America Expects Saints, Not Teachers

preschool teacher showing frustration

As a kid, one of my favorite films involved Mexicans who counted. That movie, Stand and Deliver, was inspired by the real-life story of Jaime Escalante, a Bolivian immigrant who became a celebrated calculus teacher in East Los Angeles. The film rightly brought out the fangirl in me.


Many of Escalante’s students were stubborn Chicanos and I related; I was a Chicana and I hated algebra; history was my jam. The movie also featured Latine nerds, an archetype that was familiar but that I hadn’t seen on the big screen. Lastly, Escalante reminded me of my mom, Beatriz, a Mexican immigrant who taught public school in California.

As an adult, I now recognize the movie’s pernicious flaws.

Stereotypes are central to the plot of Stand and Deliver and while its ethnic caricatures are hard to miss – the cholo who feels pressured to hide his book smarts versus the cholo who refuses to learn – I didn’t understand how one of the movie’s primary stereotypes distorted my understanding of the teaching profession until I set foot in a classroom to instruct. Films like Stand and Deliver hurt educators by representing us as engaged in a morbidly transactional profession. In exchange for sacrificing our mental and physical health, we achieve hero status.

Martyrdom underwrites our goodness.

As the coronavirus continues to take lives, the lives of teachers and school staff included, the good-educator-as-unflinching-martyr trope is being used to shame those of us who express concerns about IRL instruction. Last month, New York Times’ columnist David Brooks penned a screed that all but accused educators critical of their working conditions of laziness, stupidity, and cowardice.

Brooks seems to prefer stoic teachers ready to become ill and die and I imagine the columnist watching Stand and Deliver, nodding in approval at a scene set during a night school session. Escalante, who has taken on a second job as an English instructor, shuffles about a classroom, clutching at his chest while he leads adult students through a set of language drills. The students seem unaware of their teacher’s distress and Escalante excuses himself. Once he’s out of their sight, he loses his composure. He sweats and pants, wheezing as he struggles to make his way down a desolate flight of stairs. Crumpling to the floor, Escalante presses his face against the seemingly cold cement as he experiences a heart attack.

(I imagine Brooks leaping to his feet to give a standing ovation! “That’s the spirit!” he screams.)

Several scenes later, Escalante convalesce in a hospital bed. His teenage son tells him, “Dad, the doctor says no stress. No job-related activity for at least a month.”

Escalante quips, “I want another doctor.”

The teacher urges his family to go home, and after they leave, he produces a pamphlet and a pen. He scribbles calculus notes and gives them to a nurse who smuggles the mathematical contraband to his students.

This plot point begs a question: If a heart attack is an unacceptable reason for a teacher to rest, what constitutes a justifiable reason?

Decapitation?

Not if the instructor who’s lost her head teaches home economics: Let her thread a needle!

Too many Americans hold teachers to the grotesque standards set by films that portray us as modern saints. I once evaluated myself according to such moral benchmarks and the first week that I taught ninth grade, I held myself to them. I developed a sore throat that I hoped could be cured by ignoring it. The pain overwhelmed me and speaking became torture. A student stared at me as I struggled to remain upright.

“Ms. Gurba,” she said, “you don’t look…good.”

“I’m fine,” I coughed. I taught the rest of the day while seated.

After school, I went to a clinic where I discovered I had strep throat and while I understood that I was infectious, I also understood that if I used sick days to recuperate, it was likely that parents, fellow faculty, administrators and even students might think me selfish. It’s not only the perfect attendance of students that’s celebrated. Teachers who come to work in spite of illness are often celebrated as well. They’re lauded for their selflessness. That’s what people have been conditioned to expect of teachers. No selfhood. Just selfless vibes.

I permitted myself one day off and agonized about it the entire time that I watched Jerry Springer.

In November of last year, CNN reported on a teacher who conducted elementary school lessons from her hospital bed following surgery. I found CNN’s fetishization of her convalescence cringeworthy but the news outlet, desperate to canonize her, placed her story in a section of its website titled “the Good Stuff.” The Good Stuff offers “headlines that make you smile” and its report on Stephany Hume characterized her as “inspiring,” “the type of teacher we all wished we’d had in elementary school.” Apparently, an ideal teacher is one whose identity is defined by unrelenting sacrifice: “…when the English language arts teacher of 20 years went to the hospital for an unexpected hernia surgery, she still made sure to read to her students at Sewell Elementary from her hospital bed — gown and all.”

