Sebastián Valdez, a third-year psychology major, loves UC Santa Cruz, but is frustrated by the high student fees for transportation ($171 per quarter) and the poor bus service students receive. He describes long waits, regular breakdowns and dissatisfied drivers. The 16 campus buses, he learned, are more than 30 years old and are breaking down at a consistently alarming rate. He thinks they are unsafe for drivers, inconvenient and unreliable for students and need replacing. The university’s Transportation and Parking Services, he argues, knows about the issues, has money and is not doing enough to fix the problems.
Sebastián Valdez
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
I’m a Mexican-American UCSC student and I’m sick of the performative activism in Santa Cruz County
Sebastián Valdez crossed the U.S-Mexico border every day starting at age 13 to go to school in the U.S. It cost him time and took a toll on his mental health. It also made him wonder what made a successful future hard to find at home. Now a sophomore at UCSC, he is frustrated with the “performative activism” he sees in Santa Cruz and with how misunderstood people like him are. “I want to be a catalyst,” he writes. “I want to encourage others to use their own voices and tell their own stories. An accurate historical record, told by those who lived it, is the only way to reinstate dignity in our communities and break racist misconceptions about who we are.”