Putting the Power of Love to Work

As a mother, grandmother, educator, and union leader, I’m thrilled to contribute to this special issue of American Educator on a subject that is not just close to my heart—it’s at the center of my entire being.

To me, activism is the way we put the power of love to work in the world. I know that may sound a little corny to some of you; let me try to explain why I believe this so strongly. Without putting love upfront in the driver’s seat, so to speak, our activism will always feel a little fragile, not built for the long-term project of bringing real justice to all—and especially to the downtrodden.

Five words define my life as an activist: family, community, fight, faith, and love.

As a Puertorriqueña born on the Lower East Side of New York City, I began life with what were two big strikes against me in that era—I am female, and I am a person of color. Maybe three strikes, when I think about it—I was also born poor.

Not that we didn’t have enough to eat when I was growing up, but we didn’t have much. What we did have was family and a community that looked out for its children. I never really knew that we were low income. I knew what we had, not what we didn’t. And I knew I had people surrounding me who didn’t look like me but cared about me.

Whenever I came home from school, or anywhere, and walked through those gates at the entrance to our tenement building, I was being observed by a huge network of tías, abuelas, and neighbors, all of whom were tracking me as I made my way home. If anything had happened to me on the way, my mother would have known about it within seconds. Through my daily experience, I was absorbing lessons about the power of community—about the power of so-called ordinary people to take care of each other.

Still, as I grew up, those early strikes led to some rough times. I got married too young and ended up a domestic violence survivor. I adored my two little girls, but I struggled as a single mom. Even worse, my younger daughter kept getting sick, and we couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

Despite visit after visit to the doctor and to the ER, she wasn’t getting any better. We began to worry that she might be reacting to something at school. And sure enough, we soon unearthed a parent’s nightmare: asbestos.

That discovery changed my life. I found other concerned parents and started pushing for inspections of all public school buildings in New York City. Turns out, there was asbestos that could harm students and staff everywhere.

To protect our kids, we were going to have to do battle against one of the biggest bureaucracies in the biggest city in the country: the New York City Board of Education. That’s when becoming a fierce advocate—a fighter—took a central place in my life.

I’d learned to fight, literally—and to stand up for myself and others—as a kid, but now a whole bunch of us had to work together to push the board to inspect every single school in the system. Because of our fight, we created a Parents Environmental Steering Committee with city hall. By the time we were done, we had shut down the entire school system for two full weeks after the planned beginning of the school year. That required an enormous sacrifice by families throughout the city. As a single mom, it was a struggle for me—but the board left us no choice. We couldn’t send our children into buildings we knew were toxic. It was a huge task, but we made it happen—together.

I learned a lot from that struggle. I learned that the only way we could challenge a huge institution was by creating a community. By sticking together and nurturing a community of activists. And by having faith: faith that as parents, we had the right and duty to stand up for the health of our children. We created and cultivated faith in each other.

Thirty years later, I now can say that what began as a private concern—the health of my daughter—ended up as a community cemented together by a rock-solid faith in ourselves and in each other. And by love. Love for our kids. Love for each other.

In this issue of American Educator, you’re going to read stories of AFT members’ activism from all over the country. From grassroots work on local elections to bargaining for the common good, your fellow members are demonstrating the inspirational, multifaceted reality of union activism. It couldn’t come at a better time.

Emboldened by the former US president, extremists are seeking to sow anger, fear, and division. They’re banning books and narrowing curricula so that it’s harder to create a safe and welcoming classroom environment for all. Attacking people who come to this country seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Pretending to support working families while actually supporting cuts in government benefits and services. Scorning people who look, pray, or love in ways that extremists don’t like.

In the labor movement, we believe in building a big, strong, well-anchored tent that can hold all of us—not tiny little cubicles where we are too afraid to talk to people who look, believe, love, or talk differently than we do. You cannot build a big tent out of anger, fear, and division. You can only build it out of faith in and love for each other, knowing that our shared humanity matters far more than any differences. My vision is that the American tent needs to be real for everyone so no one is ever treated as a second-class citizen again. This is not a value we pay lip service to—this is for real, and it comes from loving each other.

Activism at its core is exactly that—coming together to build a better life for all.

