The arch angels
How a Los Angeles school is pioneering indigenous education – and reaching out to parents and children in one of the city’s most notorious neighbourhoods.
In 2009, Xinaxcalmecac Academia Semillas del Pueblo together with its sister school, Anahuacalmecac International became the first public IB World Schools in the city offering the PYP and the MYP. Both schools are chartered under an umbrella community-based organization, Semillas Community Schools. Semillas’executive director and a co-founder, Marcos Aguilar, explains the schools’ mission and how parents and community are crucial to its success.
“I followed my wife, Minnie Ferguson [now Semillas’ Director of Education and IB Programs], into teaching as an extension of our undergraduate experiences in Chicana and Chicano Studies [the culture of US citizens of Mexican descent]. It was important to us to create a curriculum that addressed the ills of the community and led to a healthy and sustainable way of living. This seemed to be anathema to the reality I found in the public schools I worked in.
My experience of teaching culminated in eight years in a high school in east LA of 5,000 students where I taught the District’s only Native American studies class and one of a few District-wide in Chicano Studies. I also founded a traditional Aztec dance group, which became a way to engage with families beyond the classroom. These experiences in community-based teaching led to the idea behind Semillas:
to organize educational autonomy as Native Peoples.
It took five years to get our first grants. When we started, we had no facilities and no money. We convinced a national non-profit to loan us the money to buy a building, but it wasn’t ready when we first opened in September 2002 so we began life in a park. By December, our funding had dried up and my wife and I had to hock [secure a loan on] the little equity we had in our house to cover teacher salaries that winter. We’ve had to do that a couple of times since then. As traditional Native People, we knew it was important to ask the community for permission to open the school, so we went into the streets to discover what kind of school people would be interested in. We asked traditional elders for permission to teach our language [Nahuatl]. We recruited students by going door to door, and the teachers we hired were themselves reflective of the community – people who approached teaching not just as a theoretical practice but as an extension of their own life experiences.
This area is, by some standards, what they call the hottest killing zone in Los Angeles. It has the highest level of gang-related murders and gun crime. But it is also a community. And our school has become a learning center that extends way beyond the neighbourhood the school serves, simply because there is a need for community-based education that strengthens Native children – through an understanding
of the importance of parents and elders in the lives of the children, and the importance of shared history and language.
Parents have been central to everything we do. They have helped to establish Xokolatl Café, a social enterprise project designed to raise funds for the school by importing and selling chocolate and cacao from traditional farmers in Mexico. Parents take part in monthly meetings with teachers and weekly excursions with students, serve on the board of advisors, help lead the dance circle, share stories in the classroom and even hoe the garden. In our school community, attending a parent meeting once a year is simply not enough – children need more attention from the adults in their lives, and we seek any and every opportunity to support that through Semillas. We value all our parents, and we welcome them through the door. Unfortunately, parents report that many public schools in LA greet them with a locked front gate, and that keeps parents out along with everyone else. Keeping the doors open is challenging, but these are other people’s children, not mine, and I have to be guided by parents’ visions of their own children’s education.
Without exaggeration, enrolling their children in our school has become part of many of our parents’ strategy to heal themselves and find sanctuary for their children while they confront the demands of the modern world. This allows them to improve other parts of their life and empowers them to find a different way of relating to their children.
A couple of years ago, a parent who is a long-time resident told me the school had changed the entire face of the neighbourhood. Every building we have was previously abandoned, and now they are full of colour and murals. More and more, Semillas is being noticed by educators across the world as a new way of running community schools. Yet I feel we’re still a decade away from reaching the beginning of our potential as a transformative institution in our community.
Today, we have an excellent programme in an excellent school in a very difficult situation. Our finances are precarious; our campuses are limited, even as we imagine classrooms without borders. But I believe we can overcome these limitations through community solutions. Our school has taken the standards the IB has set internationally and adapted them to the needs of our community and our students. This school can be a centre for the local community and for internationally minded educators, working with students and parents to improve lives.”
