I anxiously waited for my grandmother to pick me up. Humming and dancing to my father’s old-school music in the background. I was looking outside the front-room window. I saw three teenagers of color walking down the street. A black car had approached them. A gun emerged out of the driver-side window. All was still as the bullets flew and met the flesh of one of the male teenagers.
I screamed aloud as tears poured down my cheeks. My dad heard me and ran into the front room. He looked out the window. He screamed, “Go call 911!” He ran out the front door, picked up the male of color, and watched him take his last breath. He was only 16 and died in my father’s arms.
I was 7 years old and a witness to a gang-affiliated murder in a middle-class neighborhood.
Two deaths occurred that day. One young Navajo man departed this world while one young Mexican man would do life in prison. These men of color faced two systems that failed them – the education and criminal justice systems, which often intersect to create the perfect storm resulting in disproportionate rates of educational failure, incarceration and death of youth of color in the United States.
No one is immune, not even gated communities, to violence. Violence is the consequence of unchecked systems of power creating power and powerlessness, and oppressor and the oppressed.
I unexpectedly revisited this site of trauma when I attended the American Educational Research Conference and the session “The Pushouts,” a film that documents the life of Victor Rios, once a gang member and now a professor of sociology, and his collective work with Yo!Watts, a program for people ages 16 to 24 who did not finish high school.
“This is a story about young people who are left behind,” said Rios, who works alongside Rebeca Mireles Rios, an assistant professor of education, former mentees and Martin Flores, director of YO!Watts.
