Elders: Rebeca Barrera - Children, Cultura, and Spirit: Continuing the Legacy

Welcome to Healing Generations, a podcast creating a dialogue uplifting the importance of healing, strengthening and supporting our communities and that addresses the disparities and inequities in communities of color. Healing Generations is brought to you by the Healing Generations Institute, a collaborative initiative of the National Compadres Network and the Brotherhood of Elders. Be sure to subscribe to stay up to date on our new releases. Bienvenidos, good day everybody. This is Jerry Teo with the Healing Generations Institute and Healing Generations podcast and we want to once again welcome you to this journey, to this dialogue, to this platica, to this learning, to this healing process that they were all in and thank you so much for joining us today. As always, I want to begin by thanking the Creator and thanking the ancestors for another day of life, another day of breath, another day of being able to learn and to heal and to grow and to share with community that way. And as we do that, I want to acknowledge where we're sitting, wherever you're at, just acknowledge where you're at. I'm in the tangua gaviriendo land, native people from there. Think about the barrios and neighborhoods that you're in, all the people there, all the grandmas, the abuelitas, the children, the families, even the perritos, the dogs, the cats and all the things that make our family in our community who they are. And then let's take just a beautiful breath just for our own families. Think about the families that we come from and those blood-related families and the love-related families, the ones that have become part of us because of our spirit, our work and because of what we share with each other. And finally, that last acknowledgment of you. I want to acknowledge you and who you are and everything you do in the world, wherever you're at in your journey, wherever you're at, we hope in these platicas, we give you a little bit. A little bit, towards my grandson says, "Do a little bit better, "and he says, "Tomorrow we do a little bit better." Okay, so maybe we give you a little bit so you can feel a little bit better, a little bit happier, a little bit stronger, and we're moving to this next day in a good way with some gratitude. And today, I am just overjoyed because I have with us today, first of all, let me just say a really good friend that I've known for years and years and years. We've traveled parallel roads, we've worked together on projects, on efforts, on national movements, but I've watched her also from afar, just continue with this legacy of being a leader, a maestra, a wisdom keeper, an advocate, specifically for children. But also when we say children, we say familias, and with the whole essence of them loving and knowing themselves, and especially their cultura, their culture. And she has been one of the leaders and the voices for all of that, for our children and for all children. And many accolades along the way, as well. She's led organizations and developed organizational movements. She's been on the board of scholastic books, as well, and really been at the forefront of many, many things. And who I'm talking about is Rebecca Becchi, a good friend, and so good to see you, Becchi. And thank you so much for agreeing to be part of the podcast today. I'll give you an opportunity to welcome the listeners. A pleasure. That introduction sounded almost like an obituary. I hope we're not that close to the end. But thank you, Jerry, for inviting me to share this moment with you. It's always a pleasure to visit with you about any number of things, and you're right. We have been marching down parallel paths, each of us finding our own way to get to the same, I think, mission. One time you told me that this wasn't a job for you, that it was your life. And I didn't realize that that because I was in a job, someone was paying me, I didn't realize until I was doing it on my own that it wasn't a job. It was my life's mission also to share cultura, to make sure that the next generation was healthier, would have some of the things that our generation did not have and had to fight so hard for. I always wonder, if I'd had bilingual education, what would I have been today? If somebody had told me that it was okay to say my name Barrera instead of Barrera, the way the teachers pronounced it and the way that happened. So, yeah, I'm happy to be here. Let's get started. I want to begin because I know you have a rich history, even with your own familia. And I wonder if you could share with us a little bit about who you are, your familia, your kind of your upbringing and what brought you. Happy to do that. So, my mother is the first member of her family born on the US side of the border. Her family came from Monterey and the Nuevo León area to Laredo during the Revolution. And her mother died in the pandemic. She was, my mom was five years old. And so then she went back to, my grandfather took his four children to Torreón to live with his sister. And they lived there for about seven years. And these things in later years, we understood how they flavored my mother's life and the cultura that she shared with us. But eventually, my grandfather, he was living in Monterey at the time. By the way, this is the revolution. And they are riding on the trains with Pancho Villa and all of the guerra around them. But these children then stayed with their tías until they were about, my mom was, I guess, 11 or 12 years old. And when my grandfather followed his favorite pianista, to Laredo. My grandfather, by the way, was the director of the Sinfonía de Monterey de Nuevo León. And so he, when they went to Laredo, the children met their new mother, their new stepmother. And we always laughed because my mom would say, we couldn't call her mama because she wasn't the mama that we remembered. So we called her mother and it came out mother instead of mother. They wanted to be all American. And so for