Our feminist youth engagement work and participatory research was situated within a program model, Public Achievement (PA), born from the brilliance of Black women educators and organizers during the Civil Rights Movement. Our movement ancestors paved the way and shared feminist theory and practices for social change across time, rooted in the knowing that education is a vehicle for freedom. Through education, all people, despite race, gender, or citizenship status, can be free. We have learned from their blueprint of “Freedom Schools,” community-based sites of liberatory learning where everyday people gain the skills to create change, to create our own liberatory education spaces with young people in and outside of school. The zine highlights our contemporary work to nourish youth voices and co-create liberatory education.
Within these pages we tell our story of the youth who envisioned, advocated for, and co-created their school and communities first-ever Ethnic Studies courses and programming. Our Freedom School grew beyond the original program model of PA and took the shape of a new collective named Youth-Led Ethnic Studies for Colorado (YES4CO). Ethnic Studies is liberatory education that centers BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) (her)stories and cultures while ideally cultivating youth agency and activism. Ethnic Studies has become part of our collective “why” and drives much of our youth engagement and activist work. Even as we are mobilized to take action for immigrant or LGBTQ+ rights, anti-racism work in schools, or youth mental health, we come back time and time again to the importance of reclaiming marginalized histories and culturally-affirming learning environments as key to our vision of more free and just futures. You will see that within these pages we engage in a form of artivism to re-conceive the story of “Our Ethnic Studies Freedom School” (Agnoletti et al., in press) to make it more accessible to a broader audience. In this zine we use the method of blackout poetry, a creative tool from our activist work to help the reader access more challenging academic content from Black and Chicana scholars. Blackout poetry serves as a powerful metaphor in our current sociopolitical reality where the voices of women of color are actively being erased and silenced. We also seek to use methods of storytelling that both reclaim feminist knowledge while creating a bridge that makes academic content more accessible to community and youth.
This guide utilizes a feminist research and knowledge creation method, plática, which our community used to shape our collective visions and action towards liberatory education. Plática, a Chicana feminist research method commonly associated with Guarjado and Guarjado[1] and Fierros and Delgado Bernal,[2] is a way to gather in collectives to share, reflect, and chat in ways that help us make sense of the world as we build knowledge and power. We see this zine as our own plática in motion, one that gathers lessons and practices for youth activism that we’ve learned across time and which we think would be helpful to others. Several pages of this zine are sourced from actual recorded pláticas that took place between 2023-2024 as we reflected on and continued to build community-based and youth-led Ethnic Studies offerings–we share summaries, often in the format of poetry, that captures the collective knowledge, dreams, and experiences of youth activists. We also experiment with our own version of plática methodology where the authors of this zine present ourselves autobiographically through pláticas with past, present, and future versions of ourselves; through this self-plática we seek to honor the many versions of ourselves who have participated in this intergenerational feminist engagement work across time.
This zine is a continuation of the (her)story that our collective, our constellation of social change makers, has already made. Publishing this part of our story is the next chapter in the big picture of our work which spans across now more than a decade and is part of a larger lineage of social change and youth activism. As the Mexican proverb states, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” We are the seeds of change.
Notes
[1] Francisco Guajardo & Miguel Guajardo, “The Power of Plática” Reflections 13, no. 1 (2013): 159-164.
[2] Cindy O. Fierros & Dolores Delgado Bernal, “VAMOS A PLATICAR: The Contours of Pláticas as Chicana/Latina Feminist Methodology,” Chicana/Latina Studies 15, no. 2 (2016): 98–121.
Author Biographies
Charla Agnoletti is a lifetime educator, youth organizer, and a mother-scholar-activist. She was born, raised, and still resides in Denver, Colorado, the land of the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapahoe Nations. She is a Denver Public Schools (DPS) graduate, and a former DPS secondary Language Arts teacher and Restorative Justice educator. She is white, of European American heritage, predominantly Italian American, with English, Irish and German ancestors. Charla is a second-generation college graduate and is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of immigrants to the United States. Charla is the former Faculty Director and Instructor for the Public Achievement program in the School of Education at CU Boulder, an internationally recognized program model for youth-led civic engagement. She co-founded and ran YES4CO (Youth-Led Ethnic Studies for Colorado) alongside her students who advocate for Ethnic Studies curriculum and programming in schools in their community. She is currently completing her dissertation for a PhD in Learning and Human Development with a concentration in Critical Studies in Education at the University of Colorado at Denver. In her 20 years of education, community organizing, and research she focuses on the role of youth voice and agency, especially youth of color and historically marginalized youth, in co-creating dignifying, and liberating education experiences which yield intergenerational social change and transformation.
Jordan Lee is a professional researcher in the Suding Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, collaborating with local land management agencies to develop local grasslands wildfire fuel models and understand what types of fire mitigation strategies are most effective in the grasslands-urban interface. She studied cultural geography and linguistics during her undergraduate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she researched the racialized history of the conservation field and stakeholder engagement along the Colorado River Basin in the WELS Lab. She also participated in CU Public Achievement, where she worked with a high school team to advocate for ethnic studies curriculum at their school district using the principals and tools of community organizing. Since graduating, she has worked as a wildland firefighter and fire effects monitor, travelling the country as a practitioner of wild, prescribed, and cultural fire. Jordan is interested in the interconnected nature of ecological and cultural stewardship, particularly as related to intentional fire, and working across different agencies and institutions in the name of ecological and social well-being. Outside of research, Jordan is a teacher with Chibi no Gakko, a Japanese-American heritage camp, and dabbles in ceramics, trail-running, and climbing.
Yamileth Salinas Del Val is a graduate student in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She graduated from CU Boulder in 2023 with double majors in Ethnic Studies and Leadership & Community Engagement, and minored in Sociology and Spanish.
Adriana Iturbe Esler (she/her/ella) is a proud daughter of immigrants. She first joined the program as a high school student and later returned as a Teaching Assistant with the Ethnic Studies team. Adriana’s writing centers stories of resilience, highlighting how cultural practices help students navigate, heal, and thrive both within and beyond academia.