A May Day Letter to My Student Deportee

Dear “Cesar,”

This May Day, as I march with my union, the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, I will thank them for their role in making Berkeley Unified a sanctuary school district and Berkeley, a sanctuary city, but above all, I would like to thank you.

It’s been over 18 years since your last day in our second grade class—a heartbreaking Valentine’s Day in 2007—just before your family succumbed to a deportation order forcing you to leave the country, despite your U.S. citizenship.

This year, convicted felon and twice-impeached President Donald Trump’s Valentine’s Day present was to threaten all public schools and universities to desist in teaching about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or lose funding. He also issued executive orders illegally revoking visas, work permits, and even facilitating the arrest and detention of immigrants and their allies.

ICE tried to banish the family of one 7-year-old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example.

Do you remember the now-censored “DEI” book about Cesar Chavez that I read to your class, Harvesting Hope by Kathleen Krull? She told the story of how the huge Chavez family lost their farm to the depression and drought that scourged Arizona in 1937. Some of you cried when you learned that the Chavez family was forced to trade their productive 80-acre finca for the life of migrant farm workers, developing lesions, blisters, knotted backs, and burning eyes and lungs.

But I reassured you: “No hay mal que por bien no venga.—There is nothing so bad that good can’t come of it.” Were it not for the Cesar family’s displacement, he might not have co-founded the United Farm Workers, a union that has saved countless farm workers’ lives, improved working conditions, and inspired multitudes internationally. Similarly, your family’s suffering gave birth to change and hope in the city you were forced to abandon and beyond.

For years I’ve waited until you were old enough to understand my recounting of the resistance leading to the safeguards you inspired. After you left, your classmates and I would tear up looking at your name on your mailbox and your empty seat. I fought against tears every time we said the Rosa Parks Pledge: “to make this world a better place for ALL people to enjoy freedom,” because ALL didn’t include you.

Your mother wrote from Mexico that you had transformed from my cheerful, round-cheeked model student into a sullen malnourished child who refused to do his school work or eat. I could not stop crying.

Inspired by the ironic letters of my parents’ close friend Blacklist-breaking screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, I wrote an Open Letter to an Immigration Judge:

Dear Honorable Immigration Judge,

…how can I go on teaching about equal rights and freedom of speech and all the things our Constitution is supposed to defend, and that the very name of our school is supposed to represent, when the father of my students is deported simply because his skin is darker? Both my Latine and white students are U.S. citizens. So how do I explain to the class that one has the right to a family in the United States and the other citizen does not?

The letterwentviral. A community faith organization called BOCA helped my student teacher and me organize an informational event April 26 with cafeteria tables full of lawyers offering free advice. Rosa Parks’ families pressured the superintendent and police to protect immigrant students. With BOCA’s assistance, as a BFT union representative, I wrote and presented a resolution to the BFT executive board to make BUSD a sanctuary district and it passed overwhelmingly.

Meanwhile your classmates heroically transformed their grief into actions by writing their own “Without You” poems based on Los Panchos’ “Sin Ti” song and read them on an Univision TV special about you.

Next, my spouse and I pulled the best elements of sanctuary ordinances around the country together into a local ordinance and presented it to Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission. It won unanimous support and was recommended to the City Council. On May 22, 2007 we organized a rally outside city hall in favor of our beefed up sanctuary ordinance. Aided by the BFT, many of BFT’s Spanish two-way immersion teachers, KPFA host Larry Bensky, LeConte’s principal, and the Berkeley community, the rally reverberated through the City Council chambers. Berkeley Resolution City of Refuge 63711-N.S. was adopted that night (5-22-07) giving a previously symbolic resolution the teeth of law. Berkeley’s spark of an example ignited other cities that adopted similar ordinances throughout the nation. Months later, BFT president Cathy Campbell got our School Board to adopt our sanctuary District resolution as board policy.

Over the years, this work has only gained strength.This January 21, Berkeley School Board Member Jen Corn submitted an even stronger resolution to the City Council reaffirming Berkeley’s status as a sanctuary city and it passed overwhelmingly again. And in February, teachers, principals, office workers, and support staff received a two hour training on how to safeguard the rights of our immigrant students. This whole sequence of events began when you, “Cesar,” my polite, photogenic, straight-A, bilingual 7-year-old student, became the poster child of a renewed movement to protect immigrant rights in Berkeley.

So today, as Donald Trump outdoes predecessors in figuratively defiling our Statue of Liberty, Mother of Exiles, thanks to you,“Cesar,” so many more of us are able to defend her call for our “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” ICE tried to banish the family of one 7-year-old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example. Fear feeds tyranny, but you and our union showed us how community and courage can construct democracy. And no matter what challenges we may face now, there is no going back.

As Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) said,

Once social change begins it cannot be reversed.
One cannot make illiterate those who have learned to read.
One cannot uneducate those who have learned to think.
One cannot humiliate those who feel pride.
One cannot oppress those who are no longer are afraid.

Thank you, to our Rosa Parks’ Cesar Chavez.

Love,

Maestra Margot

My student’s name has been changed to protect his privacy. He responded with a very moving note of gratitude, giving me permission to publish this letter.