the rest of her life, we always called her mother. It was just, we don't even know how to spell that. But even, even the lady who helped her clean her house would say, doña moder, señora moder. We would laugh about that. So my mother's life was filled with cultura and music. And my grandfather then eventually became a very successful, prominent leader in Laredo. And also he was the head of the Custom Brokers Association for the whole country of Mexico. He was the president. He founded it and worked with presidents and all that. So they had this long legacy. And my mom then, in her life, she chooses to marry a cowboy, a ranchero from South Texas. She met him at college. She had decided to become a nurse, which my grandfather thought was a terrible thing for a woman of her social standing to do. But my mother insisted she was going to go to college. And so she went to what was called at the time, Texas A&I University in Kingsville. But eventually it became part of the Texas A&M system. But during that time, she did meet my father. And then he had to go to war. And so eventually, you know, that all changed. But my father, his family was part of the original families of Tejas. My ancestor that we know the most about is a capitán, José Vázquez Borrego, who came to Tejas with the Escondón Settlements. And he brought with him 15 families. They were rancheros from Zacatecas, from Coahuila. And they brought all these families, and they helped settle a very wild land that was right on the Rio Grande. And so that territory then became part of Tejas. The original settlers of the 1700s, they created the roads, they brought all the cattle, they made the government happen. There was new government by the time that the North Americans moved into this territory. There was already governments and cities and many, many families. I'm telling you this story because none of it was ever told to us in school. It's the tragedy of Texas education is that Latino kids today in our schools, we are 53.9% of the children in the Texas public schools. But we're only represented by about 22% of the teachers. And we have none of our history in the Texas history books. In school, no one ever mentions to us what happened before the Battle of the Alamo. Everybody's very proud of the Alamo and the heroes of the Alamo, because they think that that's what liberated Tejas from the terrible Mexican people. But Mexico had a right to come and have a showdown. After all, they had invited these people to come in and settle the land and gave them land and gave them space. But they were required to learn Spanish, become Catholic and no slavery. And that was the thing because of the cotton farming at the time and how it was the big moneymaker in those 1800s. That's what these North Americanos wanted to do. They wanted to keep their slavery. So don't let people fool you that the Battle of the Alamo is about a mean Santana. There was many, many reasons why those battles, that one and the one in San Jacinto, why those battles occurred and why Texas eventually became independent of Mexico. Eventually, of course, that led to the Treaty of Guadalupe de Algon and the war between the United States and Mexico, where Mexico loses half of its land. So for me, that I didn't understand it as a child. And that's one of the reasons that I'm driven to make sure that our children know our history and our heritage and our cultura. Because research shows that children who know these things, they become more resilient. They're smarter if they know two languages, by the way, because your brain has different locuses, different places where your languages are. And imagine if you have a research shows that if you have a car accident and you're injured in that part of the brain where you speak one language, you still have the other language. That doesn't happen for people who have only one language. So there's so many benefits to knowing your languages, your history, your cultura, and then being able to be successful in life because you feel you know who you are. And I think for all of these years, I didn't realize that these background things of what happened with my family, my parents, and in the early years of school, that was all it eventually emerges as the strategies that I work with today. It's where our names were all changed. You know, mine became Becky. My brother, who's Omero, was immediately Homer. My friends who were Alberto and Roberto, all of them lost the O at the end and it became Robert and Albert. And all the Maria, Maria Lenas became Mary Helen or Mary Ellen. It was this thing, this be more American without understanding what it means to be American, which by the way is from Canada all the way to Argentina. So, you know, there's so much confusion about what we are and who we are because it was never allowed. We were punished in school for speaking Spanish. You know those things. So that's kind of the history that led me to where I am today. You know, I really appreciate you sharing some of that legacy and history. And the one thing, you know, as a mental health practitioner myself and who has dealt with, you know, trauma and healing all my life in communities. The other thing that identity does is it grounds you in a sense of well-being. And it makes you feel grounded. And the thing is that sense, you know, when our grandmas, grandmas give us the bendición, you know, when they would bless us up and tell us that we were a blessing, it meant that you are wanted, that you are sacred, that you are worthwhile, that you're valuable, that somebody cares for you, that you have a connection with me, whether I'm here or not people. When I go to the other world, I'm still going to send blessings that way. And what we have found is that when you have that cultural identity, the spiritual, the psychological, the mental, the emotional, all of that connection, then you do better. And when struggles happen in your life, you have something to ground yourself back in. So in those difficult times that