I want to share the stories of three amazing AFT members, each of whom has found their own path to putting love into action. I hope you are as impressed by them as I have been.

Together We Rise Citizenship Clinics

I met Iran Alicea, president of the Hillsborough School Employees Federation (HSEF), when his local hosted a Together We Rise Citizenship Clinic* in Tampa, Florida. Created by the AFT and brought to life by AFT affiliates and their community partners, these clinics provide free legal assistance, and sometimes financial support for citizenship application fees, to some of the nine million lawful permanent residents eligible for naturalization in the United States.¹

Iran’s members include folks from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Mexico who want to have a voice in our democracy (just like they do in our economy). He became interested in helping his members with citizenship after assisting Victor Moreno, HSEF’s vice president for custodial operations, with his citizenship paperwork. “By going through the process, Victor opened our eyes,” Iran said. “We asked ourselves, ‘How can we do this on a larger scale?’ ”

When Iran learned about Together We Rise, he knew it was perfect for his local. “Of the first 50 who attended our clinic,” Iran said, “all of them could speak to an attorney and make sure their paperwork was in order—the majority have become US citizens. This is a big deal for us, because finally, these people who have been working here for years, contributing to the economy, have a say in running their communities.” As citizens, they can build a much stronger community.

“Clinics are real activism for the Hispanic community—more than 100 people have gone through the process. Word is getting around, since the school district is the county’s largest employer. When new employees learn they could become citizens, they gravitate more to the union,” said Iran. “Not only that,” he added, “we help them fill out voter registration cards, and they help the union by voting in local elections. There’s real desire in the Hispanic community to become citizens—the clinics help us get over the biggest barriers: affordability and bureaucracy.”

The local only works with school district employees. But if someone else shows up, union folks take them to Mi Familia Vota (My Family Votes; MFV), their local community partner. One member’s mother has a small cleaning company; they directed her to MFV, and now she’s a citizen.

Victor and Iran accompany members to their naturalization ceremonies. “Sometimes we’re the only ones, because everyone else is working,” Iran said. “We take pictures.” And the ceremonies? “Very emotional—the excitement is catching.”

When I asked where his activism came from, he didn’t hesitate: “From my parents. My 91-year-old mom lives here in Tampa and cooks every single day, not for herself but for the neighborhood. She tells my sister, ‘Take this next door or to that neighbor.’ People just love her cooking. It’s not political activism, but watching her care for her community, that’s where it starts for me.”

Iran has long been a union member, “first an aircraft mechanic, then a machinist, a cop, and a detective.” When he moved to Tampa, he started with the school district and naturally joined the union. “As I see it,” he reflected, “I’m not going to take any of this with me. I’m bilingual, I can help people. That’s my goal: to assist as many people as I can, to leave behind what I can’t take with me.

“I’m just a pathway,” he went on. “My reward is watching someone succeed. It’s always been that way for me—all I live for. If I can help make this person a little bit better, a little more successful, that’s what I look for. It’s not about me; it’s about my people becoming citizens. Money can’t buy what I try to give.”

A Passion for Gun Safety

Sylvia Tanguma is a longtime elementary school teacher and the president of McAllen AFT in the Rio Grande Valley. I got to know her at a citizenship clinic in Houston two years ago. In deep-red Texas, Sylvia has taken on one of the hardest, most depressing issues in America today: gun violence.

I wanted to know what made Sylvia an activist. She thought for a minute. “I get angry at the injustices I see—and I love my students.” School shootings played a big part as they transformed from rare to occasional to almost frequent. “When I saw that they were targeting elementary schools, I’d think, when are they going to walk into my classroom?” She describes her students as “25 innocent kids who have no malice in their little heads and brains,” and she is determined to stop shooters from “doing whatever they want.”

Wondering how shooters got guns in the first place, she learned that a Texas 18-year-old who can’t buy a bottle of beer can buy an AR-15.²

Uvalde was Sylvia’s worst nightmare come true. And politicians sat on their hands. “They would rather be in the good graces of the NRA than stand up for the safety of schoolchildren who cannot defend themselves,” she argued. I heard the love of her students in her voice, her worry for them, and her righteous anger.

