Change Isn’t Coming, It’s Here
06/09/20
By William Estrada
Arte With Maestro William. Image courtesy of William Estrada.
Leaving our physical classrooms to teach remotely happened abruptly and without much time to prepare for all the lessons we are teaching and learning. It has been psychologically and emotionally draining, for students, teachers, parents, and school staff. Days merge into each other, time is unpredictable, and virtual meetings weigh the heaviest on us as they take so much time of our day. This quarantine time has also reminded us to prioritize what makes teaching successful; our connection to the students and their families. Although there is constant discussion of whether the teaching happening is of high quality, I am conscious that listening to our students, reminding them we are here to help them, asking about their families’ wellbeing, and connecting them to resources in their neighborhood is a big part of the work we do as well.
The pandemic has amplified something a lot of us knew already, public schools serve as a social service agency and the resources families need are not distributed equitably throughout the city. Black and Brown neighborhoods have been historically robbed of resources and disinvested in for generations and to pretend we should teach like nothing has changed is preposterous. How can we teach, assign grades, or demand students’ full attention when there are many things happening inside their home, out in their neighborhood, and across the nation? I felt defeated, I felt that no matter what I did, it wouldn’t be enough. Teaching at Telpochcalli Elementary through a lens of social justice helps me engage students in deconstructing everything that happens around us, and not being able to process everything that was happening with students made me feel helpless. I wasn’t able to ask them what structures are in place and what purpose they serve? Who has power and how do we use it when we have it? What stories do we want to tell and why is it important for those stories to come from us? How are rules enforced? Who enforces them? And who is given second opportunities when they break the rules?
Teaching art gave me an opportunity to have a dialogue with students about the complexity of being part of a group of people who have been historically marginalized. These rich discussions, jokes and laughter, stories, and creating next to one another is what I miss the most. While fumbling to figure out how I may be able to recreate this remotely, I realized I couldn’t. I was scared of what I had lost, not knowing when I could teach our art classes again.
Through various professional development meetings with Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), an arts organization I have worked with for over 17 years, on how we could reimagine what our teaching could look like during this time, I began to realize the lack of Bilingual art content on YouTube. I was resistant to making videos at first. I kept asking myself why make more art content on an already saturated platform? There isn’t much I can add to this anyway.
Arte With Maestro William - Episode 1: Life Doesn't Frighten Me Read Aloud - Spanish
After recording the first read aloud as part of Arte With Maestro William and posting it on social media, I realized there was much more discussion to have. As a cis brown male, it was important to be vulnerable, make mistakes, share my feelings and insecurities, but most importantly ask my students what are they thinking? How are they feeling? And what could they do to tell their own story? We all need to be reminded to play. We all can enjoy being read to. We all need to be given permission to make something. We all need permission to be curious again, to learn without fear of failing. It isn’t perfect, but teaching and learning never are. It is a reminder that we learn and teach each other, and this moment can be generative if we allow ourselves to be taught. There is so much to learn from the people around us.
Chicago ACT Collective
During this moment of change, I am grateful to be surrounded by amazing people who constantly teach me, love me unconditionally, and critically challenge me to be the person they know I can be. “The ability to be amongst people who you can learn from is found in the Chicago ACT Collective;” Paulina Camacho and I recently wrote this about our collective. The Chicago ACT Collective is an arts-based group that straddles a variety of roles and disciplines including higher education, K-12 classroom practitioners, students, community-based organizations, museum education, teaching artists, and their families. Our work centers perpetual dialogue amongst ourselves and the people we collaborate with in order to disrupt hierarchical models of teaching and learning. We use art-making as a research and reflective tool, enabling a cyclical process of making and learning with and from each other and our broader network.
The majority of our work is created in collaboration with people, groups, and organizations, adding to direct responses to current events and people-centered movements. We believe that the arts provide openings for connection and spaces from which to build and work. By publicly sharing our work through aesthetic depiction, we invite opportunities for continued dialogue to break down complex systems for ourselves and others. We privilege interdisciplinary approaches and the intergenerational experiences of our members to orient our work around various articulations and framings. We honor and respect the work of our collaborators and attempt to be mindful of systems of oppressive representation, working to avoid perpetuating unjust aesthetic forms. We attempt to avoid the colonial gaze of cultural appropriation and are intentional about the text and imagery that we use to shape and inform the work we contribute to.
