Reflections on Scholarship and Equity-Minded Teaching at Río Hondo College and Los Angeles Trade–Technical College

Author: Santiago Andrés Garcia, Los Angeles Trade–Technical College

The invitation to contribute an essay to this anthology was met with positive emotions and seriousness to write about fourteen years of teaching and reflect on the current state of our community college students. With that in mind, I shine a light on the teaching practices and humanistic philosophies that have allowed a place of storytelling for students of color historically marginalized by the US schooling system. This daily act of looking into the mirror occurs in the current stream of a student mental health crisis, and attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)^[1]. Thus, how we reflect on our teaching and scholarship is a question among educators actively working to build classroom and community capacity. Here, I document a mix of reflections and equitable teaching practices across two community colleges. In thinking about equity, I align with the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education, which writes, “Equity-minded individuals are aware of the socio-historical context of exclusionary practices and racism in higher education and the impact of power asymmetries on opportunities and outcomes, particularly for African Americans, Latinas/os, and Native Americans” (Pathways 18). Lastly, to situate my own unique story, I write from the lens of a faculty member of color and, more so, from the perspective of an Indigenous Chicano anthropologist.^[2]

This essay is divided into three sections. In the first section, I reflect on my time at Río Hondo College in Whittier, California, where I got to know students, their values, and their potential to meet learning outcomes. A brief history of the Mesoamerican Clay-Figurine Project is woven into the passages, as this was central to my teacher training and scholarship.^[3] In the second section, I dive into some notions of anthropology and how an eye for the human body shaped my love for teaching at Los Angeles Trade–Technical College (LA Trade-Tech), one of ten colleges in the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD). I cite my initial experiences at LA Trade-Tech as evidence of a need to teach from a place of love, compassion, and patience. To uphold this message, I share the experiences of three students who overcame unfortunate circumstances with varying outcomes. In the final section, I look toward our academic freedom and culturally relevant teaching as a methodology to intervene against the ongoing attacks and mental health challenges students face. Thoughts and questions about how to serve a dynamically diverse community of students at LA Trade-Tech close out the essay.

Learning to Teach at Río Hondo Community College

In 2011, I was hired to teach Humanities 125: Introduction to Mexican Culture at Río Hondo College part-time. I had zero teaching experience—simply an anthropology degree specializing in ancient Mesoamerica and a history of public service as a student activist. Many of my classmates of color and I had been raised in homes where hardships were constant, and even though we did not have much, we found wealth in our struggle for liberation. The crossroads of teaching and Mesoamerica came together at Río Hondo, where most students sustain family ties to Mexico and Central America and bring a wealth of unique knowledge into the classroom. A paper coauthored with students lamented how many of us had seemingly become fragmented from our traditional ways but showed that pathways that entail food, ritual, language, and sacred sites exist that make us genuinely whole and free (Garcia et al. 145–52). At Río Hondo, I fell in love with the roll-up-your-sleeves approach of community college teaching and the genuine rapport that surfaces when teachers and students strike an equilibrium. Inspired back then, and to this day, I gravitated to the work of Silvia E. Toscano, a seasoned community college professor at Pasadena City College, who modeled “teaching as a healing craft” (Toscano Villanueva 23) to establish reciprocal partnerships with students on and off campus.^[4]

In 2014, I began the Mesoamerican Clay-Figurine Project. I brought clay into the classroom to create a material record of students’ stories while meeting the learning outcomes for a humanities class. Referencing Mesoamerican codices, students of mixed African, Mexican, and Central American ancestry made small-scale clay figurines of themselves alongside ancient ways Native to them (fig. 1). As mentioned, this method gave rise to living Indigenous knowledge where food, health, and a sense of well-being became central to learning and becoming. The clay work was accompanied by self-reflective writing assignments designed to improve literacy and encourage storytelling. During my first years of teaching, I spent long hours listening to the experiences of students, which would develop into a culturally relevant, anti-racist, queer-affirming, and trauma-informed style of teaching. As I look back and reflect, I see an anomaly that took shape: COVID-19-like diseases and their symptoms had slowly affected learning. I ask myself, Why were healthy students checking in from hospitals with recurring sickness?