Teachers are never not supposed to be giving.

We are supposed to give ourselves away until nothing remains.

Celebrating cases like Hume’s sets an absurd standard for teacher behavior, one that requires saintliness. This standard exists because, like nursing, teaching is a feminized profession with moral expectations dictated by fucked up gender norms. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the education of children has been treated as an “inherently ‘feminine’ pursuit” and data shows that the profession has grown increasingly gender segregated. 77 percent of public school teachers in the United States are women, with the “the average teacher [being] a 43-year-old white woman.”

The logic of misogyny drives the urgency with which assholes like Brooks call for teachers to return to IRL instruction. Because teachers are feminized, we’re expected to be unconcerned with our own well-being and wholly consumed with the well-being of strangers’ kids. This conceptualization falls within a framework theorized by philosopher Kate Manne, one that she terms the “human being/giver distinction.” According to this distinction, women function as givers and must conform to a set of obligations that are fundamentally economic. We must offer love, attention, affection and admiration as well as caregiving labor without the expectation of any of these moral goods or services in return. Here I will stress that the allocation of these moral goods and services is synonymous with the teaching profession.

I enjoy teaching but it’s not a religious vocation.

It’s a job, one that has become increasingly difficult to perform during the pandemic, with 77 percent of teachers reporting an increased work load compared with last year. Thanking us for our labor isn’t just unnecessary: it’s condescending. We work because we must, because under racial capitalism, we have been disciplined to the wage and racial capitalism that will punish us if we dare to critique the prevailing set of economic relations. The highest expression of gratitude to educators isn’t a litany of platitudes. Most of us would prefer to work in safe environments where our health is prioritized. In order to give that to teachers, Americans will have to relinquish their fetishization of us as selfless givers.

hands holding up yellow protest signs that say Hands Off Our Bodies
Photo Credit: Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash

Originally published in Common Dreams. Reprinted with permission.

The Latino electorate will prove decisive in securing reproductive freedom and abortion access through ballot measures around the country, particularly in states where Latinos are a significant portion of the electorate.

In November, abortion rights measures will appear on ballots across ten states, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and New York, where Latinos make up a significant portion of the electorate. For decades, pundits and politicians have recycled long-held misconceptions about Latino voters and abortion access, citing our conservative and religious beliefs.

Anti-abortion extremists have long fueled these misconceptions through misinformation and disinformation campaigns targeting Latino communities with egregious lies and inflammatory rhetoric about abortion. Yet, polling, focus groups, and direct interactions with Latino communities have debunked these outdated tropes.

The Latino electorate will prove decisive in securing reproductive freedom and abortion access through ballot measures around the country, particularly in states where Latinos are a significant portion of the electorate.

For Latinos, the freedom to decide, a pillar of our American democracy, is critical. Meanwhile, Latinos are being hit directly with anti-abortion efforts that take away that freedom such as the six-week abortion ban put into effect by the Florida Supreme Court and the 1864 abortion ban upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, people of color and Latinas have felt the impact of a lack of abortion access, an element of basic healthcare.

A 2023 report by the National Partnership for Women and Families estimated that nearly 6.5 million Latinas, or 42% of all Latinas of reproductive age in the country, live in a state that either had or was likely to ban abortion. Ironically, it will be abortion access and anti-choice efforts to restrict freedom of choice that will mobilize Latino voters this election.

In a poll conducted by three national reproductive justice organizations, 87% of Latinas named abortion and women’s rights as one of their top priorities as they head to the polls. Another battleground poll conducted by Somos PAC and BSP Research found that 61% of Latino registered voters expressed a more positive/favorable view of Kamala Harris after hearing that she will protect abortion rights, versus only 19% of Latinos who said they had a more negative view of Harris after hearing that.

In key states to secure the White House and both chambers, Latinos make up large chunks of the electorate: Arizona (25%), Colorado (15%), Florida (20%), Nevada (20%), and New York (12%). In the face of unprecedented attacks on basic healthcare access and targeted attempts by extremists to mislead and divide our community on this issue, this November Latinos will be key deciders on abortion access across the country.

Mari Urbina, Managing Director of Indivisible, Battleground Arizona Lead and former Harry Reid advisor.

Héctor Sánchez Barba is president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota (MFV).

