Maestra de Paz

Telling people I'm a high school teacher is one thing, and saying that I work at a semester program is also fine. But telling people I'm a Peace Studies teacher? That gets interesting.

Sometimes I chicken out and say I teach high school English, and then pray that nobody asks me what books I teach (Scarlett Letter? No. Great Gatsby? No. My Gender Workbook? Yes!)

"Peace Studies teacher" does not exist in any kind of mainstream educational lexion that I know of.

But sometimes people nod earnestly, or are really interested. Sometimes people step back and reexamine me - I guess I don't look that radical upon first impression. And sometimes people are like, "WAH?".

And then all the old activists and peace workers ask me what we're reading. This has happened several times now. I can't tell if they have ideas of what we should be reading - if I pass or fail some test with them - or if they are genuinly interested, or perhaps searching for some ellusive peace curricula.

I too am searching for an elusive peace curricula - and am always open to suggestions - but am pretty clear that my class is really about power, about naming it and transforming it. We look at the history of nonviolence and nonviolence theory, and social movements, but we also spend a lot of time on gender, race, and class.

I ask the kids to surf the space between the political and the personal. I think identity politics have a bad name amongst some folks, but I'm clear we can't get to peace unless we ask some hard questions about power.

That's what I try to say to people when they ask. It often feels like the begining of a conversation rather than an explanation.

Mexico #1

We walked out to the border fence through arroyos – dry creek beds that run with seasonal rains. The way was lined with water bottles and discarded clothing, bras and other bits left behind. The “wall” was round steel posts, at least twelve feet high, driven into the ground, filled with concrete which meant no resonant percussion at the border. We were denied even that silly resistance. The kids climbed, though, and we learned how easy it is to go up, and probably over. Up and over was the plan for everyone we met, almost 40 migrants in the desert that day, mostly men, with faces that ranged from apprehensive of us to bemused. They asked us: “What do you think of us?”  and hailed from places in the US that were familiar and close to home. They had done the jump many times, were returning to lives and jobs and families in the US.

In a quiet moment, our group leader asked us to sit and breath, to think of the dozens if not hundreds of people in the desert around us, waiting to cross. The land had seemed quiet, populated by scrub and cattle, but suddenly it was full of eyes and breath and stories.

The people we saw were not carrying enough for five days in the desert. I have hiked for five days in the desert. I am worried about those people.

In an art exercise later, that arroyo became the long road of human history and migration to new life in strange lands, an image that dances now with what I know about NAFTA, maquiladoras, and the wall. And the footprints in the sand, in that long road river of humans walking, included my own.