Gloria Ladson Billings_part 1

Youth all over the world are suffering; latino/a youth in the U.S. are particularly vulnerable to life's most horrible lessons. Our imagined U.S. community has not historically met the needs of the indigenous peoples, those slaves brought from Africa, the Latino/a community nor of any other immigrant group, both voluntary and involuntary, in its long history of weaving, assimilating, and integrating diverse cultures into its social fabric. Youth from all walks of life have suffered the most. How do youth deal with this trauma? How do we all suffer as a community when a U.S. born member of Campecine Youth Academy has her home raided by Immigration Customs & Enforcement and watches as five officers arrest and deport her father? Today, she communicates with us over email as she begins school in El Salvador she claims that she is excited and is making the best of her life. This experience leaves not just this family feeling hopeless but our entire community because we are not able to do anything to preserve the sacredness of families! Rather than being anomalies, this kind of trauma and these types of experiences are the norm in our communities. Latino/a communities are not just being terrorized from the outside by the fear of having their families separated; we are also destroying ourselves by internalizing the hate and disdain that exists against "us". We, who are told we do not belong here and that we are an invasion to this society, have internalized these discourses of white supremacy against ourselves. Latino/a youth often start to believe and act as if they do not belong in this country, as if they cannot create roots, and as if they should voluntarily leave..."GET...GET!"..."hey, the border is looking for you!"..."yall are the NEW niggas!" These are things we hear in our schools, in our public spaces and in the media all around us. I mention this because youth workers often take for granted the context and the ecological validity of our work in the lives, families, and communities of youth we claim to love and serve. The Campecine Youth Academy (CYA) is an "Enemy of Hopelessness." Every day is a collective structured response to this material existence youth experience with "Critical Hope," which rejects the despair of hopelessness and the falsity of cheap American optimism (West, 2008, p. 41). CYA's critical hope demands a committed and active struggle against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides of wealth inequality, group xenophobia, and personal despair (West, 2004, pp. 296297). Tupac Shakur (1999) referred to young people who emerge in defiance of socially toxic environments as the roses that grow from concrete; CYA aims to fertilize the seeds of hope within each child who chooses to commit to the work of Critical Hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009).

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Campecine
• Youth
• Academy
• Gloria
• Ladson
• Billings
• part