In Defiance of All That is Bad
by Tera Martin
I was stumped. Asked to write about my experience at the Watsonville Center in our current budget hell, I wasn’t really sure what more to say than this: this semester has at times felt like the most stretched, hectic and empty of my eleven years as the faculty coordinator of the Integrated Learning Center.
How to characterize the disappointment of making fliers with our reduced tutoring hours while watching brand new Cabrillo students—who don’t know any different—accept these services as they are? How to explain collaborating with all the staff of the Watsonville Center and witnessing the services they provide, bilingually, with grace and astuteness—A&R, Financial Aid, Counseling, the CTC—and encountering empty desks, where staff used to work, support our students, and form our family? How to talk about the pride and concern about watching my own LIA staff stretch to—and realize the limits of—supporting students whose needs haven’t changed in a time when California’s state budget has? (In fact, I would argue, their needs have increased.) How to talk about the bad worry over how much of the Watsonville Center will be leased out to other organizations, or the paranoid anxiety caused from overheard conversations tinged with bodily metaphors—to save the core you must reduce from the periphery? And the perpetual concern of adjunct instructors—who teach so many of the Watsonville Center courses—wondering about future work and how to pay the bills?
I realized some of the emotional imprints of so much loss and change this past Friday while helping the Organization of Latin Americans, a few of the students in the Dreamers’ Scholarship Workshop, and some ILC students and staff decorate sugar skulls for the two Día de los Muertos altars that are being created in the Watsonville Center. This is the week leading up to Día de los Muertos—an important cultural tradition celebrated in the United States, Mexico, and other parts of Latin America, which celebrates and honors those who have passed away. An altar—filled with colorful sugar skulls, papel picado, mementos, skeletons, marigolds—is being created in both the lobby of the Watsonville Center, as well as in the ILC. It is believed that the aroma of the marigolds brings the spirits to the altar, and the return of monarch butterflies represent our lost ones (especially our warriors), come home to visit.
Also this past weekend was Eid al-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice, for Muslims around the world. My partner’s family, who emigrated from Afghanistan in the 1980s, celebrates this time of sacrifice by acknowledging those in need—of food, clothes, donations. We share food with food banks, donate time and money to local organizations, and recognize what we have. With what we have, we can improve the life of someone else.
This, then, is the time of honoring our losses and sacrifices, and finding the hope of community to continue to fight for our students, our school, our colleagues. 
Watching students (and their children) and staff come together in a classroom that smelled like sugar to decorate candy skulls with sparkles and feathers and icing in order to remember who we have lost felt hopeful. One student—a longtime math tutor in the ILC—said, “This is so relaxing, so nice.” Somehow, while watching a colleague and staff member cover a sugar skull with green icing, I didn’t feel so alone.
Recordar, the Spanish for “to remember,” comes from the Latin recordari. Corazón shares the same Latin root cor. So, to remember means to pass back through the heart once again. In remembering our losses, we pass back in order to go on, in community, stronger, together.
In Watsonville, we work with many underprepared students, often juggling the demands of parenting, full-time employment, loss of employment, ICE, not having enough food, higher tuition, and reduced course options. Yet three of my English 1A students, who face many of these same challenges, chose to drive to Santa Cruz on this past Sunday to stand in line with me for two hours to meet Dave Eggers, the author we’re currently reading. Community, support, and inspiration manifest themselves in many ways.
I find hope in the challenge of figuring out different ways to continue on inspired and inspiring. Howard Zinn writes,
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
This, then, is not a piece to say we in Watsonville have it any worse than anyone else; I daily experience all the ripples of campus-wide reductions. I hear the stress in people’s voices over the phone. I say this: Somos Cabrillo. We are all Cabrillo.
Let’s start forward thinking. Of course, vote YES YES YES on Prop 30. However, what more can we do? I had dinner with a friend who is on the Board of the Peralta Community College District, which in June passed (with a 72% approval) a temporary 8 year parcel tax (Measure B) that provides direct funding to the District. The money cannot be used for facilities or administration or swept by the State. Because of that parcel tax, their cuts are significantly lower, regardless of Prop 30’s outcome. There have to be other innovative ideas. Let’s keep thinking, challenging, inspiring each other.
And, in this present moment, I remember:
I miss Marta, who began working at Cabrillo as a student assistant, was then hired to work in A & R, was laid off from Cabrillo, and is now pregnant with her third child. I miss Sonia, who was cut and transferred to Financial Aid in Aptos. I miss Cecilia, who was cut from A& R and who now works in the Bookstore in Aptos. I miss so many of the adjunct instructors I used to see more of. I miss Shirley, the very first English LIA at the Watsonville Center, who was moved to the Writing Center in Aptos. I miss her husband Jeff, who passed away in June. I still go into the Faculty Workroom in Watsonville and expect to see him. I still talk to students who didn’t know he passed and were hoping to take his English 1B class in the spring.
I see the monarchs fluttering and know our warriors are with us in spirit. We must live and act “in defiance of all that is bad around us.” We carry with us all those we have lost, including those students who are consistently being squeezed out of our system. We owe them. They--and we--deserve each other’s energy, support, encouragement, and fight.