Q. What is your favorite part about being Latina?
A. It’s a slightly complicated question for me, for the 80,000 plus children who are in foster care, and for the thousands of other young people in the juvenile justice system who have been separated from their families and are not being raised in culture and community but rather by government systems. My journey to identifying what I love about being Latina has been one of learning about my culture as an adult. Because most of the facilities I grew up in maintained an institutional culture and prohibited speaking Spanish, we did not have traditions around food, religion, or family. Our traditions were shaped by loneliness, instability, loss and trauma. As an adult, I’ve discovered that what I love about being Latina is the recognition of love and nurturing as powerful and transformative interventions.
Q. Now that you are a mom- how do you view culture, and what parts are essential for you to pass down?
A. I’ve worked to raise my children with a different connection to culture that embraces their history and pride in who they are. For me, the discrimination and stigma I faced growing up in systems shaped my ethnic identity. For my children, I want them to be grounded in knowing our ancestors overcame so much for them to exist, and they are not a stereotype, but literally the realization of the dreams of my great grandparents who overcame great obstacles to immigrate to this country from Mexico. My kids are teenagers, and my son just left for college- for them, culture is knowing that they are rooted in family and a mother who will move heaven and earth for them. For them, culture is also the chance to eat the many traditional yummy foods I’ve taught myself and my children to make. I’ve had the opportunity with my children to start over and redefine culture. I lost my Spanish while growing up in foster care, but my son has reclaimed it. If you’ve been privileged enough to grow up with a family that can maintain your connection to culture through language, that’s amazing. But watching my son learn and embrace the language by choice has been beautiful and inspirational for me.
Q. Tell us about a time when you were underestimated.
A. I feel like I walk through my life underestimated, and it is a quiet superpower. Sometimes, being underestimated has created an opportunity for me to quietly move significant change, and at other times it has fueled my determination to work incredibly hard to show myself what I am capable of doing. As just one example — during my childhood in foster care and juvenile detention facilities, I was put in special education classes because my living situation was so unstable. I was constantly in crisis from all the things happening in the facilities where I lived. At the time, people didn’t think I could graduate high school, let alone law school one day. However, my first stop after I got out of foster care was to take a GED assessment exam at a residential job training center for young adults. I scored the highest in the center in English and vocabulary because despite my formal school experience, I was a reader. Books were, and still are, my best friends and coping mechanisms. From there, I was put into an “Academic Olympics” competition, which (even though I lost) resulted in me slowly redefining myself as somebody intelligent who had something to contribute. All it took was somebody giving me a chance. People started looking at me differently, and I lived up to it. I enrolled in community college, then a four-year university, and later law school.
Q. Why law? And why the Youth Law Center?
A. Law is a powerful tool, and I wanted to harness that power to ensure that other teenagers didn’t have the kind of experiences I had in foster care and juvenile justice. I escaped the system and had opportunities, not by design, but by luck. If children have to be separated from their family for some period of time, we need to redesign systems so that they are surrounded by caring adults, connected to the community, and will be protected, safe, healthy, happy, and feel loved. Those can and should be the definition of justice for children. Before and after law school, I worked as a youth organizer, supporting teenagers in the system to translate their experiences into policy recommendations and reform. I had a lot of fun working in partnership with those young people to achieve legislative victories in California that became models for the rest of the country on how to provide what youth most need. However, after years of leading that work, the frustration of changing laws, but not seeing those reforms translate into changes in youth’s lives, led me to lawyering. I knew about the Youth Law Center because the incredibly fierce lawyers there had supported our efforts as youth organizers and advocates- teaching us the law, strategy, and effective advocacy. So I came “home” to the Youth Law Center to work as a lawyer to enforce the law and protect and advance the civil rights of young people who were system involved. I still sometimes can’t believe I now have the opportunity to lead this amazing organization- who invested so much in me as a young advocate.
Q. What exactly does the Youth Law Center do?
A. We are a national public interest law firm that advocates for system change for children and youth in foster care and juvenile justice systems. We use the law as a tool- and utilize impact litigation and movement lawyering, policy reform, field mobilization and creative collaborative change strategies to create better futures for children and youth. Our work involves stopping harm against children being raised in systems, but more importantly, it involves advancing opportunity. We want our young people to have opportunities to become happy and healthy 40-year-old adults, and use the law in every way possible to achieve that goal!
Q. You’ve been the Executive Director of the Youth Law Center for 11 years now. How have the conditions for young people who are system-involved changed during that time?
A. I think the world has gotten much harsher for children and youth generally. For those children who are not living with the protection and buffer of family, it is incredibly hard. Our children in the foster care and the juvenile justice system are often isolated from family and community that might insulate them from social volatility, political divide, racism, economic challenges, or climate disasters. They are truly experiencing a crisis that requires a community-wide urgent response. I advocate daily to ensure that decision makers and the public understand that family and community are the intervention and solution. That job has become even more critical in recent years. The pandemic put extreme pressure on government systems, and these systems are the ones responsible for the day-to-day needs of our children. That means we have to lean in and remind communities that these children belong to them. Our advocacy has changed to emphasize that.
Q. What do successful partnerships with communities look like?
A. In one of our most successful advocacy strategies, our Quality Parenting Initiative, we’ve shifted to a model where we train directly-impacted youth, families, community members and agency staff to be advocates for changing foster care systems to ensure every child, every day receives excellent parenting. To enable our communities to lead and sustain the movement for change, we have to build their power to do that work. We have now trained about 500 community champions on advocacy skills, child development, change management, strategic facilitation and issue spotting. These champions are now leading incredible advocacy for children and youth in their local communities. This is how we will win and build the new futures our youth deserve.
Q. How can we help the work you do?
A. There are so many ways! One easy way is to become our partner and donate to our organization, which enables us to immediately respond to children’s most pressing needs. Donations allowed us to spring into action in Tennessee recently, where terrible legislative proposals would have meant that very young children could be incarcerated for extended periods. Donations have also allowed us to get California to make a massive investment in community college opportunities for teens who are incarcerated, allowing them to have a different future. Another way to help is to step up and parent or mentor a young person in the system who needs a caring adult right now. You might even get to be a part of reunifying a family from your community! The need for caring adults is particularly pressing for Latino and other children of color, who often only have options to live outside their own communities.My own experience is testimony to the power that a caring adult offers. Amazing things can happen when you work with one young person to expose them to the world . So many of the children who need you are like me and have never had the opportunity to attend a symphony, go to the theater, attend a sports game, learn to garden or cook. You might be the magical force that plants a seed with a child that grows into a career as a composer, artist, horticulturist, or dreamer.
Q. Who is another Latina we should feature on Informada?
A. There are so many, but one comes to mind as formative to my own career trajectory and experience as a single, working Latina mother. Amagda Perez is a lawyer and champion for justice for low-income immigrants and other disenfranchised community members. As the Co-director of the UC Davis School of Law Immigration Law Clinic and Executive Director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Amagda is not only a force of nature for her community, but is the most inspiring example of a Latina woman who walks with kindness, integrity, and care. When I started law school, Amagda’s story of growing up as the child of farm workers and returning to fight for the legal rights of her community, inspired my career path. She also modeled how to be the best mother. She had just had her first baby, and she and her little one were inseparable in the hallways of our law school while she ran our immigration clinic. I’d see law students taking her baby for walks in a stroller in our hallways, and saw how important it is that we have a community to raise our child in. Amagda modeled for me that leadership for women looks like infusing love and care into everything we touch, even if that love sometimes needs to be forceful!