture between the north and south sides of the city.
Estevan Rael-Galvez, working with the students as part of the city of Santa Fe’s Culture Connects program, recalls one girl saying, “They just don’t understand who we are as Mexicans.”
Someone else, he said, responded, “That’s why we need to tell them.” So that’s what they’re doing. “Back in the olden days,” said Priscila Guillen, 18, Capital High had the reputation of being a rough school, with gang fights and high dropout rates, and students getting into trouble and not showing interest in pursuing an education or a career. And maybe a decade or so ago, at least some of that was true, she said, true enough that she felt apprehension when she was heading to Capital after finishing at De Vargas Middle School.
“When I actually got here, I realized it was the complete opposite of what I had come to believe,” she said. “The students here want to study, want to get an education.”
But while the reality on the ground changed over time, the image did not.
Challenging stereotypes
Some 60 students from the 12th-grade AVID college preparatory program at Capital have worked on the “City of Dreamers” project, which grew out of an after-school film-making
program that Santa Fe-based nonprofit Littleglobe started in the fall of 2014 at Capital. Littleglobe, according to executive director Chris Jonas, works with people in its programs to help them tell their own stories in unique ways.
When the videos were screened from that after-school project, people asked that it continue, with particular interest from the AVID students, he said.
“They looked at it as a way to challenge the stereotype about immigrants,” Jonas said, noting that many Capital students come from such a background.
Guillen, for example, said her parents both came from Chiapas, Mexico, but she hasn’t seen her father since 2008 and was raised by her mother, who has little education and cleans houses for a living. “She came here for me,” said Guillen, who was born in this country. “She worked so hard.”
Her mother’s sacrifices opened up opportunities for Guillen, who said she in turn worked hard at her education and now has been accepted to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she plans to study biology, then enter dental school and eventually specialize in orthodontics.
“I’m not the only one,” she said, adding that many of her classmates are heading to higher education.
Capital’s graduation rate rose from 50.9 percent in 2008 to 60.7 percent in 2012, according to Santa Fe Public Schools. In 2014, Capital’s graduation rate was up to 68.5, surpassing Santa Fe High’s 67.1 percent. (Santa Fe High was back ahead, with a grad rate of 69.9 percent compared to Capital’s 66.4 percent, in the recently released 2015 numbers.)
“This is a group of hard-working students on course to succeed in education,” Jonas said.
Yet they would tell him stories about how, if they held a car wash to raise money for school programs, no one would turn in if the signs said it was for Capital High. “You would get ‘the face,’” he said they told him. Yet, if the signs simply said the car wash was raising money for school programs without identifying the school, they would get customers, he said.
In a video promoting “City of Dreamers,” a student says when she tells a new acquaintance she goes to Capital, the person will respond, “Oh, THERE” in a deprecating voice.
“Yeah, THERE,” she says, “and it’s awesome — deal with it!”
Getting ahead
Students came up with a story that runs as a theme throughout the event, Jonas said. It tells of a seed that lands on broken concrete in a vacant lot, yet still grows into a tall tree.
“The place was formerly an orchard. The acequia stopped running, but the seed starts to grow anyway,” he said. “It reminds people of the way things used to be. It contains the legacy of its forefathers in a new place; it rethinks what it is and remembers what it once was.”
That story parallels arrival as an immigrant to Santa Fe’s south side, which was once farmland, but has become commercial and residential lots — and sometimes can be a harsh place for a young person, he said.
“A lot of people come here fleeing violence,” Jonas said. “There are not opportunities where they come from.”
But getting ahead in Santa Fe isn’t necessarily a picnic, either, he noted.
One student in the video talks about the need to make sure there is food on the table and clothes on his family’s back.
“Sometimes I do feel I’m not going to make it, why should I go to school?” he said. “I want to work to help my mom pay the rent.”
Many stories
A range of stories will be told during the night at the Lensic, Jonas said: Students who are headed to college and are advocates for their community; students who are struggling just to graduate high school; a mom who does not have a Social Security number and lives in the shadows, but her kids are American citizens.
“We’re looking at how Santa Fe is a setting of complex beauty, history and culture. Not one story sums us all up,” he said. “The south side is a growing side of town that we’ve neglected to fully embrace.”
Included in the project are three paid interns from the Youth Media Project of ¡Youthworks! who are in training for film production.
One of them is Gabriel Martinez, a 17-year-old from Española who earned his GED through ¡Youthworks! programs. He will also host a section of the onstage performance and hopes to get a degree in audio production.
“It’s a great way to connect our community, and to bring everyone together and have an understanding of each other,” he said of “City of Dreamers,” which he described as “very powerful.”
His father, Martinez said, was an immigrant from Chihuahua who was deported when Martinez was too young to remember ever knowing him.
“I like the project; it kind of touches me, too,” Martinez said. “I know what immigrant children are feeling with their parents.”
He said he hopes the stage presentation can help people step into the shoes of an immigrant and help erase some of the stereotypes. Asked to name those stereotypes, Martinez offered, “All different things, like education isn’t respected, immigrants are criminals, they’re here illegally. That’s not true.”
Jonas said he hopes to take the project into a second year, perhaps including the whole city. “We are all dreamers,” he said. “We all dream of Santa Fe as a town that includes all of us.”
Or, as a student says in the video, “People say kids are hoodlums ... . They’re just kids, you know. They just believe and dream.”