Assignment: Diversity in Action—Life Lessons Learned

EDUC6164: Perspectives on Diversity and Equity “In Her Own Voice: Julie Benavides”

Program Transcript NARRATOR: This is the second segment of the video series in which three early childhood professionals tell their life stories and ways they came to understand and address challenges related to diversity. Listen now as Julie Benavides tells of her upbringing in a family of nine, and how she turned her struggles with the tensions between her family culture and the dominant culture into opportunities for continual reflection and professional and personal growth. JULIE BENAVIDES: My personal journey is looking at what my reality in doing anti-bias work stems from my childhood, and I look at my background. My background and my childhood, I felt, was fantastic, fun, joyful. I come from a family of nine. So being with others, sharing our possessions, our toys or the lack of sharing of resources was one of the initial points of taking a look at who I am. And from there, I like to take a look at the images that I get and how those images have changed me as a person and changed my reality. And so that's the first image of having laughter in the family and having all these nine brothers and sisters, but the reality is living in a one-bedroom home and being humbled by that. JULIE BENAVIDES: And one thing that really struck me is I was in a kindergarten classroom, and they were reading a book, and the book was Harry the Dirty Dog. And Harry the Dirty Dog was a white dog with black spots. And through his adventure and his journey of them finding him, he became saved by washing him being the black dog was no longer great. It was being the white dog with the black spots. So I went home and tried to scrub my skin so I wouldn't be like Harry the Dirty Dog because a classmate of mine turned to me and said, "You're like the black dog." So I didn't understand that cognitively, but emotionally, that was an emotional response and that was an image. So that was one of the images that started me on my journey as I look back, because you need to put all these pieces into a whole. JULIE BENAVIDES: The next thing I recollect is I grew up in the late fifties and when television was coming on, there was the riots going on, and it was really a scary feeling, so that emotional response of the fear of what was happening and my parents talking, and my brothers and sisters. And I was about six or seven when Kennedy was killed and Johnson came as the president, and they had the War on Poverty Act. At that time, I didn't know it was the War on Poverty. I just saw people rioting in the streets and wondering why people were being hurt. So that stayed with me as well, and as I realized that was being talked in our household because we were a family of nine. And since we didn't have all those

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resources, we were talking about maybe the president would do something for us. That's what I started to hear. JULIE BENAVIDES: And then in the late sixties and the seventies, my sisters went off to college. And it was a huge deal for a family of nine to leave a close- knit family to go to--the first educated group to go. My father only had a second grade education, and my mother had a ninth grade education, so it was a really huge deal for the Roma family to go on to college. But at that time, my sisters were gone. We saw in the news there was the riots going on, the rallies of the Chicano Moratorium in the 1970s. And the fear again, the emotional response was there of what's gonna happen to my sisters. And they had the Chicano Moratorium. And my sisters came home, and we were--I felt a sense of relief for my family, but the fear was still there. But they took me to other rallies that they went to. So I started at a very young age, going out into these rallies, not really knowing that we were asking for justice or equity. So that was another image that came out. JULIE BENAVIDES: And then--and when I went to college, I became involved in a student activist group, MEChA. And with MEChA, we were trying to do things in the community to take back to the community and learn while we're, of course, getting educated, and I became involved in a student community center. And in that community center, they were starting a Head Start, which was, incidentally, related to the War on Poverty. So with Head Start, really, it was mainly going to the communities and empowering families, empowering children. So those images stayed with me. JULIE BENAVIDES: And when I started the Head Start, we--that year just a multitude of change occurred--new program, working with new communities. And I worked in Long Beach, and in Long Beach was the Center for Indo-Chinese Refugees. That's where the Vietnam War was ending and families from Laos, Vietnam came in. And for them to be integrated into the system, an ideal place was in the Head Start programs or the job training programs. So the community center that I was at had a job training program, and it was just starting the Head Start. So not only was I a young student activist working with the Head Start, but I started learning about all types of people, because I was in a world where I was only used to European Americans and all of us. And I was thrust into working with African Americans, families from Laos and families from Vietnam. JULIE BENAVIDES: So those type of things really made me start thinking about my identity. What is my identity? And as the journey went on and I started learning about how to integrate families, I started learning about my own self- identity, who I was, how my family background still influenced me. Only my father and mother spoke Spanish, so we were stripped of that language as I started realizing that these families coming in from Indo-China at that time or the Asian