I'm sure Becky, you know, I mean, we've been through a lot of things and sometimes, you know, horrible things that we don't know how we're going to get out. And we go back to that spiritual, we go back to those bendición, we go back to those prayers, we go back to the cultura. At least we have something to go back to. But what's happened and continues to happen with children that are robbed of their identity, robbed of their spirituality, robbed of their culture, they have nothing to go back to. And they're more vulnerable. And because of that, they end up, you know, with other issues as well. And I wonder if you could speak to that, you know, especially about your own development, because I'm sure it wasn't easy as a young woman, a mujer, Mexicana, trying to get through, you know, this system and be a leader. And you know, I don't know, things just sort of take you from one step to another. And if you are resilient, you become gutsy. You stand up and you want to fight back. But you have to discover what your worth is before you can stand and defend. And so I do remember that when I came to college, I was put in a dorm with all the Mexican-American students. And the air-condition dorm was where the other, where the richer kids were, right? So, and I do remember that in both, both of the colleges that I had the opportunity to spend time in, the same thing happened in both places. But my junior year in college, we had a World's Fair in San Antonio. And all my friends alborotaron todas. Let's go sign up. We're going to go work at the World's Fair. It's going to be called Hemisphere 68. And we want to be part of it. So we thought, well, that would be a great summer job. But the tricky thing was that the fair opened in April. And if you wanted a job, you had to start in February. So I had to drop out of my regular dormitory life and my course work for one semester in order to participate. And several of my friends and I did it. I continued to go to school. And I went to night school. And I took independent study classes because I wanted to graduate with my, with my colleagues, right? But working at Hemisphere was the first time that my second language, that's when I learned it was an asset, Jerry. I understood all of a sudden that being bilingual was something important because I was going to be touring presidents and mayors and representatives of all these countries where Español is the common language. And I didn't feel like a pocha. I felt like I had something to offer. And I learned all the facts and everything. And all of us, there were 100 VIP tour guides. And I would say that at least 10 of us have continued to be friends for the 50 years since then because we all recognized, and some of them were from here in San Antonio and some came to San Antonio and then just stayed here. But each of us has learned together the value of being bilingual and having an understanding of other cultures. And that opened my doors and my understanding of the bigger world hugely because remember, I'd been growing up in South Texas in a little ranchito in small towns and where oil companies had controlled everything and we did not have representative cultural leaders. It was really, really hard. So those are things. And you know, when the teachers tell you, you have to say your name a certain way and when they punish you for speaking Spanish, they make you feel like your family is not worthy, that you're not good enough to be part of this society. And so you have to figure out ways to overcome that feeling. And the weird thing is both of my parents went to college. My father went after the war and my mom went because she was there. She wanted to be a nurse. Imagine she went to college when women don't go to college and she was probably, I think, I mean, I have to say this, all women are the carriers of cultura, except probably in your case as well. But you know, she gave us so much confidence, so much capacity and so much understanding of what can be that we were able to overcome even the weirdest things through my high school years, the only Latino or Spanish speaking person or Mexicano that I knew through all of high school was the Spanish teacher, my mother, the school nurse, and the cafeteria workers. And school bus drivers, if we went on a school trip somewhere. So it was really, I mean, you could never be student council president, you could never be anything special. We did have a couple of people that became a cheerleader, one or two here or there. But we really had no power in those early communities. So imagine my discovery to come to college, go work at Hemisphere with other people who were just like me. And we all discovered that being bilingual, being Mexicana, was something really important and powerful because no one had ever told us that in high school. My father told us, but it didn't take root because it wasn't in the books. And he would say, but you come from this long legacy of family. And so that again, these are the things that drive the work that I do today on behalf of children. Well, I know, you know, there's, I'm sure, you know, when I hear you talk about not seeing teachers and people that look like you and that validate who you are and where you come from. I know that's, you know, it gets stuck inside of you. It gets, it confuses you if you're valued or not. And I would imagine that's one of the reasons why you invested and really dedicated your life to early childhood education. Because I know part of your work was working with young children developing centers that really, really nurtured the whole essence of the bilingual, bicultural child. Can you talk about that and why, why children? I will. And that was really by accident, I will tell you. In 1968, you know, that was an immensely historic year. That's when Martin Luther King was killed. It was Robert F. Kennedy. It was our hemisphere year as well. It's also the year that the students at the Edgewood School District did their walkout. I think you all were walking out