In 2019, the clay-figurine project received funding from ACLS and the Mellon Foundation to help purchase classroom materials, pay for research expenses, and hire student assistants. As in previous years, students continued to tell their stories through clay work and reflective writing. It became apparent that equity would be accompanied by what Curtis Acosta calls “developing a critical consciousness in students,” a four-part model that moves from self-reflection to the acquisition of “precious knowledge,” followed by the “will to act,” and then “transformation” (37–38). Meanwhile, the scholarship had been promising, and continuous clay projects and the meeting of learning outcomes proved that students had achieved academic milestones, valued themselves more, and had begun their unique healing journeys. One theme that would emerge throughout my early teaching days is the unattended connections teachers and students have with disease and medicine; a trait that is often generated while caregiving, training in medicine, or as a victim of prolonged illness and violence (Garcia 382). It turned out to be the case that the crossroads of human health and learning would play out during the COVID-19 pandemic, when students in the Los Angeles region lost family members on a significant scale.

Looking back on this journey of public service, I have learned that the most pressing concerns around community college instruction relate to building positive healing models. Concerning the ethnic studies project, Priscilla Yvette Hernandez and I wrote,

During the ensuing chaos [of the pandemic], large groups of Southern California activists, organizers, and educators scrambled to care for the severely sick, the vulnerable, and for themselves. Under COVID, the poor health resulting from generations of chronic stress and disease, substance addictions, homelessness, and illness unique to the movimiento worsened; we rapidly lost relatives young and old. COVID taught us that the significant questions of our era are about human health, housing, and medicine. If Ethnic Studies are about building power, saving lives, and developing a critical consciousness, then we must all learn how to be cured by the serpent and not killed by it. (Garcia and Hernandez 123)

“To be cured by the serpent and not killed by it” emanates from a favored tale of Native American philosophy concerning the healing power of snakes but also the havoc they cause when not handled carefully. For example, in Indigenous Chicana/o literature, Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent is a manifestation of time, space, and creation. As a humanities teacher, he spread arts, crafts, and medicine (Garcia and Márquez 16). However, Quetzalcoatl is overrun by fatigue, undermines his family, develops arrogance, and is overcome by his seductions. Those familiar with the story know that Quetzalcoatl’s labor for the community cost him his life, and his often-told journey reminds us of the intersections of teaching, health, and social justice, of how equity-minded teachers lament the exclusionary practices and racism endured. Take for example, Elisa Facio and Irene Lara’s anthology Fleshing the Spirit, where a cohort of Indigenous Latinx and Chicanx authors describe reclaiming the childhood spirit as the first step in resolving symptoms related to early traumatic experiences. These include but are not limited to unequal access to health care, living in unsafe housing, child abuse, and police brutality. Faculty members of color stem from and live in the same communities as their students, and we experience the same violence. Even simply asking for transparency, and shared governance in institutions comes at the price of a strange psychological worry, which we endure regularly.

Efforts to advance DEI at Río Hondo College were boosted in 2022 when the Mesoamerican Clay-Figurine Project received an ACLS/NEH Sustaining Public Engagement Grant. Working alongside my colleague Lucha Arévalo^[5] from Chicanx studies, the Association of Raza Educators, and Eastside Café in El Sereno, we developed a program grounded in community knowledge and collaboration. In the short course of one year, we organized three public conferences, some in person and some through Zoom: Encuentro I (Racial Equity and Social Justice among School Youth and Communities), Encuentro II (Community Health and Medicine among Urban School Youth, Teachers, and Communities in a Post-COVID-19 World), and Encuentro III (Indigenous Sovereignty in the Classroom and Community). The conferences were followed by additional meetings, one on traditional medicine and one on modern human health. When it was all said and done, the grant work produced (1) a series of equity-minded educational videos, (2) the fair compensation of student and community consultants, and (3) the building and sustainment of partnerships with teachers, students, and community members outside of campus. Our project website contains the training videos, and the lessons we learned while organizing one year of public engagement are in preparation for a forthcoming article.

Anthropology at LA Trade-Tech

In the summer of 2023, I was hired by LA Trade-Tech to teach anthropology on a full-time, tenure-track basis. The following are my initial reflections on a new campus in a district where teaching and DEI naturally merge. I begin with some common notions of anthropology, the field I trained in, and its impact on my teaching practice.