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countries had this richness in speaking with their children and with their language, which I didn't. And I had rejected that because my parents had pushed that. That was the only way for us to move ahead and be educated. So I started looking at that, what happened to my language, started studying, doing the work and connecting with other ethnic groups that were on campus, student groups that were trying to make change. So we were--we connected. And about when I was 20, I ended up forming a collaboration with all the different student groups on campus, and I started bringing them to work at the Head Start programs. JULIE BENAVIDES: Okay. So here I'm 20, and I'm, all of a sudden, thrust into a world where there's so many different type of people. And also when you're going to college, you go through your own identity crisis as to who are you--what do you wanna do in terms of career, who do you wanna become. And at the same time, I'm dealing with children and families who are trying to integrate into the American system. And not only it's jobs. It's looking at the cultural differences and similarities that we have, and just continually asking myself, "Where am I going with this?" And it just seemed to snowball from bringing the groups together, doing collaborative activities. We ended up doing a whole multicultural festival at our college campus, and then bring them. Some of them from the Asian American Student Club came to work. Some from the--one person from the Native American Coalition came to work at the Head Start. So we had a pretty much diverse group. Didn't know what we were doing in terms of ECE, just that we have to do something here in the community. And then found out--of course, later on, we found out we weren't even licensed to do that, you know, so we, of course, took care of the early childhood piece and went back to school for that. JULIE BENAVIDES: I worked with another group, and we developed a nonprofit organization and we started writing grants to work in a different community. But all of a sudden, I was thrust into another group where there was predominantly African Americans and predominantly Samoan Americans. And there were some Latino families that were also there in the community. It was the city of Carson, and that was really life-changing because of the cultural conflicts between the groups. Sometimes it was difficult to figure out how to negotiate them. The success was myself and a coworker, we wrote a grant. We got it funded, started out with 35 children, and our intent was to focus on bringing these groups of families together. So we started with 35 children. And when I left it, I soon became the education coordinator through my journeys, and also professional journey became the assistant director and then the executive director. And when I left it, we had about 700 families, and it was just a wonderful experience. And I'm now at the community college and teaching child development classes. That's my journey working with children, families and students. JULIE BENAVIDES: So--and part of my learning, as I became aware, if you look

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at our learning cycle and awareness starts, the awareness became of all the different types of people I was interacting with and trying to understand their reality, to understand what was their family lifestyle, how it differed from mine, trying to maneuver through any of those conflicts. And in doing that, I realized I needed more information. I needed more knowledge. I needed to go take more classes. Although I had my bachelor's degree, I needed to take more training opportunities, take advantage of them or engage myself in a course study. So I started doing that at the site. I became involved with a community group that we started doing study groups. And with the study groups, I started going on to taking college courses on diversity as well. And then I became involved at the National Association for the Education of Young Children and met Louise Derman-Sparks. And I became involved in the diversity retreats that they had. And with the Leadership Interim Group, we really did some intensive work, and I realized that that's what the work is about. We just can't go out and become aware of diversity because we couldn't even define what--what is diversity? What is cultural competence? What's anti-bias? All those words were thrown out, and were we using them properly? So part of my reality, what I needed to do, my work, was to define those for me, define them for the agency that I was working with. JULIE BENAVIDES: So becoming aware of people is one thing. Working with families and children is that initial process, but then we go on and we have to explore more of who we are and go back to ourselves because we can't tell--we can't direct these communities and tell them what they need to do to be integrated into American society. We have to understand them first. My awakening is based on several decisive moments or several of what I call images that I can still remember. And the images I remember when I was young is coming to realize that I didn't belong or I was told I didn't belong based on issues of economics. And based on economics, you know, everything seemed be fine. I had all these playmates. But when you start realizing in sixth grade that you don't have what they have or they start realizing you don't have what you have--and my best friend from kindergarten all the way to sixth grade says, "You know, you need to go play with other Mexicans." So that was one thing that I didn't understand at that time, couldn't comprehend. That was a decisive moment. That image stood with me. So as I start connecting the mental images, based on those emotional responses I have, it started putting a picture. And from then, another experience that occurred came to me where I was rejecting because I would experience this cultural disconnect with my own family. I was told by my family you need to get an education. This is what's gonna free you. And I did excel in academics. As I was excelling in academics, I needed to reject also my family of not speaking Spanish, of being in honors class means that you had to bring your family, being embarrassed of my family. We also started having our own divisions within our own ethnic groups. There were the Mexicans. There were the Mexican-Americans. People were calling them Spanish. People didn't

