A free Saturday conference will teach teens from Morgan Hill to
Watsonville how to take on injustice in their community, organizers
say.
Gilroy – A free Saturday conference will teach teens from Morgan Hill to Watsonville how to take on injustice in their community, organizers say.
The second annual Cesar E. Chavez Youth Leadership Conference aims to bring more than 200 teens to Gilroy High School to discuss hot-button issues such as affirmative action, racial profiling and immigrant rights. Youth leaders have spent months scrubbing cars to raise funds for the event, planned for 11am to 6pm Saturday. Longtime member Jasmine Barba, a senior at Live Oak High School, described working until 9pm at friends’ houses, making posters for the event. It’s the culmination of two and a half years of organizing by the fledgling Cesar E. Chavez Youth Leadership group, which meets weekly with mentors Carlos Flores and Nuemi Guzman.
“We’re trying to give them a sense of pride and direction, to make their communities better,” said Flores, who works for Community Solutions’ Restorative Justice Program as a facilitator and case manager. “We want to make them aware of the problems – things like gangs, racial profiling, the ways the system is stacked against them – and give them the knowledge to achieve, to go to university.”
Monday, Flores was busy handing out flyers at Gilroy and Morgan Hill schools. Counselors and probation staff have helped out by advertising the event as far west as Watsonville and as far south as Hollister.
Flores said the high school is an accessible location for teens.
After months of planning, “it’s kind of surreal” to think about the upcoming conference, said Barba. “We didn’t think we could do it, and now it’s almost here.”
Saturday’s event will include workshops on Oaxacan activism, immigration and Latino unity, music spun by a DJ, and a speech by Reynaldo Berrios, author of “Cholo Style: Homies, Homegirls and La Raza” and the creator of Mi Vida Loca magazine.
“A lot of our kids think there’s no way out of gang life, no way out of drugs or alcohol,” Flores said. “Reynaldo Berrios is inspirational. He shows them they’ve got a future, that they can make a change.”
Barba said she already wanted to go to college when she joined the group two and a half years ago, but trips to ‘La Raza’ days at the University of California and Stanford reinforced the importance of education, and inspired her to learn more about her own and other cultures.
“It’s opened my eyes to new cultures, new careers,” she said. “I’m thinking about minoring in Chicano studies, or at least taking some classes.”