The field of anthropology in the United States has racist underpinnings (Beliso–De Jesús et al. 418). Its founder, Franz Boas, and his students, maintained programs that unethically collected the biological data of Black people, Indigenous Peoples, and migrant populations, mainly to disprove ideas of racial inferiority or in a last attempt to save the other from so-called extinction. For much of the twentieth century, predominantly white male voices dominated the field, where white, full-time faculty members made up the majority (Brodkin et al. 554). I am uncertain whether this equity concern exists within the anthropology departments at LACCD, and, reflecting on this, I am confident this knowledge may help conceptualize the insights of faculty members of color that often go missing. These lenses could lend themselves to enriching and reestablishing connections once held between students and teachers from the same community. At any rate, I am aware of white anthropology faculty members on the front lines building anti-racist policies and course content, and some of the brightest minds I know of are anthropologists of mixed backgrounds working in a ground-zero context. To be fair, anthropology is one of the few disciplines where a theoretical understanding of the field data might be constructed on-site. This approach runs parallel to the view that the daily activities of humans remain vital to understanding the inner workings of society. Moreover, the field’s early fascination with healing traditions leaves it with a keen sense of the human body and the natural environment unseen in different fields (fig. 2). When applied with an ethical lens and in collaboration with people of color, these methods lead to a positive understanding of people and society and in return help to solve modern problems.

Fig. 2. Anthropology 101 at LA Trade-Tech: learning the human skeletal system, spring 2024. Photo by author. Shared with permission.

There is a reality at LA Trade-Tech that is unapologetic, uncensored, and in your face. The campus is located on the outskirts of South Central, home to one of the country’s largest unhoused populations, where violence and drug abuse are public occurrences. One observes the city’s shortfalls in an overflow of street waste, unattended infrastructure, and lack of opportunities. Our student population is almost entirely Black and Brown students from downtown and greater Los Angeles; its remaining population is either Asian or white. The campus has a one-hundred-year history of training students in the trade fields of culinary arts, cosmetology, plumbing, and construction. Since day one at LA Trade-Tech, I knew my teaching strategies would be specific to a pedagogy of love, compassion, and patience while tending to the high academic standards of anthropology. In thinking about this approach, I have bell hooks in mind, who wrote, “[T]each in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students” (13), and “professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom” (21), and ultimately championed the teaching of self-actualization as a tool for students to live whole and deep lives. This method would serve as an intervention for LA students amid many challenges. And, in thinking about the work of bell hooks and Silvia E. Toscano, I could see how they spiral with their fingers back to a human-centered place of healing and learning.

In my first semester of Anthropology 101, my student Ramon (a pseudonym), a light-skinned Chicano who always wore a gold chain with the Holy Cross, sat in the front row. I could tell many issues challenged Ramon, but I never interrogated him about his life, something that I have done with students in the past. Ramon’s symptoms did all the speaking. He often had puffy eyes, so I knew he did not sleep well. Occasionally, he carried a strong cannabis odor, indicative of self-medicating. He appeared thin for his stature, suggesting that he often skipped meals. Despite these signs, he was polite and delightful. Ramon was habitually tardy, and, despite recording multiple absences, I was open to accepting his late assignments. School was his priority, but so was his job as a valet driver and his relationship with his partner. In the end, Ramon earned an A in class while receiving bits and pieces of the love, compassion, and patience I carry from home. I am a dad of three; my oldest daughter is twenty-five years of age, so it becomes easy to weave teaching with skills born from parenting.

Ramon’s story is a common one among college students of LACCD. In a 2015 article, our now-retired president and chancellor Francisco C. Rodriquez wrote that our students were indeed “riddled with challenges and opportunities” (15), citing poverty and poor performance by students as “simply unacceptable” (22). It is accurate that there is an elevated state of awareness at LA Trade-Tech when compared to other colleges I serve. And, according to Rodriguez, there must be a level of courage, conviction, and coraje (valor and boldness) to want to change things that are not right. Ramon held on in the class, and we remained in contact, but his two classmates sitting next to him in the front did not make it. I communicated with these students, but, in the end, their circumstances fell in the way. Reyna (a pseudonym), for example, sent me a message about her decision to drop the class and return when she found herself in a “better” mental state (fig. 3). Although she did not relay any specifics, I responded, “DO NOT DROP. . . . I’ll get back to you later today.” I never heard back from her. Malcolm (a pseudonym), the other student, also dropped the course when the search for a place to live began interfering with his class attendance. While writing this essay, I asked Malcolm if I could share his story with readers, and he agreed, so I include a screenshot of our initial text exchange (fig. 4).