This Viral Video Game Is Changing the Face of Voter Outreach

In 2024, voting campaigns have evolved greatly, to say the least. Creativity is now the name of the game and tongue-in-cheek humor is expertly leveraged to drive action. One example of that is Bop the Bigot, a revival of a viral game created in 2016 by Bazta Arpaio, an Arizona activist group, as part of a campaign to unseat Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio lost his re-election to Paul Penzone that year.

The game has now been updated for the current election cycle and relaunched by On Point Studios, with new features added to enable players to find out what’s on their ballot, confirm voter status, and register to vote.

Much like its former 2016 version, the game allows users to take out their political frustrations by virtually “bopping” GOP candidates in the head. It’s very similar to whack-a-mole, except the mole is replaced by former President Donald Trump, Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance, and Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, which is spearheading Project 2025.

cartoon renditions of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance around a Bop the Bigot logoPromotional image provided by On Point Studios.

B. Loewe, Director of On Point Studios, came up with the concept for this game when working as the Communications Director at Bazta Arpaio in 2016, and is the executive producer of this revamped version. In the first version of the game, Bop the Bigot players used a chancla (flip flop) to “bop” the characters, tapping into Latino culture by leaning on the childhood experience of being set right by a flying chancla from a fed-up mother or grandmother.

This year, the chancla is replaced by a more current element, a green coconut, referencing Kamala Harris’ coconut tree meme. There are also side characters like “the couch,” cat ladies, and more coconuts. All references to jokes about Vice-Presidential candidate Vance, or insults Vance has made about women on the campaign trail.

Another new addition is that Harris’ laugh is immortalized as the game-over sound effect, an unexpected detail that adds even more humor and levity to the game.

cartoon renditions of Donald Trump, Kevin Roberts, and J.D. Vance around a Bop the Bigot logoPromotional image provided by On Point Studios.

Bop the Bigot, which is playable on desktop and mobile, is intended not just as a way to vent political frustrations, but also as a tool for activism and securing voter engagement.

For example, the game supports the work of Mexican Neidi Dominguez Zamorano, Founding Executive Director of the non-profit organization Organized Power in Numbers by using the “game over” screen to prompt players to donate to it and support their efforts.

Organized Power in Numbers is focused on empowering workers in the South and Southwest of the U.S. through collective action and comprehensive campaigns. Their mission is to create a large-scale movement that challenges the status quo and advocates for workers' rights, and racial and economic justice.

Currently, Dominguez Zamorano is leading worker outreach to 2 million working-class voters in the South and Southwest through doorknocking, texting, and calls with the help of local groups in North Carolina, Arizona, New Mexico, and more.

“We have been blown away by the enthusiastic reception for the video game. We knew we wanted to be part of its creative approach because our movement needs more fun and laughter. We need more ways to connect with nuestra gente so we can feel joy among all the absurdity we witness every day,” Dominguez Zamorano shared with Luz Media via email.

“Our people are gente trabajadora and we deserve to feel uplifted even in our toughest moments. We are deeply involved in the South and Southwest so we know what’s at stake in this election and we’re happy this can be a resource to mobilize, raise spirits, and get out the vote," she concluded.

Dominguez Zamorano is a committed activist for immigrants and workers' rights, known for her strategist skills and expertise. She played a key role in the campaign to win DACA and has also held roles in major campaigns, including as Deputy National States Director for Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign. In addition to her work with Organized Power in Numbers, Dominguez Zamorano is serving as a Senior Advisor to Mijente’s Fuera Trump Initiative.

Grassroots efforts like these have taken on new life in 2024, with Bop the Bigot adding to the larger, ongoing fight against political apathy and disinformation. Just as it did during the 2016 race, the video game uses humor to soften the serious task at hand—getting people to the polls.

"We want the game to be a fun and comical outlet for anyone who’s been insulted, frustrated, or harmed by Trump in the past and everyone who is ready to move forward as a country after election day," explained Loewe in a press release. "The proposals in Project 2025 and the beliefs of Trump and Vance aren’t just weird, they’re truly harmful. We wanted to give people a humorous and peaceful way to smack down their racism and sexism. We hope it makes people laugh and also feel empowered and motivated to get to the polls on or before election day."

With a mix of satire, sharp political critique, and nostalgia, the game is a call to action. The upcoming election, which is getting closer by the minute, has sparked fierce activism and creative yet grounded initiatives like these aim to ensure voters are engaged, especially young Latinos and disenfranchised groups.