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Arlene Cardenas is a parent academic advisor at Hurley Elementary School.

When I came here to Hurley, I had just spent seven years of life working for the Internal Revenue Service. I was coming back to teaching because I had taught before, starting as a volunteer parent, then as an instructional aide, and then I went to college and became a preschool teacher. By that time, I was divorced with three kids. When I first finished college, the preschool didn’t have any teaching positions open, so I became the parent-trainer coordinator. I did that for a year until a teaching position opened up. I taught for a while, and then was recruited to teach 4^th grade at Loma Vista School. The beauty of that position was that there wasn’t a single student in my class who hadn’t gone to preschool with me. So, it was a script for, “Everybody’s going to win here because you know me,” and I knew the parents. It was a beautiful experience.

Unfortunately, as a single parent, I had three kids – two in high school already – and every summer I was struggling to make ends meet. I saw that the IRS was hiring, so I decided to go out on a limb and try that. I got picked up and thought, “Well, I’ll do this just for a while until the kids grow up,” but then I did really well. I was teaching new auditors how to audit and I hated it. I hated every day that I went to work. But I made the best of it.

It wasn’t until one summer after I had remarried and the kids were out of the house that I went to a conference in Spain with my husband who teaches at Cal State Fullerton. I attended all these workshops with these women who had their doctorates and were doing exciting things in education. I began to wonder, “What the hell am I doing at the IRS?” which I hated with a passion. How excited can you get about Mexican exemption cases?

By the time we left the conference and were traveling down to Granada, I told my husband, “You know what? I think I’m going to make the move. I’m going to go back to teaching.” I was in my 40s at that time. I said, “I’m going to be working for a long time and I want to go back to what my passion is.” By the time we got to Granada, I had made my decision. I figured the majority of my time is spent at work and I’ve got to have a passion for it. And I have always had the passion of working with kids because I’m a firm believer that they have absolutely no voice at home, at school, wherever.

I remember my own traumatic upbringing in the schools. I came from a school like this, and all it took was one teacher to really instill in me that I could be more than I thought I could be. It was my 6^th grade teacher. She believed so much in me and was the only positive influence in my life at that time. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it only takes one teacher to make a difference – and that was what happened with me. Up until that point, I had had a horrible experience in school.

I started school in Kentucky in 1951 or ‘52. My dad was in the military, and since there wasn’t a school on the base, I had to go to school across the border in Tennessee. When I was a young kid, I was a lot darker skinned. I had jet-black hair and looked very, very Mexican – only there were no Mexicans in Kentucky or Tennessee. The teachers didn’t know what to do with me, especially because I had a sister who was white (my dad was half Irish, but my mom was 100% Mexican). When I started first grade, I was put into a 1^st and 2^nd grade combination class. My sister was in my class, only she was in 2^nd grade. And sure enough, they seated me with the black students. The white students were up front, including my sister, and I was in the back with the black kids. The black students looked at me because they could tell I wasn’t black. They thought maybe I was a “high yeller” which is what they called people with mixed blood. “Well, maybe she’s that,” they thought because my hair was curly, but it wasn’t kinky, and I was really dark.

I also had to sit with the black students in the cafeteria. My mom always packed two burritos in one bag for my sister and me, and I would go over to where my sister was sitting with the white kids, get my burrito, and go back. I didn’t question it because I was a child. My sister was just sitting there like it was the most natural thing that I was sitting in that section. She probably thought I had been bad. Also, when we took the bus, I went to the back of the bus while my sister sat up front.

Then my mom started noticing. Her English was limited, but she noticed that the way I spoke English and the way my sister spoke English was different. She asked, “What’s going on? How come Arlene speaks like that?” My sister said, “She sits with the –,” and at that time they used the “n” word. My mom went off on me, “Why are you sitting with those kids?” “Because they make me. I have to sit there. That’s my seat.”