in Los Angeles as well. So that summer, I thought the only thing I knew how to do was sew and design clothes because I had been so successful at it. And because I hadn't had opportunities for, you know, we didn't know in South Texas that you could grow up to be a physician or an architect. I would have loved to have been an architect, but it wasn't in my pathway. And my father insisted I had to go to a girl school, a Catholic girl school, because he was afraid to let me leave our home, which is a very Latino thing not to let your kids go away, especially your daughters. You want to keep them close by. But what happened was I thought I was going to be a fashion designer and I was going to go to New York. I was going to break away from everything. And that was the year that my friend said, there's something exciting going on over in Edgewood. You need to go with us. We're going to go and we're going to see if we can sign up for something. We want to be teachers. We said, we don't have teaching certificates. I had a home economics degree of which, by the way, one part is early childhood education. In those days, home economics covered from nutrition, interior design, home economics was the economics of management of money, all the way to, now this is really old school and then early childhood education because they thought, I guess they thought women's work was to raise children. So I went with that group to Edgewood school district when there was a new movement. The students had done a walkout. They had run for school board. They had taken over and they had hired this brilliant man named Dr. Cardenas. And I got hired because they needed teachers. It was the poorest school district in Texas. And that school district eventually became the court case, Rodriguez versus Texas that went all the way to the Supreme Court about school finance because in Texas, and I don't know how it is in California, but schools are supported by the property tax for the property that is in their neighborhood. And if you consider the word Edgewood, it was on the edge of town. It was there. The woods are out there. It's where the laborers lived. So there was no property value there, the little casitas. It was the poorest school district in the state of Texas. And that's where I began my teaching career. And so one of the things that happened was with this very, very creative superintendent, we landed a small grant, I think it was about 25,000, to start a program called Youth Tutoring Youth. And the idea was that older kids who had trouble reading or who had potential dropout issues, that those young people would be in charge of little kids, and they would be helping these little kids read books, do art activities, do their homework, whatever, they would become tutors for the little ones. And of course, we know that the ones who learn the most are the big kids, the ones who are at risk. And so that program really catapulted me into a different understanding of how children learn. They learn by doing, by being involved, by being immersed in what they're doing, not by just listening to somebody lecture to you or reading a book. And especially our kids, who had grown up in neighborhoods that were at risk, the way that they learned was when they sat with their father and helped to change a tire on a bicycle or when they were in the kitchen with their grandmother. So then I understood that that's how young kids learned. That's the best way to learn. And that built an entire new framework for me. I became a curriculum writer, very successfully created the first one of four national bilingual Head Start programs that were used, are sold like, I don't know, 60% of all of the Head Start programs, migrant Head Start were using that program. And then it just kept, you know, one thing led to another. I left, I worked with IDRA for five years, which was the organization born from that school, the school walkouts and the school finance lawsuits. And we worked on desegregating schools and talk about getting an understanding and a background of how our education system is manipulated to keep some of us from being successful, whether it's intentional or not. I mean, I'd like to give the people the benefit of the doubt. But now I know that a lot of it is intentional. We're being kept. So at one point, then I created my own school, a bilingual preschool. I had a contract with a hospital. We were open around the clock so that we could serve nurses. And you can't help but become immersed in family understanding when you are caring for their children and helping them through, you know, children are with adults, probably, I would say, less time with their family than they are in the school or learning environment because we all have to go to work. You're so lucky if you get to stay home and raise your child till they go to school. But it doesn't happen for everyone. So that's how that went. One of the things that made me a super fighter was that during the years that I had my private preschool, my early childhood center, we went all the way up to kindergarten, certified kindergarten. And the kids started with us at about six weeks to two months old somewhere in there. And they were with us till they were in the first grade. So, you know, in those days, nobody understood early childhood education because it was unheard of. So, we were licensed by the state, but we were managed by the city restaurant department because we serve food. So one day, we have a birthday party going on in the three-year-old classroom and the inspector arrives. They always come without telling you. It's a surprise visit, right? And he sees this party and he says, "Yes, the cake. That does not look like a store-bought cake. Why are you eating this? You're not supposed to bring in outside food to a certified restaurant." This is an early childhood center. It's not a restaurant. And he said, "You have a restaurant license." He took the cake, put it in the trash can, and kids were crying. The mother was having a