Arts Education: "Social Justice Residency" and "Seeds of Resistance"

K-12 STEAM education

East LA San Gabriel Valley

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

We address the need to create connections for public high school youth to their community’s social justice history in order to create an understanding of what issues were addressed in the past, who addressed them, and what systemic problems remain. This understanding, conveyed through the arts in a transformative project-driven manner, empowers youth, making them stewards of their own community’s history, and giving them a role in the future of their community’s well-being.
Specifically the inspiring social justice history of East L.A. is generally not extensively taught, if at all, in East L.A.’s public high schools.
Most immediately, the current attacks on DEI initiatives plus cuts to vital federal departments/programs by the current administration are effecting public education, the arts, public information access, and funding. In L.A. various crises are also further effecting pubic education and arts education funding including the recent fires, and immigration crackdowns.

Based on the success of our intergenerational Social Justice Residencies (2021-25), the 2025-26 Social Justice Residency (SJR) will engage 4 East L.A. area community leaders in interviews conducted by 25-30 youth at Roosevelt High School’s Math, Science, and Technology Magnet Academy (MSTMA) in Boyle Heights.
In addition we will build new SJRs for the 2026-27 school year at 2 additional LAUSD or PUSD high schools.
In the words of the only theater teacher at MSTMA, the SJR “allows students to see the impact of the community leaders, feel connected to their own community, and envision themselves being agents of social change in the near future.”
Leaders will represent the social justice history of East L.A. Past leaders include Victoria Castro and Paula Crisostomo, educators and principal organizers for the 1968 East L.A. Student Walkouts; Quetzal Flores, cultural strategist, and founder/musical director for the East L.A. band Quetzal; and community activist Stephen Sass, founder of the Breed St. Shul renovation project.
Students will be mentored to collaboratively write 4 short plays based on the interviews. A culminating production, “Seeds of Resistance: Social Justice Plays by Youth Inspired by Community Leaders’ Stories,” will be performed for 300+ community members at Roosevelt. Community leaders will participate in a post-play panel responding to each play, providing additional insight on their social justice journeys, and engaging with the students and audience.

This SJR provides multiple ways to uplift and transform STUDENTS, COMMUNITY LEADERS and AUDIENCE, and provide healing in regards to past injustices, and stabilize the community by providing direct engagement with inspiring community leaders and their community-centered stories/histories.
It gives STUDENTS the opportunity to build community, become caretakers of their community history, and provides them powerful and direct examples of how to speak for themselves and their community.
Our COMMUNITY LEADERS are deeply impacted describing their experience as “emotionally moved to be honored,” and supportive of the project because it “empowers youth to be positive change makers,” and is “life-changing.”
Our COMMUNITY AUDIENCE receives the gift of theater that positively represents their communities’ social history, experience the students’ creative mettle, and engage with inspiring community leaders.
Funds will support the SJR at MSTMA and allow for expansion to 2 high schools in 26-27.