So my dad went down to the school, and when he got there, no one believed that he was my dad because he doesn’t look like me. They said, “You must have adopted this child somewhere.” And my dad answered, “No, I’m her father.” Apparently he told them, “She is Mexican and she needs to be with her sister.” Well, it didn’t work because my friends were the black students so I’d just naturally gravitate to them. Plus, the white kids wouldn’t play with me anyway. They were already so ingrained. I also wouldn’t wear my shoes because none of my black friends wore them – they didn’t have any. To fit in as a child, you’re going to do what you have to. So, that was my first identity crisis.

By 4^th grade, we had moved back to Tucson. My dad was out of the military, and we worked and lived on a ranch with my grandma. Of course, it was all Mexicano and everybody spoke Spanish. My sister and I had these southern twangs, and I spoke like someone out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We were bizarre kids.

Then we had to learn Spanish. We could understand it, but we couldn’t speak it because my mother wouldn’t allow us to speak Spanish at home. I went back to school, and I was so happy because I saw kids who were my color and spoke Spanish. When I tried to be friends with them, they would wonder where I had come from. “How come you talk like that? You talk funny. How come you don’t speak Spanish?” That kind of thing. So I quickly began to try and assimilate with them, and started speaking Spanish. I said, “Well, I’ve got to do this. This is where I fit.”

My school was 99% Latinos. We also had  kids coming in from Nogales, Mexico, because Tucson is close to the border. They didn’t speak any English, so the teacher would sit them in the back. These kids were huge with mustaches growing on them. They were older and their voices were changing. Because I was probably one of the only Mexicans in there who could speak English, the teacher would send me to the back of the classroom to teach these guys. They would say all these horrible, nasty little things to me, and I had to play teacher. I was robbed because I wasn’t keeping up with my studies and these guys weren’t paying attention.

My life at home was also very troubled because my parents became alcoholics. My mom was a domestic and cleaned houses for the rich Jewish enclave on the east side of Tucson. On the days when she had big houses to clean, she would pull me from school to go clean houses with her. So, I’d be on my hands and knees with my mom scrubbing and she’d encourage me by saying, “You know, when you grow up, you’re going to make a lot of money because you’re a very hard worker and you can get lots of houses to clean.” I was a very precocious child, and I remember being in a bathroom and scrubbing, thinking, “Hell no, I ain’t gonna do that.” But I wasn’t going to say anything to her because it was noble work. It was an honest dollar that she was earning.

The sad part is that she would take me even if it was a test day at school, and I can remember that I wouldn’t eat because we didn’t take lunches. The lady that we were cleaning for was supposed to provide us with lunch. I remember this one lady would give us a plate of her lunch leftovers like we were a couple of dogs. And my mother would look at it like, “They’re so nice to me and they don’t have to be.” And I’d say, “Why not? Why don’t they have to be nice to you, Mom? They should be nice to you. You clean their house.” “Yeah, but they pay me.” “Yeah, but they could still be nice to you.” Then she’d get mad at me because I always had to question. I was very, very consciously aware of my surroundings and what was going on. I think that’s where I developed my sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.

My mom and I would have to take several buses to get to the houses we had to clean, and we used to go by the University of Arizona. I was in 4^th grade, and I remember seeing this huge red, really nice building, and I’d ask my mom, “What is that building?” And she’d say, “Don’t even think about it. That’s the university. That’s where the rich people get to go to university,” like she was afraid of it. So I thought, “Guess I’ll never go there if we’re not rich and I’m on my way to go clean somebody’s floors.”

But then I got to 6^th grade with Mrs. Jaeger. I’ll never forget her because I had never been treated with such respect and encouragement. She took a bunch of us to go sing at the university, and I can remember like it just happened yesterday. I saw girls with books walking on campus, and I thought, “Wow! It’s like what I read in True Confessions.” (I used to buy those True Confession books with titles like, I Was a Teenage Mother, or My Husband Beat Me. I had to hide them from my mother, but by reading them, I knew people lived in a different way.) So, I was at the university, and I thought, “One of these days, I’m going to go to a university.” It took me till I was 32 years old to get to my first university class. I had just finished junior college where I had gone only because my daughter’s preschool teacher dragged me there and made me sign up. She had said to me, “You’re going to do this because you have a knack for this and you can do it.” Then I transferred from the junior college to a 4-year institution. And I can remember that first night. I could not believe it. I stood in the middle of the quad and just cried, saying, “Man, if they could see me now, the ones in the barrio.” It took me a while, but I did it.