fit. I went straight to the phone and I called his boss, who I happened to know very well. We visited, we talked, and then I started talking to the mayor. I would follow the mayor around and say, "Henry Cisneros, you are bringing all these people in new jobs to San Antonio and you haven't figured out where their children are going to be while their mothers are working." And I would tell him this over and over and he didn't understand because his wife was at home with their children. She didn't have to work. So that led to establishment of a commission for young children. And Henry appointed me and we became like siblings after all the fighting about, "Why are you paying attention to?" And we rewrote 13 city codes. Just the most amazing, silly things like the building code requires a handrail for steps that is three feet high, but little kids are two feet tall. At a time when the cities were not ready for this movement of women in the workforce and so having to learn how to build policy and everything, that changed me. And that also taught me how to be fierce and how to use solid facts and how to get an army around me. And so that really was a terrific time. But there was one more thing that happened, Jerry, that brought you back into my world as well. I don't know if you remember when the NAFTA agreement was made, North American Development Bank and Latino organizations were meeting with these officials of the government regularly to plan what Latinos were going to get out of this trade agreement with Mexico. And of course, it was all about clean water on the border, about jobs, about economic development, about maquiladoras, that kind of thing. And I went to one of the meetings. It was mostly men, I think Milma from Maldef might have been there at the time, but it was mostly men. It was the Chamber of Commerce. It was Maldef. It was Lulaq. It was all those big guys, right? And I walk in and I start talking about, "Hey, what about the kids that are selling chicle on the bridge and how about the birth defects from the contaminated water?" And they're like, "And who do you represent?" And I said, "Well, myself, you know, I'm here." And they literally told me, "You cannot come to this table unless you have a constituency." And I was like, "What do you mean? Well, you have to have an army behind you, voters. You don't have a voice by yourself. You're just a person testifying on your little issues." So that's when I called you and everybody, and we went to Washington. I think there were 40 organizations and we started creating what eventually became the National Latino Children's Agenda so that all of us across the country would be lobbying for the same things for our children. And it also put us back in the table because now we had a constituency. And there were many other parts of that, but that's what led eventually to the founding of the National Latino Children's Institute to carry out that agenda. And that's all history from there. And Día del Niño was born from that as well. That's right. And I know there's limited time in terms of us talking, but I don't want to brush over the significance of what you did there in terms of bringing the consciousness of our children and their health and their well-being and their rights into a statute and policy, and beginning to shift from what was the norm to what our families needed, what the mujeres needed, what the children needed, and then the national work that then began to create an awareness. Because I remember us being at conferences and meetings and people were not, they didn't have a consciousness of any of this. And so with that organization, we were able to bring some consciousness to the needs of children to the health and well-being. Because at that time, it wasn't even a consideration. So, I really want to acknowledge you for that. Thank you. You were a big part of it too, Jerry. I wouldn't have done that by myself. It was you and 30 other people that helped me move forward with that. I know I was the push behind it and the idea behind it, but not, but everybody helped make it happen. Yeah. Now, there was a lot of us there, but I just want to acknowledge you for being the impetus of that. And then we coalesced together and made beautiful things happen. And the other area that was really, really impactful, and I know it impacted me too because it really motivated me as a children's book writer, but then you began advocating for bilingual books and you became part of Scholastic, right? So that was, you know, these are like accidents, these things that lead you from one thing to the other. Well, you know, but what I realize now is our ancestors, you know, son traviesos, you know, they're metiches. They put you into stuff you didn't even plan for it. I was not planning on it. But all of a sudden, you're there. Yes, you're there. But then you have to decide because they can put it in front of you, but you decide whether you're going to battle it, whether you're going to, because it's not easy. Yeah. Because, you know, and let me just mention, you know, this because it seemed like an easy thing to, you know, what you were doing in terms of voicing the needs and all of that. But believe me, I remember the pushback and I remember it was hard. It was hard. And I remember the, you know, the discrimination and the racism. And I remember all of the struggles that we had just in doing this. But I know the whole aspect of, you know, books and literature that is bilingual became a major contribution of yours too. And of course, we were there with you. And I was at that time, you know, a first time author as well. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, the significance of, you know, bilingual books. And so all of these things were happening simultaneously. And I had been elected to the board of the National Association for Education of Young Children. But actually, again, I was just, I wrote, I applied because somebody suggested, they nominated me. And the next thing I know, I'm on the board of this gigantic worldwide organization. And because of that, at the same time, these very good people at Scholastic were creating a new parent child magazine. And they were creating an advisory board. And they wanted writers. And because the Scholastic at the time was their, you know, their mission, which is, you remember, it's, it's written on the carpet in their offices. It's that all children have access to books about themselves and, and to all books. And so because I was on that board, I was introduced to the folks at Scholastic. They asked me to serve as an advisor. I said, okay, sure. They wanted me to write articles for their magazine. And I said, well, I've never written a magazine article, but I'll try. And I wrote from my heart, how you reach children, how your teachers interact in the classroom, how parents have a role, and how you bring them into, and they were blown away. And coincidentally, about a year later, the state of Texas was going to create its first bilingual education curriculum for the pre-K. And so Scholastic decided to jump into it. They called me and they said, can you lead the writing team? And I was like, well, I'm busy doing this other stuff. We were doing "cara y corazón" at the time. And also we were doing other things that they said, no, please, we need someone like you, someone who knows Scholastic, and someone we trust will bring us the right combination of people. So the easiest way for me to think of running this nonprofit and writing this enormous curriculum was to hire like 10 people, each one a specialist, one in music, one in art, one in math, one who would be scientists, you know, and together, all of us created this magical curriculum called El Tayer, the early childhood workshop. And the darn thing sold 90% of the Texas public school pre-K programs. And then it went to California and it went to Florida. And it made a bunch of money. And we had gotten $100,000 to divide between 10 of us. And we spent a year working on it. And all of a sudden, the gift comes to me. Will you serve on the corporate board of directors? Like, what? What's that? I was on the board of Avon, say at the time, and I had been on a couple. I knew what a nonprofit board was. I didn't know corporate. They go, we'll fly you to New York five times a year for board meetings. We'll pay you and I was like, oh, okay, I can do that because I work for a nonprofit. I was making peanuts, right? So that's how I joined the board in a big surprise for me. Had no idea how corporations functioned. I was an educator and I found out that they needed an educator. They were all rich people on that board who own stock. And these board members, I mean, I would go to the board meeting and somebody would have flown in on their private jet and somebody else owned the Washington wizards. And there was me. I would fly in coach. I think it took me some years to figure out that I could ask for a first class ticket. I had no idea. Anyway, once I was there, then the next 10, 12 years as a board member, I would ask questions. I would ask hard questions of the board. And they did have new bilingual education programs going. And that's when I think we got you published and a few other Latino authors. But then there came a point where the rules changed. And I had already been on the board 14 years and the president, God bless him, he asked me to become an executive in the company rather than being on the board. And that was great. Because once I was an executive, I was director of Latino initiatives. And I could work with every department in the company to try to promote Latino books and Latino things. And I would take Latino authors on the road. And we created strategies. We did a million dollar program called Le Yseras. And it was pilot tested in San Antonio because we were trying to get books into libraries. San Antonio, imagine a city of two million people had only about 600 library cards at the time we started that project. And so we put up billboards. We did bus stops. We had cards on doors. This is marketing. This is something you don't learn as an educator. You learn it in corporate America. You learn how the public begins to think because I learned marketing working with Scholastic. Anyway, that did lead to eventually my setting up my own bookstore. When I left Scholastic, I had a bookstore called Tres Revecas. By the way, my grandmother, my mother and I were all Revecas. So Tres Revecas represents the passing of one, your first tradition is your name, Latino names. But the second is passing from one generation to another, the cultura. And so my tagline was 100 años cultivando tradiciones. And my mom did live to be 101 years old. So she made up for all that she heard mom had lost. Anyway, the bookstore became a place where we did readings, where we everything was cultural in that store. And I spent the next 10 years traveling back and forth to Mexico and bringing back things so you could fill your life with cultura. You could wear things that felt cultural like what I'm wearing right now. And I began exploring the traditions. One year, I did a project for Palo Alto College here in San Antonio with the Gates Foundation Grant to start a high school on the college campus. These were kids that reminded me of my original kids at Edgewood. They were potentially dropping out because they had family responsibilities. They were busy working as soon as they get out of school, they'd go to work and then work till midnight at Burger King or something. They took care of siblings. They took care of elitos. So these kids then were at risk of dropping out of school. But by being able to come to college, you now go to college Tuesday, Thursday or Monday, Wednesday, and you rearrange your schedule. And so we took these high school seniors. And by the time they finished, they had both a high school diploma and a two year associates degree. But that was hard, hard work because once again, we were breaking all the patterns and the public schools did