Ramon, Reyna, and Malcolm relay messages about what daily life entails for Los Angeles community college students. There is something more, however: all three demonstrated exemplary conscientiousness while becoming well-trained professionals and keen students. Truly, there are no words to describe the mixed emotions I have felt at LA Trade-Tech, from raw to surreal, sacred, and heart-wrenching. Not withholding, I would like to add more to the topic. While closing out this essay, I emailed Irene Monica Sanchez-Diaz, a public scholar and poet, and ethnic studies professor at San Bernardino Valley College (fig. 5); she had the following to say when I asked her to share about the most significant challenges faced by her students:

I have seen through teaching Ethnic Studies at the high school level and now in the community college that the most impactful experiences in the classroom for students are the ones where they get to connect and discuss topics in the community with their peers, and by the end of the class, it feels like we created our own small classroom community that students tell me does not always happen in other courses. I also see that through discussing local issues students can connect to the material they are learning about where they are from or live. It allows them to also connect the issues we discuss, from the past to the present, and then we think of ways we can collectively create a better future for all. This does not have to be unique to what I teach; I think these types of connections can be fostered in many classrooms in many different fields. Coming off distance learning in the pandemic I think creating more opportunities to genuinely connect on a human level is crucial to student learning and success.

Irene’s testimony reiterates the necessity of learning in real time and building relationships with students and outside communities. It points to a genuine place of learning created when teachers, peers, and daily life come together. I find it imperative to promote cross-campus interactions and reciprocity now more than ever after surfacing from the sheltered learning of the pandemic, and ongoing attacks. Indeed, schools are not homes, but for many college students they are the only places where they will interact with caring adults in a positive environment. Every semester, I meet students who rely on the campus for food, shelter, and community, and see it as a place of serene value. As a collective, community college students and faculty embody urgent and emerging messages of society, and rigorous humanistic knowledge.

Reflections and Thoughts on Equity-Minded Teaching

Community college students are at risk of failing to meet the rigors of learning when compared to their university classmates (Edman et al. 338–340). Many are undocumented and without resources, balance school with work and family, and it is projected that such challenges will continue to impact students during their formative years (Toscano Villanueva 25–35). Since community colleges accept students of all learning levels, many traverse the system with below-average reading, writing, and math skills (Garcia 382–383; Sanchez 17–25). These factors may be compounded by childhood trauma, financial worries, and unseen illnesses taking form as our world becomes increasingly cramped and violent (Garcia 382–383; Sanchez 163–166). In intervening, state resolutions have allowed faculty members the academic freedom to assist learning outcomes when they become unattainable due to crisis. One of many resolutions of the California Community Colleges Board of Governors reads, “RESOLVED that a trauma-informed student engagement approach is key to improving our classroom climates and campus overall . . . .”^[6] This rationale led me to model clay in the classroom to tend to the self-esteem of students who had become removed from their core cultural values, aspirations, and traditional forms of becoming. This approach said it was an act of equity to accept late assignments when students had to balance work, health, and family. Furthermore, this model allowed words of care and concern to be delivered to students in a loving form, hoping to strike a fire in their learning at school and well-being elsewhere.

To arrive at some final thoughts, I put my best foot forward and reflect on the following questions to improve my practice and encourage faculty, counselors, and administrators of the community colleges to do the same in their own capacity. What shall an Indigenous anthropology of color look like at LA Trade-Tech? How shall I best serve a majority Black student body whose history of intellectual contributions and activism run deep in the surrounding community? What would instruction, scholarship, and collegiality look like in a place of the academy that does nothing like the academy, where the focus is not solely on teaching and training but on positive human health as well-being? Then, there is the question of privilege that comes with a tenure-track position and the resources afforded to full-time faculty. How shall I use my newfound status? And, if anthropology as a discipline is equipped to solve problems of our society, as stated earlier, then how will anthropology at LA Trade-Tech differ from what anthropology programs are doing at Los Angeles Harbor College or East Los Angeles College? What innovative coursework will prevail in a small but growing program like ours? How can LA Trade-Tech foster and sustain positive relationships with our local Native American community, the Gabrielino, Kizh, and Tongva Nations? In teaching, I aim to pass on to students the tools of liberation passed to me while seeding a hunger for success, lifelong learning, and reciprocity.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge all students who have allowed me to share their stories and experiences over fourteen years, as well as the ACLS, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation for supporting our teaching, learning, and scholarship.