When I was in high school in the 60s, we weren’t really aware of things. I remember in 1963, my girlfriend and I were in a math class in the basement with the football players who couldn’t add. So we were showing them how to do math while the teacher was just sitting there, goofing around. Finally, we got upset and said, “You know what? We’re not going down there.” We knew that it was unfair for us to be in there. Of course, we got suspended, and what did our parents do? Beat the crap out of us for stirring up trouble. But it made a difference because somebody said, “You know what? They’re on to something. Let’s put them in another math class.” And they put us in consumer math where we learned how to write checks, how to balance our checkbooks, how to fill out a 1040a form. We were not tracked for college, but at least it was better than teaching those big old bozos down there.

I remember there was one teacher who was a real trailblazer, and she became the dean of girls – Ms. Urquides. She would chase us all the way to Nogales. A bunch of us girls stole a friend’s mother’s car to go to Nogales, and Ms. Urquides was right behind us. If it hadn’t been for her, none of us would’ve finished high school. But she said, “You’re going to go.” She even pulled me out from under the bed one time because I hadn’t gone to school. When my mom ran into her years later, she asked my mom, “How is that Arlene doing?” My mom answered, “She’s a bilingual teacher.” And Ms. Urquides said, “I knew she’d do something with her life.”

So this is my story – how I’ve ended up here. When I think of those situations, it always takes me back to how I felt as a child. Nobody would stick up for me. My parents wouldn’t because at that time, anything the school said was, “They’re right and you’re wrong.” There was no voice for us. The point is, if you have parents that have an inkling that you can do something better – that’s a huge part of education. Let’s say that my mother had been more educated. She probably would’ve said, “You know what? My daughter does get good grades. She’s always in trouble, but she does get good grades. I need to support that.” But she didn’t know that. So when I talk with my parents, I say, “When you see that your child has potential, it’s your job to fight for every ounce that you can get for your child. If you don’t do it, nobody’s going to do it.”

My whole thing about parent involvement is educating the parent. If you educate a mother, you educate a family. I really believe that because she is the strong one in the family most of the time. Culturally, a lot of these Latino women don’t have the language skills or the legal status. They’re trapped, and that’s a reality. People have to start dealing with what’s real.

When I start a class for parents, everybody comes for the first couple weeks. But pretty soon it starts to dissipate. When I ask what’s going on, I hear, “My husband says I can’t go.” But who am I to go in there and scare this marginal idiot? There are boundaries you really cannot cross. But by ingratiating myself to a lot of families, a lot of the fathers will allow it. By the same token, things do come up. It’s not that they don’t want to be educated. It’s just that they don’t always have the liberty to come on a regular basis. I think people that don’t understand this, come away thinking, “They’re not interested. They don’t care.” But they do. They value education. They want the best for their kids or they wouldn’t have come through that town or through the desert. The stories I’ve been told of what people have been through…

I think all of my history that I’ve just shared shows my commitment to parent involvement. And I don’t feel that we’re there. There are very few people that feel like I do and it’s probably because they can’t connect. I don’t know if it’s because a lot of people have different experiences. I’m not saying that you have to work in the field and know Cesar Chavez in order to connect, but I think that if you’ve never really been hungry, how do you know what it feels like? You can read and read and go through the empirical data, but unless that helps you to connect, what good is it?