“It falls on us as teachers and school personnel to take care of the kids! That’s the duty of the people we’ve elected. We don’t have a bulletproof  back room where we can take kids and be safe.”

McAllen AFT has teamed up with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. They attend rallies with other teachers and hold demonstrations downtown. “So many people in the valley are pro-gun that we’ve had to get more active,” Sylvia said. Her goal is to establish a minimum purchasing age of 21 and background checks so that assault rifles are not so readily available.

Incredibly, the National Rifle Association held its 2022 convention in Houston just days after the Uvalde massacre. AFT President Randi Weingarten, along with community organizations and local and national gun safety groups—including Sylvia’s—held a protest rally and press conference to highlight the connection between assault weapons availability and school shootings.³

When Governor Greg Abbott came to McAllen last year, Sylvia organized a peaceful protest with Moms Demand Action and AFT members. They know they face long odds. “We’re trying to agitate. Our local state representatives have said, if we continue being active and advocating, down the line, something will be passed. It’s a long road, but we’re not giving up.”

The work is hard. “Staying strong is overwhelming at times,” Sylvia said. “My husband is very supportive. He knows I’m passionate about this.” During our recent conversation, she showed me what living with potential violence was really like. “We had an incident today where one of my students told a coach that another fifth-grader had a gun. That activated everybody—until it turned out to just be a rumor, thank God. But I was standing there, looking at my door, thinking, ‘If someone comes through that door, where am I going to put the kids?’ The glass door is locked, but someone with an assault rifle can just shoot down the door. They could get in the school in seconds. It’s horrifying to know it could happen to you and your students at any time.”

Teaching Taíno Culture

I met Aurymar Román Irizarry at a fantastic conference in Puerto Rico in August 2023 called Reencuentro Taíno (Reencountering Taíno). I grew up on the stories my grandmother told me about the Taíno, but I’m sorry to say I thought they were just that—stories told by our elders. Before the 16th century, the Taíno were the primary people of the Caribbean, with a rich spiritual life, beautiful ceramics and music, strong matrilineal governance structures, and sophisticated systems of agriculture, hunting, and gathering.

The conference showed me that, contrary to widely held beliefs in the 20th century, Taíno culture did not die out after Columbus arrived. Thanks to scholars and activists, linguists and archeologists, artisans and musicians, and dancers and teachers, the amazingly resilient Taíno culture is being rediscovered, nourished, and even taught in some Puerto Rican public schools.⁴

When I reached out to Aurymar months later, I wanted to know how she got involved in teaching about Taíno culture.

She began teaching history in 2019 to 11- to 15-year-olds; soon, she started supplementing the textbooks because they had nothing about Taíno history or culture. “I looked around online,” she said, “and found a group of people with knowledge of Taíno language, culture, and traditions. I asked a lot of questions, and as I learned, I began changing my curriculum and seeing what I could bring to my students in ways that would be fun and engaging. First, I brought in musical instruments: a drum called a mayohuacán, made out of a tree trunk; a seashell trumpet called a fotuto; and maracas made out of figs. I’ve learned to play these instruments, and so have my students, who get excited when they see them; they play when we practice Taíno songs.”

In class, she makes a Taíno tortilla made of yucca and teaches students to extract ink from the jagua fruit, which is a Taíno practice. She’s also made a little dictionary—she calls it ABC Taíno—for her students, which they use with memory games to help them learn vocabulary. “I’ve found that books can give you the story, but you need experience to have really significant learning,” she explained. “That’s why I bring so much stuff into the classroom.”

I asked what parents thought about her teaching methods. “Parents learn with the students,” she answered. “Recently, I introduced a Taíno song, and the kids got so excited that they sang it to their families. Their families were thrilled to learn from their own kids what they hadn’t been able to learn themselves. I guess it’s a movement we are growing here in Puerto Rico, trying to realize this part of our heritage, recognizing that all of us in Puerto Rico have some Taíno blood in us.”

Aurymar’s love for her community and heritage shines through in her activism. As she explained, “Teaching these Taíno culture and language traditions is activism because this is knowledge that was basically hidden from the people. It takes activism to bring back what has been hidden, what deserves to be shared and recognized.”

