Quick Take
Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice is starting a "Freedom School" as the community organization advocates for the inclusion of ethnic studies in Pajaro Valley Unified School District schools. As the 40th anniversary of the 1985 Watsonville cannery strike looms as a symbol for organizers, tensions both with the district and in the November school board election are mounting.
Pajaro Valley Unified School District teachers and community members, who have been advocating for the school district to renew a contract with an ethnic studies consultant since the board discontinued it last fall, are launching their own community education program, a Freedom School.
The teachers and community members formed a new group, Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice, or PVESJ.
PVESJ held its first meeting for the Freedom School last Monday at Landmark Elementary School in Watsonville. More than 70 people attended the event – a film screening of a documentary about the 1985-87 Watsonville cannery strike, a strike organizers believe has a lot of relevance today.
PVESJ is a coalition of about 20 core members and several local organizations, including members from The Tobera Project, Santa Cruz Black, Motivating Intergenerational Leadership for Public Advancement (MILPA) and Barrios Unidos, according to Christine Hong, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. Hong said the UCSC Center for Racial Justice, which she directs, and the Resource Center for Nonviolence also support the coalition.
”We are a community coalition for ethnic studies positioned against a school board that has proven itself to be largely hostile to ethnic studies in an area where the power structure has historically not reflected the interests of the majority of people in the community,” said Hong.
The group formed after the PVUSD board decided not to renew its contract with Community Responsive Education (CRE), a consulting firm run by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a professor in San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies Department. The consulting group had worked with the district during the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years and helped teachers develop an ethnic studies curriculum that highlighted the community’s history.
PVESJ members say the board’s decision in September to not renew the contract is a direct challenge of the point of ethnic studies: to teach the untold stories of diverse groups, including African American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, Native American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies.
At the September board meeting, two community members and board president Georgia Acosta and board member Kim De Serpa accused the consulting firm’s founder of being antisemitic. Tintiangco-Cubales, CRE’s founder, denied the allegations and called them “an act of defamation.”
“[CRE has] already been in our district teaching for two years with a pedagogy that I don’t know what they’re teaching,” De Serpa said at the September meeting. “It makes me very uncomfortable as a Jewish woman. I am shocked, actually.”
After a discussion among the board members, the PVUSD board voted 7-0 to instead have staff bring another consultant contract to the board for approval.
Acosta and De Serpa – who is in a runoff in November for a seat on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors – were vocal opponents of CRE.
During the September board meeting, the two board members cited CRE’s earlier involvement in a statewide ethnic studies curriculum debate. The Jewish legislative caucus had argued that curriculum developed for the state by CRE was antisemitic. After Gov. Gavin Newsom approved a revised curriculum, responding to those concerns, Tintiangco-Cubales and the other drafters told the state to remove their names as writers from the curriculum in February 2021.
The ethnic studies controversy now comes to another head in the November election. PVESJ leaders said they’re supporting candidates Gabriel Medina and Carol Turley, both of whom attended last Monday’s screening. Turley, running for board president Georgia Acosta’s seat, is the homeowners association general manager for the Pajaro Dunes Association. Medina, a filmmaker, is running for board member Oscar Soto’s seat.
PVUSD’s response
In April, before starting as the district’s new superintendent, Heather Contreras told Lookout that she would engage with the community about the contract before deciding how to move forward with the matter.
Lookout requested an update on that engagement. PVUSD said Contreras wasn’t available and provided a statement, saying a committee of ethnic studies teachers and high school administrators is working to determine how new administrators and teachers will be trained in the future on ethnic studies.
PVUSD spokesperson Alicia Jimenez told Lookout that committee members will compile a list of ethnic studies experts who will be considered for potential contracts with the district.
“Many community members and students have expressed concern about how the administrators will be trained in the absence of a contract with the previous consultant,” the statement reads. “We continue to meet with students and the community to hear their voice and explore how we can ensure we are meeting their needs and at the same time fulfilling the requirements of the approved Ethnic Studies framework and the guidelines from the California Department of Education.”
Jimenez declined to comment on whether or not CRE’s contract might be renewed.
Freedom School
Inspired by freedom schools – alternative schools for African Americans created during the 1960s civil rights movement – organizers say they’re planning educational events on a near-monthly basis as part of their freedom school.
The documentary screening of “¡SÍ SE PUEDE!,” Spanish for “It Can Be Done,” told the story of the 1985 Watsonville cannery strike – when about 2,000 workers, mostly women, walked out of two local canneries. The owners had reduced their pay and benefits, and the strikers demanded to have their salaries and benefits back. The film is the first of a yearlong program focused on the cannery strike in light of its upcoming 40th anniversary.
The screening was followed by a panel of speakers who were part of the strike or are children of strikers.
Watsonville High School ethnic studies teacher Bobby Pelz, a PVESJ member, said the community can use lessons of what happened in the strike and connect them to the events of the day. Pelz spoke about what he sees as CRE’s impactful work to the PVUSD board.
“One of the difficulties of dealing with the board is that in the system that we built, the board has all the power. I can speak until I’m blue in the face to try to get them to change their mind, but they don’t have to,” he said. “And if they want to silence voices, they can easily do that. So the freedom school is a way of taking the power back because we don’t have to answer to anybody.”
Local stories like the cannery strike aren’t in local history books, and should be, said Roy Recio, founder of The Tobera Project, an initiative to preserve the Filipino experience in the Pajaro Valley. Through his initiative, he later led the creation of the Watsonville is in the Heart digital archive of the local Filipino experience, and an exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.
Recio, also part of PVESJ, said CRE helped start the work that included telling the stories of local groups in the Pajaro Valley in PVUSD classrooms. He said ethnic studies courses he took are an example of the power of the kind of curriculum CRE helped create.
“For me, The Tobera Project and the Watsonville is in the Heart project would not have happened if I didn’t take ethnic studies [as a student],” he said. “So therefore, I know the power. I know the grounding that it does to move people forward. Ethnic studies has the power to unite people, educate people, and it really does save lives.”
In addition to organizing the Freedom School, Hong said PVESJ has led letter-writing campaigns, hosted a town hall and is supporting two candidates for open seats on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District governing board, all in the effort to advocate that the district renew the contract with Community Responsive Education.
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