It’s like that sometimes with young teachers who have not had children. One of the things that I’ve often said when I’ve mentored young teachers is, “Look, one think I ask is that you always respect the parents. When you’re talking to them about their children, you have to remember that that’s an extension of them. That’s a part of their body you’re talking about. And you don’t have the right to scold or disrespect them. Whether you think the parents are right or wrong, you’re still attacking them personally.” I always tell the parents that their child is with me only for a little while. They are always the first teacher. They taught their children how to talk and go to the bathroom, and to put on shoes. And when they come to school, my job is to teach them the curriculum.

I find that keeping that kind of perspective on things helps me keep it real. And then when I see the kids I had come back to me, it’s really interesting. Just this last year, I hosted a Hurley Homecoming and recruited kids that had graduated from Hurley and were now in college to come and talk. One gentleman in the audience came and told me Miguel was here. I was trying to remember Miguel, and then his little face came to mind.

The first year that I taught 3^rd grade here at Hurley, my husband who is a professor at Cal State Fullerton came and read to the class. He talked about being a professor and what it took to get there. The kids were really interested in Cal State Fullerton, so my husband told them, “Well, maybe one day, you can come visit me,” meaning, “You’re going to come and go to school there.” Then later that year, I got some money to go on a field trip. I asked the kids where they wanted to go, and one kid said, “Let’s go see Dr. Cardenas at Cal State Fullerton.” I said, “Really? You guys don’t want to go to a museum or something?” “No, let’s go to Cal State.” I said, “All right. Let me find out if we can do that.” And I thought, “Oh my gosh, I remember how excited I was when I was taken to the U of A.”

That night I asked my husband, “What would it take to bring these kids to Cal State Fullerton?” And he said, “You know what? We can make this happen.” He happened to be involved in outreach. So I went to my principal and told him, “We’re going to have a day at college.” It was amazing. The PTA paid for the buses, the university paid to have t-shirts made for the kids that said, “I’m going to college.” There was an opening ceremony, and college students were the guides. The kids got to participate in a classroom in the computer science building and in the anthropology department. They saw where the kids live in the dorms and met some of the soccer players. It was such a success. We did that for ten years. It became a tradition. We eventually lost the funds for it, but this year we managed to start it up again.

So to go back to the Hurley Homecoming night – Miguel had been a student in the first class that went to Fullerton and now he is an architect in a firm in Brea. I went over to him and said, “You get on up there, Miguel, and you tell them how you did it.” And he got up there and spoke to the parents – the place was jam-packed – and he said, “I remember when Dr. Cardenas and Mrs. Cardenas took us to Cal State Fullerton, and I knew I could do that. My mom said, ‘I will help you,’ and my mom, no matter how tired I was and didn’t want to do my homework, would be on me. ‘If you want to go to that school, you’re going to go to that school.’”

Half of the teachers at this school graduated from Cal State Fullerton, and they were former students of my husband’s. Isn’t that neat? One went off to be a principal. He was so awesome. But those are the changes that have to be made. And these are kids that, at one point in time, were probably written off. “Oh, they’re not going anywhere.”

You’d be surprised how even in our world of teachers, we’re supposed to be a compassionate field, but it’s amazing that there are those that don’t see it that way. In the Ball Foundation World Cafés, I’ve come across that a lot in the district. A lot of times, I have to ask myself, “Do I want to get in on this battle?” And I don’t know. I look at the aids and say, “I’m not changing this person.” But if they’re young, recent graduates, there’s a chance. I’ve found that you don’t have to be Latino to be able to work with Latinos. You have to understand Latinos and want to help and be committed. I’m not professing that if you’re not brown, you can’t do it. No, I don’t believe that at all. I’ve seen too many non-Latinos be successful here.

I had an instructional assistant that went on to be a teacher. A blond, blue-eyed surfer guy. He was young and going to school, and he started seeing some of the things that I would talk to him about. Pretty soon, that guy was running around with Chicano power. I didn’t want to make him that radical, but he became so loved by the kids that when we would do self-portraits, they would color their hair blond and their eyes blue because they wanted to look like him. I told him, “You know that imitation is the best form of flattery. These guys love you.” He learned so much just by opening his eyes. He had a lot of respect from the kids and he went off to teach in another school with the same demographics – and he’s very successful.