not want to share their money with the college tuition. And we had to make arrangements for the state of Texas. It was complicated. Now it's all over the state. But being the pilot was hard. But when that ended, I took off to Mexico for about a month to just regenerate. It's become my happy place. And I'm going next week to celebrate my birthday because it just, that's what makes me happy is going. But while I was there, everywhere I would go, I would ask, and how did you learn my mom and senior me? And that's how I understood the passing down from one generation to the next, the knowledge, the skills, the joys, the artesania, and the recipes for our food, all of that. So those are the things that I embedded. I forgot to tell you all about Dia del Niño. But when I was running the National Latino Children's Institute, that was one of the things that emerged from that summit in San Antonio was to create a children's festival, a children's day, where we would just focus on the kids. The kids had asked for it, we gave it to them. And so Dia del Niño is now celebrated in about 200 communities around the United States. I'm forever grateful for all the people who helped me get it through the US Senate and to make it. And for the original sponsors, Olga Aros from McDonald's and Ford Motor Company, and all those people that helped us spread the word all over the country so we could have Dia del Niño everywhere. But the things we do at Dia del Niño are the things that came from that month that I spent in Mexico. We do repujado, we make ojos de Dios, we do mosaics, we make a community mural, you have 10 kids painting together. It's wonderful. We grind cacao so you can smell the chocolate and taste the raw cacao. We play games, we use Valeros, the Valero game from Mexico, we invented a game called Tira la Chancla and you have to throw it through these. It's really fun. And we have, of course, our music and our dance and we have adult dance teachers who teach you basic dance steps. I mean, it's a full day of thrilling things for children. And the great thing is now from that we started writing cultura cards. So during COVID we've got this teeny tiny little grant that said to put the arts into underserved communities. So we said, okay, let's take all of our artesanía activities that we're doing at Dia del Niño and we'll write a how-to and we will distribute those to parents with this little $3,000 grant. And so for every activity that our kids were doing, we would write a cultura card. On the front it has the history, the background. So you learn that the ojo de Dios is something that the Wicholes have done traditionally and how they hang it over the crib of their child and how they add different colors every year. So many things about each of these traditions. And then on the back of the card is the instructions. And that has catapulted us into the work that I'm doing today with Somos Culturimas. So we have identified over 200 topics that we're making cultura cards about and we're immersing them in our community. We're putting them into classrooms through student teachers with my friends at the universities because of course there's no textbooks that we can use. But for every single card we're adding the Texas essential knowledge and skills requirement. So no one can say you can't do an ojo de Dios in this classroom. That's not mathematic and we can show them, oh yes it is. Look at the geometric thing. Here's the Texas standards that are met by this activity. And then they send them home to the families and the families are doing these things as well. So next week when we go to Mexico we'll be studying the mage, the mystical mage. That's the name of our topic. And our next fundraiser for the Adel Niño will cover the mage plant and it's over 100 uses. It's not just for making tequila. It is for decorative. I don't know if you've seen the pita on the charro belts. There's even a study right now about Alzheimer's medication from the juices of the mage plant. And then there's fishing nets and ropes and all of the things that were part of our ancestry and that are still in use today. So that's how all these things led us to the work of today to make sure that we can pass coutura from one generation to the next. Wow. I mean it's amazing. And I'm sure even you in recollecting you even question, how did that happen? How did I do all of that? How did that come about? And I don't even know that I ever planned it. It just one thing led to another and you had to respond. So you respond this way, you respond and it just keeps you in the same direction. Yeah. Well I would say because when I met you, I felt your spirit and I felt your love for our people. And I think as long as you ground yourself there, the love for our people and you allow your spirit to guide you and then I met your mom. Your mom, there was no barriers for your mother. Yeah. She didn't see barriers. She made friends with everybody. Yeah. And you know, so with those three elements, it really guided you all along. And even though there was no strategic planning process for all these things you did, your ancestors were really pushing you ahead to really cultivate what our people needed, what our people have needed all along. And out of that have come really a legacy of so many beautiful things. You don't even realize how because of the work that you've done, of course, collectively with others, but with your guidance, how many people it has motivated, how many people it has influenced and how many lives you've changed. Our world is different because of the many things that you've done and the children and the teachers and what's being instructed is much better and more wholesome because of you and what you've led all these years. So I just want to publicly thank you and acknowledge you as a leader, as a wisdom keeper, as a trailblazer and appreciate you because I know, I know it wasn't easy. And I know you've confronted many things and I know there were those days because we sat together frustrated