Paula in December

Arts Council of Kern has arranged for a community-engaged visual arts project in Garden in the Sun, one of Arvin’s main parks.  The project is part of the California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities initiative in South Kern County.  The two artists involved are Hataya Tubtim and Michelle Glass, both graduates of Otis School of Design worked on the 2009 community project in Laton (Fresno County).  I’ve been talking with Hataya about our shared goals and overlapping practices in community engagement.  They are just getting started with their outreach and we are a little bit ahead of them.  They invited us to a meeting on Friday December 16 with friends of theirs—the parents of an Otis colleague—Maria and Sam Mercado.   Their meeting at the Mercados’ home in south Bakersfield was more of a party than a meeting.

Maria and Sam immediately became 2 of my favorite people by telling me that Waking Up In Lost Hills was one of the best theater going experiences of their lives—on a short list with Zoot Suit, The Pointer Sisters' production of Ain’t Misbehavin’, and Angela Basset in Fences.

We ate delicious pozole with tostadas and salsa verde.  We drank cerveza and/or margaritas made with juice from backyard lemons.  For desert we had Cuban coffee, guava pie from Café Tropical (our contribution) and fresh Mexican fruit candy.

Maria Morales Mercado and her husband Sam, & José Morales- head of Migrant Education for Kern County & Maria’s little brother all grew up in Arvin in the 60s & 70s, José’s wife Laura who grew up in Bakersfield.  Blanca Cavazos, chief instructional officer for Kern County Superintendent of Schools, also grew up in Arvin and also was Principal of Arvin High School for 13 years.

Jose & Laura Morales, Sam & maria Mercado

Hataya and Michelle had a meeting in Arvin late that afternoon and it went long so they were rather late arriving.  So Will and I had plenty of time and opportunity to talk with all these guests about their experiences in Arvin and ongoing opinions and insights.  Sam told a detailed story of the one time he went to a farm worker protest.  Maria talked about her family’s move to the US, following her father’s move north in the Bracero Program.

Maria is littlest on left, José in Mama's arms, Keene 1962

José answered some questions from Hataya about migrant ed and about Grimmway Academy the new charter school in Arvin.  He confirmed the same thoughts that it’s existence in his opinion is a vanity project of the Grimmway Farms family, that it’s a rejection of the school district, that there’s an elitism about it though he didn’t really explain that very well.  Maria commented that the school is on the property where the old cable company used to be and the cable company jacked up prices for Spanish-language channels.

Will and I ended up staying an hour or 90 minutes more than the other guests talking about their recent visit to LACMA and the Mexican art they’d seen there, their daughter Marisa’s recent wedding and the ethnic history and transformation of indigenous people and Spaniards in Mexico.

On Saturday, December 17, we led a workshop with a group of youth journalists that are organized through the Dolores Huerta Foundation.  All the same participants we’d met before were present plus a few who were absent last time.  We had 11 participants including Gabriel Garcia and Luz Peña, the supervisor for South Kern Sol.

Pablo, Will, Clara, Gibz, Andy, Lizette, Miroslava, Luz, Gabriel

We had the participants make lists for themselves of the communities they belong to as well as of communities they were interested in and individuals in their own communities that they are curious about.

We did a wagon wheel exercise using the discussion topics: Share an experience when someone made an assumption about you based on your culture or community.  Share an experience when you made an assumption about someone based on their culture or community.  Share a story about how you met your first friend.  Share the background and story about the oldest object in your home that you can hold in your hand.  The conversations tended to be very short and the share back was not very fruitful.  In retrospect, I’d have had Will and Luz sit out so that Will could listen in on the story sharing as it was happening.

Will led an exercise designed around the idea of interviews and personal story collection to be translated into a performed presentation.  Working in partners, one person would tell a personal story of arrival.  The second person listens then asks questions about content and details which the storyteller answers.  The storyteller tells the story again including the new information from questions.  After listening to the second telling, the partner then performs back that story to the teller, in the first person as if it is his/her own story.

The exercise is then repeated with the changed roles for the partners.

This seemed a very successful exercise.  One of the youth responded to the call for a volunteer to perform their partner’s story.  There was discussion about what it was like to speak someone else’s story to them as if it was your own, what it was like to hear that for the story owner, etc.

We then inquired about their interest in doing interviews, accompanied by Will and Luz, that would help Will gain more content (and relationships) for script inspiration.  A plan was made for two outings to talk with “recent arrivals” in town on Monday night.  And, on Wednesday, to have the youth interview the Dustbowl gang of friends that Will has been talking to.  (This latter idea evolved after the Monday night event.)

After the workshop we stopped by Arvin High School to see what was going on with the We The People team.  They usually work all day on Saturday in the library there.  But they are headed into finals and Christmas break so they ended their study session early.  When we arrived though we sat down with a  small group working with Dr. Jim Young and they talked with us for awhile about the work they were doing and had done so far.

Dr. Young is in his 80s I think.  He and his family were Dustbowl immigrants.  He is an AHS alum and former teacher.  He started the We The People program at AHS and even though he is retired and he still is very dedicated to helping train the team.  Dr. Young is an amazing person in so many ways.  His dedication to Arvin’s youth and understanding of the challenges they face is remarkable.  Justice is important to him to say the least. 

He explained about the differences between the AHS team and the other consistently high scoring competing teams.  The other winning schools have API scores about 9 (out of 10).  AHS’s API score is 2.  The other teams tend to have multiple national merit scholars on their teams.  AHS has had one national merit scholar in many years.  Many of the AHS team are competing in a language that is not their first language, so while they are fluent English speakers they do not have the advantage of having been speaking it and listening to it their entire lives, therefore the sentence syntax and vocabulary and in some cases diction often require extra practice and preparation.

After the four kids in the work group left we were joined by four other students who were happy to stay and talk with us about their experiences with We the People and beyond.  The team won a recent competition and are working toward the state competition which will take place in Bakersfield on February 11.  These guys were amazing.  At AHS you have to be a senior to be in We the People, so it’s a brand new team each year.  Some people work toward joining the team throughout grades 9, 10 & 11.  Others learn about it late in the game but still try out/audition.  Grades in government and history class are factors in qualifying for the team and the kids work hard to qualify.  There can be no more than 30 members of the team.  Once on the team the students work after school every day and all day Saturday.  They all seemed to really want to be there and to want to do the hard, focused work it requires.

All four boys have colleges that they’ve applied for though they know they might not be able to afford to attend.  After an inquiry from Dr. Young each of them shared about their economic status.  3 of the boys said they do not feel poor.  They have what they need though there is little to no extra and they have the support of their families.  The fourth boy said he feels poor. His mom says they are poor and they do not have money for rent and food.

It was a remarkable conversation with these 5 people.  Dr. Young would tell stories, sometimes monologue for quite awhile and the boys stayed present and interested the whole time.  They seemed to enjoy the conversation and being asked questions and thinking about their own and each others’ answers.


Will and I attended a Christmas Play/Pageant at the Catholic Church in Lamont that evening.  One of our journalist friends, Veronica, had really encouraged us to attend.  “I think you’d really like it,” she told Will.  Partly because there was a ‘Mexican” version of The Night Before Christmas.

The performances were by the catechism students (extra curricular Catholic class rather than attending a Catholic school) of all ages.  It was a classic hot mess with terrible sightlines, broken overhead lights and sound system that harmed more than helped.  Gabriel Garcia met us there.  We were a little late and, mostly on my urging, we left early.

Will returns to spend Sunday night thru Wednesday night in Arvin and will be back in Arvin the week after Christmas for more interviews and conversations.

- Paula Donnelly, 12/20/11