But then I have another story about a teacher who was placed in a situation where there was no cultural understanding. My girlfriend did her student teaching in Compton in an all African-American classroom with an African-American teacher. One day, the teacher told her, “I want you to get up and dance with these kids. Teach them how to do the bunny hop.” So my friend got up and said to the kids, “We’re going to do the bunny hop, boys and girls. Come on.” And she put her hands by her chest like a bunny and said, “Let’s get like a bunny.” And the kids were just looking at her, so she started to sing and hop, “Here comes Peter Cottontail…” She looked back at the kids and nobody was following her. So she said, “Come on. Follow me. Here comes Peter Cottontail…”, and they wouldn’t dance. After about three tries, the teacher came over and said to my friend, “No, no honey. Sit down. This is the way you do it.” And the teacher starts to wildly shake her whole body and sing, “Oh, here come the bunny! Oh, here come the bunny up and down the lane…” and all the kids were following, dancing just like the teacher. My friend had no cultural connection to them, and she couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t follow her. She’d been there every day and the kids knew her, but that wasn’t their thing. Instead, the kids were looking at my friend like, “There couldn’t be no bunny like that.” When she told us that story, we were dying laughing because it is so true. I love that story because it really shows a cultural disconnect.

When I first started working with the Ball Foundation, I was in a fog, but then I started to see the big picture. I understood that they wanted to have a shift in paradigm, and I bought into it. Not right away, though. I even asked one of the Ball people, “What is it exactly that we’re going to get out of this?” But I’m on board if it means that we’re going to start what I call the “Cesar Chavez” approach, meaning that we’re going to start from the bottom. We’re going to work with the people who are on the front line – the teachers – who are crying all the time, “Everybody’s making decisions for us, but we’re the front liners. We should be the ones to show them.”

I remember telling Joann about a time when I was driving around with Cesar Chavez when he was at Cal State Fullerton, and he said to me, “The one thing when you’re working with people is you’ve got to give them an opportunity to tell you what it is they need and how they can go about it because they’re the ones that are doing the work. If you don’t, you have no credibility because you haven’t heard that voice.” I really believe that. And I think the Ball Foundation is trying to do that. They want to bring about change from the bottom up. I think the hardest thing is to get people to buy into it. But Ball really, really wants everyone’s voices because we keep going to these meetings and people aren’t getting it. You can tell they’re not because they’re not participating. And I think it’s because of attitude. A lot of people are already in their comfort zone, and if you’re not the kind of person who likes change…But I think the goal of the Ball Foundation and the district is good, and the way they’re going about it is good because times have changed and people have to learn to change.

I do still feel that the parent component is not given the weight that it should be in this process. I know that Strategy 6 of the strategic plan has to do with parent involvement, but I still haven’t had the interaction with people about how to encourage it. Every time I go to these meetings, I feel like asking, “What’s happening with parent involvement?” I’ve gone to the Network Days and put up my interest in creating a Community of Practice around parent involvement, and there was only one woman who was interested. But I will not give up. I will be there. The next day is a new day. If the good Lord lets me have a new day, I’m going to try it again. I am so persistent that I figure if you keep knocking me down and I keep getting up, eventually you’re going to get tired of knocking me down and I’ll be up.

I really thought that by working with the Ball Foundation, I was going to be building a network and share all this because somebody over there might be doing something that I don’t know about that I could implement over here, and vice versa. So my hope with the Ball Foundation still is to be part of a network that works together and does research about what really works because I don’t have all the answers. But we’re going to see what really works, knowing that in your community it might not work because you might have the Asian community, and you may have a heck of a lot more money and more involved parents.

I think the Foundation really needs to make parent involvement a priority because it’s not being highlighted. That’s my main concern. If you’re going to have a shift in paradigm, that means you’re bringing in the parents.

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