and angry and upset because of the we got the pushback so much. And Jerry, sometimes the pushback was from other Latinos who were afraid to step out or who were I don't know. Yeah. And I think sometimes we're seeking such validation that we'll do whatever in order to get the validation by the system, but you never did that. You never did that. And so now that we find ourselves a little bit older. We're talking 50 years later. Yeah, I know. You're right. I want to really just give you the opportunity as an elder and as somebody that carries a lot of wisdom to maybe share some consejos, some advice for that next generation that is coming behind us. What would you say to them? What would you tell them as a matter of consejos and advice as they move forward in their life? You know, I think one thing is you can't be led by public media and public opinions. You're going to have to find your own road always and you're most successful when you find your own road, not that you follow the trend that somebody else says for you. You need to know, you know, it's just like writing a high school graduation speech for somebody. But I really think that it's important for each of our young people to follow a path that makes them feel whole. Things that they believe in and stay strong to the things that were meaningful in their childhood. Reflect back to what was important and try to think positive. My mom was probably the most optimistic person I ever, ever met in my life. And she always looked for the good in everything. And I do remember one time I went through a training program where it was mostly men, like three women, and always we would be given these problems to solve. And they would just say, "Oh, come on. You don't know the answer. You've never been to Brazil. You never managed a factory. I would, you know the answer." And always I would come back with another solution. And I think that that's one of the things you always have to think, "What can you do next? What?" Okay, so somebody te pone la parada, then they stop you. Find another way to go around it and get moving to the next idea. Find another solution. Never let anybody put barriers in front of you that prevent you from reaching your dream and your goal. Don't give up. No terrages. I would say that's one of the most important guiding things. Never to stop. Never to give up. To look for other ways. I mean, if somebody stops you, look away to walk around the barrier. And I think the other thing that I saw that you did is you brought people around you and with you. Yeah, you can't do it by yourself. Somebody did teach me a long time ago that you get power by giving it away. The more you empower others and help them do better, the bigger the circle of support becomes, then everybody is working towards something. So you get power by giving it away. And giving it away means empowering others, teaching them, bringing them along, opening doors for them, fixing things when you can for them. That's how it works. And so as we sit here, what are you grateful for? I'm grateful for the hard times, Jerry. Is that song about what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? It's exactly it. We celebrated the walkout of Edgewood last Saturday with a movie created about it. And having worked in those schools with such limited resources and having this attitude of we can transform it completely, nobody's going to stop us from it. Working with very little, the hard stuff is what makes everything better. I just know it. You work through it, you feel bad, you doubt yourself, you feel like you're not going to get it. But if you keep on working through those things, eventually there's a solution on the other side. So I'm grateful for the hard times. They make me really appreciate all the easy stuff that came later. My mom always told us, if you do more than what you're paid for, then someday you will be paid for more than what you do. And now people pay me for my wisdom, I guess, my time and wisdom. So yeah, it's surprising. It's surprising. You know, my mom would say it another way, que toda se paga. Oh, again, I use that phrase all the time. I think I got it from you. Because I really believe that the hard work and the struggles and the perseverance that you led has blessed a lot of people. And what I'm hoping is that as you continue doing your work, because there's still a lot of work to do, that you will see the blessings and that you will experience the blessings. And you will know in your heart that you've done a really good job. You fulfilled your ancestors' dreams of really making people better. And so I just want to thank you for that. Wow, I don't even stop to think about it. I just keep doing it. Yeah, well, and that's why that's why that's why you are who you are. So thank you so much, Becky, for coming on and we could be talking for hours and hours. And so I want to, as we close today, just bring to mind to all the listeners here, this example and this legacy of the work and the sacrifice. And sometimes you don't see it. You're not going to see the fruition of that right away. And it's going to be hard and it's going to be a struggle. But when you do things in a good way, and you do it for the people in a good way, and you do it con ganas and with good balores, things always come out and the blessings come back to you and so many, so many other people. And so I want to really, really lift that up and have all the listeners think about that and share that with other people today. Because as we move forward, we need more people like Becky, that really are leaders that way and advocate for the children. Because when you're doing things for the children, the blessings will have generations of fruition. So thank you all very, very much. We have a beautiful blessed day. Que Dios te bendiga. Thank you. For more information about Healing Generations and the Healing Generations Institute, visit nationalcompadresnetwork.org and be sure to subscribe to stay up to date with our new releases.