I mentioned teaching the history of women, African Americans, Latinos, and others on the mainland, where activists have spent decades striving to make history lessons genuinely inclusive and accurate. And now extremists are trying to return to narrow history lessons that ignore the contributions and sacrifices of so many people. Aurymar agreed—and added this: “Here’s something I say a lot. I can be an activist in the streets, and I’ve done that. But for me, real activism is giving young people the power of knowledge by teaching honest history—and that happens inside the classroom. That’s where you plant the seed and nourish it and watch it grow and flourish.”

Now that you’ve read their stories, you’ll understand why I found these activists so inspiring and why I wanted to lift them up in this issue of American Educator. They are all different from me, but I think you will notice some common threads in each of their stories and connections to my own.

Not everyone thinks as much about the fight as I did as a young woman and still do. But Sylvia, struggling against what must sometimes seem like an immovable mountain, is kept going by her righteous anger that politicians would be willing to sacrifice innocent children on the altar of their vision of gun rights. She remains passionate and persistent, and she’s not giving up. Aurymar looks back on her more “in the streets” activist days and now believes the best activism takes place in the classroom by helping youth reconnect with their heritage, while Iran remains steadfast in supporting hundreds of his members on their path to citizenship, even though he knows that there are nearly 900,000 Floridians eligible for naturalization.

All three depend on a community of like-minded people to sustain their own activism. Iran draws inspiration from his elderly mother, who he still sees literally nourishing a community. He makes sure that he and Victor attend naturalization ceremonies to strengthen the community of new citizens in his local. Sylvia depends on her local and Moms Demand Action to give her strength for their collective journey. Aurymar relies on the folks who are reviving and teaching Taíno cultural traditions for new knowledge, and she is motivated by her students’ growth.

All three of these activists are driven by causes larger than themselves and are willing to give long hours to their struggles. And all of them are extraordinary examples of love in action, my real definition of activism. Without love, activists burn out. Without love, our willingness to fight can turn cruel, even violent. With love, however, we strengthen ourselves and each other for the long haul. That’s what we need now, more than ever—the ability to choose hope over despair, unity over division, and love over hate.

I hope you find their stories, and this issue, as inspiring as I do.

Evelyn DeJesus is the executive vice president of the AFT. She chairs the AFT Latino Issues Task Force and is the presiding officer of the AFT Asian American and Pacific Islander Task Force, the AFT Native American and Indigenous Issues Task Force, and the AFT LGBTQIA+ Task Force. Her many roles include president of the board of the National Association for Bilingual Education, president of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and executive board member of the AFL-CIO, where she co-chairs the Racial Justice Task Force and the Immigration Committee. Early in her career, she was a state-certified parent educator, early childhood teacher, and reading specialist.

*To learn more about these clinics, see go.aft.org/gre. (return to article)

Endnotes

1. S. Miller and B. Baker, “Estimates of the Lawful Permanent Resident Population in the United States and the Subpopulation Eligible to Naturalize: 2023,” US Department of Homeland Security, Office of Homeland Security Statistics, Population Estimates, October 2023, hs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/2023_1017_plcy_lawful_permenent_resident_population_estimate_2023.pdf.

2. K. Collier and J. Schwartz, “Why 18-Year-Olds Can Buy AR-15s in Texas but Not Handguns,” Texas Tribune, May 26, 2022, texastribune.org/2022/05/26/gun-buying-age-texas-handguns-rifles-uvalde.

3. L. Vasquez and A. Schneider, “As the NRA Meets in Downtown Houston, Hundreds Rally in Opposition,” Texas Standard, May 31, 2022, texasstandard.org/stories/nra-convention-2022-houston-follows-uvalde-shooting.

[photos: New York Times Archive; AFT; Courtesy of McAllen AFT; and Courtesy of Evelyn DeJesus]

4. J. Baracutei Estevez and N. Strochlic, “Meet the Survivors of a ‘Paper Genocide,’” National Geographic, October 14, 2019, nationalgeographic.com/history/article/meet-survivors-taino-tribe-paper-genocide.

[Photos courtesy of AFT, McAllen AFT, and Evelyn DeJesus]