(L) “We Deserve To Breathe”, Chicago ACT Collective in collaboration with LVEJO, Digital Print, 2020 / (R) “Everyone Deserves A Place To Call Home”, Chicago ACT Collective in collaboration with Housing Action Illinois, Digital Print, 2020.
In the last month, we have developed graphic images for the following: Housing Action Illinois campaign on “Affordable Housing,” Little Village Environmental Organization campaign “Little Village Deserves to Breathe,'' and For the People Artists Collective “Brown People for Black Power” portfolio. Making as part of a collective in response to people-led movements creates moments for us to learn from each other and the people we are collaborating with. In those moments I can make the time to listen, learn, and contextualize new knowledge in ways that help me make connections to the neighborhoods I live and teach in.
Analyzing the role I play in the systems we are critiquing gives me a space to reflect on the behavior I need to change and the decisions I am making that make me complicit. It is in these moments of vulnerability and transparency where I try to provide a space for myself to unlearn what I was taught to be the truth. A lot of the information I was told to be the truth sustains patriarchal and capitalist structures reliant on my need to have things and compete with others to be the best I can be; assimilating, consuming, and working toward an American dream that was not dreamt for me, but has relied on the labor of marginalized bodies to build and sustain its foundation. Opportunities to reimagine the world we want for ourselves and the people around us are hard to come by, but we are living through a radical moment in time when we have the opportunity to build something together with intentionality.
“My Freedom Is Bound To Yours,” William Estrada, Mobile Street Art Cart Project, 2017
Change is coming, but we have to be ready to accept it, learn from it. We can not attempt to heal our wounds without first acknowledging that they exist, without first acknowledging what created them. And the problems we face can’t be dealt with through reforms, thoughts and prayers, or white papers. They need action. We can’t continuously create the same systems and structures that got us into this in the first place. We must radically reimagine what we want our lives to look like. As I posted on social media recently, what is happening now is a reminder that if we don’t all work toward making sure all black lives matter, we are complicit in the multiple tragedies we have been witnessing.
Today is about a cumulative process, a process that has constantly reminded people—we value your labor, we value your culture, but not your lives. When we refuse to defend black lives, we are telling everyone around us we are okay with the oppression of a people, people who are murdered by justifying it with whatever we were told to believe; because “they” didn’t follow the rules, because “they” look suspicious, because “they” acted ghetto, because “they” had something in their hands, because “they” weren’t raised right. The number of reasons we justify brutal actions and mistreatment of black bodies is immense. And when we remain silent, we are complicit. When we laugh at a joke, we are complicit. When we say, “we must take care of our own,” we are complicit. We can no longer be complicit to the violence.
“Working Toward Our Collective Liberation”, William Estrada, Mobile Street Art Cart Project in collaboration with the Art Department at UNK, 2018
We have to ask ourselves, what are we going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again? What are we going to do to assure resources are distributed to the most vulnerable communities? What are we going to do to begin healing all the wounds caused by “our” nation? But whatever we choose to do, we have to acknowledge our own privilege and power. We have to decide how we will use our privilege and power every day. We have to start by working on ourselves. We need to start by reminding those around us their comments will no longer be tolerated. We need to fight for, defend, and protect our black and indigenous communities. We have to wield power collectively, and we have to work toward our collective liberation. This is the only way we can rebuild our trust, our neighborhoods, our cities, our nation. This is the only way we will survive. This is the only way we can begin understanding the pain people are feeling right now. We can only do this if we acknowledge that we live on land stolen from indigenous peoples and value black lives. Until then, we will continue this cycle for another 500 years. When we are ready, from the ashes we will rise as powerful people that can fulfill the dreams because we are capable of dreaming.
William Estrada is an arts educator and multidisciplinary artist. His art and teaching is a collaborative discourse that critically re-examines public and private spaces with people to engage in radical imagination. He has presented in various panels regarding community programming, arts integration, and social justice curricula. He is currently a Visual Arts Teacher at Telpochcalli Elementary and faculty at the School of Art and Art History at UIC. His current research is focused on developing community based and culturally relevant projects that center power structures of race, economy, and cultural access in contested spaces.
www.werdmvmntstudios.com
www.instagram.com/werdmvmnt
William Estrada worked on this piece with Stephanie Manriquez, the Quarantine Times Tuesday editor. Each week, Stephanie selects a Chicagoan to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.