American Graduate; Working Classroom

I came to my very first class and I fell in love with theater and I knew that I had to do this for the rest of my life. I remember being like, this is it. The arts give voice and the more our students develop their voices, the more educated they become. I have friends and my friends would be like, oh, you're such a theater kid, you're such a theater kid. And I'm like, okay, the schools in this country, not just in Albuquerque, are failing to educate students of color and low income students. I feel like we're a little different than most people and we're loud and we're spontaneous

and we're at least I am. Working classroom is a play on word. It means a classroom that works. It means room for the working class who are invisible these days. What we have in the United States is mass resignation. Whole communities of youth who have decided that there is no future for them. And when they are invisible or only portrayed as drug dealers or gang bangers or maids, that confirms that conclusion. The students who come to work in classroom are about half of them are recent immigrants. Many of them live in single parent homes. Almost all of them go to failing schools. They face all kinds of challenges in their life. You know, whether it's learning a new language, living with domestic violence, living with addiction.

So we have a program that offers these students maximum support. And in exchange, we expect them to be incredibly high achievers and no matter how much we expect of it, we underestimate them. If you are gay, if you are an immigrant, if you were undocumented, none of that matters here. What matters is what you contribute. And how wonderful is that? It burns? Yeah. It burns. Well, theater has helped me become who I am. Theater has always been like my therapy. Not that type of thing where you say and you're talking about your problems, but it's good and it's healthy for you to be able to express everything that you have going on inside of you. Look at me. Theater was a place where we could come and just act crazy. There is nothing you can do wrong in theater. So I liked feeling like I could never be wrong.

It's so liberating. It's a very freeing experience where you can just be whoever you want to be and that's whoever you want to be is okay. You get to escape yourself and experience new things, things that you never dreamt of. Who you would never think you could ever become or who you could ever be, just freeze my mind. And it's weird because it's like, you know, I'm like Sonya and I'm going through my day and I'm going through school and all this stuff, but then it's like I walk into a theater and it's like I feel like I finally have I'm me. It's just healthy to release your mind and release your soul, whatever you have going on inside of you. I grew up with, I lived in Mexico and my mom was a drug addict. My dad died when I was three years old and I never had a male figure in my life.

I never really had. My mother was always gone. Oh yeah, amiga, can't you just leave me a new foster? No. And then I was sexually abused when I was young, so at a very young age I was, I didn't know what to do. Can I just do it right? I was cut off from the world completely and, you know, it's like I'm walking through life and it's just like black, you know, and it's like, a young child doesn't know how to handle something like that. They don't know what to do. So I was walking around with this huge, I felt so guilty. I didn't know if I should tell somebody, I don't know if I needed to do something. So I mean, I always went to therapy. I went to therapy all of my life, you know, sit there, you talk to somebody, you say what you're feeling and you talk about it.

But then there's so much you can talk about and you need to begin a healing process. So that's where theater helped me. Your first day in PCT? No. See? Yeah, move on. So I had to do a lot of digging deep and really figuring out who I was and what I was going through in my struggles to really understand somebody else's struggles. So through that, working classroom helped me clean and just heal myself. That's right. If it's like you want to know, just remember it's a show, it's a show, it's a show. I wish people would realize how powerful theater or the arts can be and that's what people don't realize. They just see it as like, oh, you're just sitting there, you're saying some lines. No, no, I'm not, I'm not just sitting there saying some lines.

So it's a very powerful tool and people, I wish people could see that because it's done a lot for me. This program is part of American Graduate. This make it happen, a public media initiative made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.