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113 Chapter 6 Finding Traction at South Gate High School I remember looking through my mail [back in 1999] and a lot of the teachers got them. It was my first year of teaching. I was leafing through the flyers and there was an organization Communities for a Better Environment, and I said, this would be great, maybe I can have them come and do a presentation on air quality issues and things that I thought were relevant to the people that live here. I thought this would be a good organization. Yuki [Kidokoro] came and did a presentation, and then I told them, you should hook up with Ms. Martinez and Ms. Ortiz and do presentations . And they did. And that’s basically how we first decided that—we all decided it would be a good organization to support because we had thought of supporting—getting involved in other organizations, but we decided that would be a good organization to work with. So that’s how we first started with Communities for a Better Environment. —Veronica Sanchez, South Gate High School teacher When CBE and Youth-EJ reconnected with a group of socially engaged teachers at South Gate High School, things began to change.The teachers brought together activists in search of a constituency and high school students who were looking for something they couldn’t yet name. Until this point, most of the Youth-EJ activists came from Huntington Park, where CBE had been active longest. Hoping to engage students from other schools, the students and Angelo Logan began following up on Yuki Kidokoro’s contacts and put flyers in teachers’ mailboxes about bringing environmental justice workshops to their classrooms. Because she felt that “a lot of kids are not aware P o w e r P o l i t i c s 114 of the political and environmental issues that are relevant to them, and there is a lack of information, communication about what is going on,” Leticia Ortiz invited CBE to her classes. Ortiz was the most senior of the group of social studies teachers who came to work most closely with CBE on the Nueva Azalea plant campaign. When she started teaching, she was one of two women in her department, but with the addition of Veronica Sanchez, Sylvia Lozano (a pseudonym),1 and Claudia Martinez, Ortiz said, “I really felt like I had important colleagues and people that I could really talk to the most.” She jokingly calls them the bloc of four. They regularly work together in planning courses and thinking about their curriculum. “We talk about things we wanted to do in our classroom, or lesson plans or certain perspectives that we wanted to introduce; we’re definitely on the same page where we wanted to go with certain things.” Her colleague Veronica Sanchez added that “although we don’t agree on everything, we are—I guess you could say we are on the left. We have similar goals, and we all want to see our students be active citizens in the community. So we all kind of gravitated toward this project as well because our students did have the opportunity to be leaders.” Although they made up the core, other teachers, including science teachers, also invited CBE to make presentations, especially after students began talking about the group and several teachers popped in to see what was happening. In November and early December 2000, when these presentations were going on, knowledge about the power plant being proposed for South Gate was still spotty.A feature article in late October in a widely read entertainment newspaper was the first many heard about the plant (Catania 2000b). The four social studies teachers used it as classroom reading, as part of their unit on industrialization, for understanding the arguments on both sides and the nature of the debate, and for encouraging students to develop their own opinions. Because he was off track at the time, Milton Hernandez was able to participate in all the classroom presentations, which was a pretty grueling schedule.“Every single period we had a workshop to do. One day it was one teacher and another day it was another teacher. All their classes. It was tiring too because I was supposed to be here at 6:50 in the morning because first period started—back then it started at 7:30.” My mental image of a workshop as a combination of informative talk with a question-and...

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