Works Cited

Acosta, Curtis. “Developing Critical Consciousness: Resistance Literature in a Chicano Literature Class.” The English Journal, vol. 97, no. 2, 2007, pp. 36–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30046786.

Beliso–De Jesús, Aisha M., et al. “White Supremacy and the Making of Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 52, 2023, pp. 417–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-040400.

Brodkin, Karen, et al. “Anthropology as White Public Space?” American Anthropologist, vol. 113, no. 4, 2011, pp. 545–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01368.x.

Edman, Jeanne L., et al. “Trauma and Psychological Distress among Ethnically Diverse Community College Students.” Community College Journal of Research and Practice, vol. 40, no. 4, 2015, pp. 335–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/10668926.2015.1065211.

Facio, Elisa, and Irene Lara, editors. Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives. U of Arizona P, 2014. Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/28897.

Garcia, Santiago Andrés. “Contesting Trauma and Violence through Indigeneity and a Decolonizing Pedagogy at Rio Hondo Community College.” Journal of Latinos and Education, vol. 20, no. 4, 2021, pp. 376–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348431.2019.1603749.

Garcia, Santiago Andrés, and Priscilla Yvette Hernandez. “Animal Artifacts and Narratives of the Mesoamerican Clay-Figurine Project.” Ethnic Studies Pedagogies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2023, pp. 109–24, www.ethnicstudiespedagogies.org/ARCHIVES/.

Garcia, Santiago Andrés, and Claudia Itzel Márquez. “Cultivating Positive Health, Learning, and Community: The Return of Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl and the Venus Star.” Genealogy, vol. 5, no. 2, 2021, article 53, pp. 1–21. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genealogy5020053.

Garcia, Santiago Andrés, et al. “A Medical Archaeopedagogy of the Human Body as a Trauma-Informed Teaching Strategy for Indigenous Mexican-American students.” Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 2018, pp. 128–56. https://doi.org/10.24974/amae.12.1.388.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700280.

Pathways, Partnerships, and Progress: Transforming a Community College. Center for Urban Education, Rossier School of Education, U of Southern California / Los Angeles Trade–Technical College, 2017, cue.usc.edu/pathways-partnerships-report/.

Rodriguez, Francisco C. “Why Diversity and Equity Matter: Reflections from a Community College President.” New Directions for Community Colleges, vol. 2015, no. 172, 2015, pp. 15–24. Wiley Online Library, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cc.20160.

Sanchez, Irene Monica. Testimonios of Transformation: The Experiences of Latina/o Community College Students in Washington State Redefining Achievement and Success. 2015. U of Washington, PhD dissertation. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/35179.

Sanchez-Diaz, Irene Monica. Email to the author. 22 Aug. 2024.

Toscano Villanueva, Silvia. “Teaching as a Healing Craft: Decolonizing the Classroom and Creating Spaces of Hopeful Resistance through Chicano-Indigenous Pedagogical Praxis.” The Urban Review, vol. 45, no. 1, 2013, pp. 23–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-012-0222-5.

1. On January 20^th, 2025, the current administration, through an executive order, targeted for termination all DEI practices and policies of the government established previously to repair the damage done to generations of individuals, and groups, denied equal educational opportunities in the United States for much of the 20^th Century. ↑

2. An Indigenous Chicano anthropological lens intersects daily human activity, behavior, and the environment as a cohesive body of work. It is informed by the intellectual traditions of ancient Mexican culture and living Indigenous knowledge of Mesoamerica and engages the personal, academic, and political through ethical methodologies. ↑

3. The project website, mesofigurineproject.org, contains a fuller project history and description, an archive of student clay figurines and related narratives, project articles, and public engagement videos. ↑

4. In 2019, I sat down with Toscano at Pasadena City College to get a closer understanding of teaching as a healing craft. See the recorded session at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilgMn8KBLJ4&t=717s. ↑

5. See Arévalo’s contribution in this anthology concerning the ongoing work to critically engage historically marginalized students at Río Hondo College. ↑

6. This important resolution passed March 17, 2022, can be read and downloaded from the following website: https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/cccchan/Board.nsf/Public# Simply type in the search phrase Board of Governors Student Mental Health Resolution. ↑