Page 4 know what identity to call themselves. And then there was one that we called wetbacks that came from Mexico. But my father came from Mexico, so I had engaged in that. So, therefore I was rejecting my own family. So that stayed with me. I didn't feel comfortable with it, but that was what was going on because if you're born here, you're in a different group of Mexicans than you weren't. So I was going through that. JULIE BENAVIDES: But then when my sisters became very involved in the Chicano Movement and that means started educating our family on what it is to struggle and really what it is to help others and really bring equity to the forefront so that--I started changing there. And so, that was another mental image that I had, that I didn't like what I did, but this is the reality of that time. And then as I went into the college, I became very involved, as I mentioned, as an activist, but the mental image that I had there was what group do I belong to? At that time, they were also going through divisions whether there was an influx of persons from Latin America. How do people from El Salvador fit in? How do people from Nicaragua fit in? So that image was there for me as well. And then, in working with early childhood education practitioners, becoming a teacher, becoming a supervisor, becoming a director, there was an incident that occurred, and it was with a family. This mother was bringing her child and drinking the bottle, and the child was four years of age. And one of the teachers comes up to her and says, "Oh, your child is way too big to be doing that. You do not need to be carrying them around that's not--he's never gonna learn. He can't become independent." And she started quoting the Piaget about being independent and Erikson, you know, that, you know, it's really a good thing that they become independent learners and so forth. JULIE BENAVIDES: And at that point, it was really critical for me. Do I say anything to back up these mental images or do I let that go and what was wrong about that? So afterwards we had teachers meetings every week. But afterward, at that particular session, I said we know we can't wait. I did talk to the--bring the teaching team and talked about what happened. And I didn't feel like I fully was capable of responding to it, but I knew it was wrong. I knew I was back to that image that I had why I was (inaudible) calling my peers when I was younger, wetbacks and why I wasn't speaking Spanish or I didn't know Spanish. The real clarifying moment for me is when the child looked at the parent, looked at the teacher, and when the parent looked mortified and the parent put the child down to obey the teacher, that was a huge disservice that was done, that the child was seeing that the parent was being disempowered right in front of them, and yet the teacher, the practitioner couldn't see that. So we talked about, I didn't know how really to clarify it with them, but I just said did you see the parent's response? The teacher was oblivious of it. So--but when I said, "Did you notice the child's response?" Of course, everybody wants to serve children. And she said, "Well, I did see him look a little fearful." I said, "Because you were telling the parent how

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to parent, and that was taking away their ability to be the parent, and our role is to empower parents." JULIE BENAVIDES: I started to realize I needed more information, more work. I started taking the diversity workshop and series with Louise, but I also started being involved in the Infant and Toddler Caregiver Program with WestEd, and there was a video, and it was called Ten Keys of Culturally Sensitive Care. And in that video of the Ten Keys of Culturally Sensitive Care, the exact same scenario of that parent bringing the child to school and the teacher telling the child about they're too big put them down and the whole things of independence, hit me that I might have handled it okay, but I didn't handle it as well, and my journey still was not done because those 10 keys were telling us and giving me information how I can take back to my practitioners what really was happening there. JULIE BENAVIDES: Well, my journey in working in anti-bias work and social justice is really never-ending. It still has a lot more to go. My personal passion is very much linked to my professional passion, and it's the joy of really learning; learning about myself, learning about others. I work currently with students and learning about who they are, how I can help them in their success and their journey. And so, that passion is getting them to think about what changes they can make in society because I think we all want to contribute to society. That's what we're here for, to be great citizens. And in being great citizens is how can we connect with our communities? How can we take back our higher education, learning, the critical thinking that we've been promoted to engage in? How can we take that back into our communities? How can we work with young children and families? JULIE BENAVIDES: And not just in teaching. I think that teaching is a very noble profession, and I started as a teacher. But we also need to make change as administrators, as community activists or community collaborators. And I enjoy seeing people link together their resources. I enjoy students trying to make those connections and then make those inquiries in themselves and their journey, "What can I do?" And looking at the practices that they're engaged in with children, with families, with communities, with legislation, advocacy. Those are all just wonderful things that continually bring me joy. I sit on several community agencies, collaboratives and engaging in creating innovative programs, looking at the needs and the improvements that have to be made. There's always-- opportunities are just endless. JULIE BENAVIDES: And when I think of inspiration, I think of all the people who have inspired me and the joy that I see that it brings to the communities or it brings to the children and families. Those little things, little practices of making change in the classroom and that's initial step in doing some of the work that we

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wanna engage in in anti-bias. But I also see, in a bigger picture, that everyone has the ability to inspire others. And for me, I look at my journey coming from a large family, nine, being impoverished, father with a second grade education, a mother with a ninth grade education, I now have my Master's. I'm teaching at a community college. I have the best job in the world. I feel like I'm an NFL player or basketball player. I'm getting paid for something that I really enjoy and then seeing the connections that students make and empowering the students that they're there to engage, not only in their educational journey but to take back to the community and to really create some type of transformational change at their center and--so that they truly can impact the lives of their children. That's what I think of inspiration.

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