“Help build our people with us”
By TIM HERNANDEZ
When you’re a State Representative, you are given only five laws you can try to pass in a 120 day legislative session. That’s the rule: five bills, no more. During my term, I ran bills on gun violence prevention, immigrant rights, strengthening unions, cultural rights of students, and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline because I believe in a world that our ancestors fought for — one of worker power, student power, and community power against our oppressive social conditions.
Some of my bills passed into law: immigrants can now get driver’s licenses in Colorado; all students can wear their cultural items at graduation without retaliation from racist administrators; and justice-involved students have educational protections they didn’t have in school before. Some of my bills didn’t pass into law because not even Democrats want to ban assault weapons or “union-busting” trainings for all workers, yet. However, of the legislation I was proud to work on, the Chicana/o Special License Plate passing into law stands out for one reason: It means something to all of us.
As a kid who grew up in Colorado, I never got to learn about my history in school. I learned about it at home. My family are Chicanos who have deep roots in Pueblo, the UMAS EOP at CU-Boulder, and the Northside of Denver. My family has always held our identity closely and proudly. I will also never forget going to my first La Raza Youth Leadership Conference when I was 14 years old, studying my history in the program, and proudly chanting “Chicano Power!” alongside hundreds of students that looked like me. It changed me; I remember leaving Metro State knowing for the first time I wanted to be a teacher like the ones I met at my first Chicana/o youth leadership program.
I eventually got my degree in teaching English at UNC in Greeley, where I took classes in Chicana/o Studies. Dra. Priscilla Falcón changed my life when she said the words “we will win because our demographics demand it.” She opened my mind to the fact that I could be the teacher I wanted to be not just in a leadership program, but every day at school. I later taught Ethnic Studies, Latinx Literature, Latinx Leadership, and Chicana/o Studies at North High School in Denver Public Schools and in Aurora Public Schools. It was often that my students told me that my class was the only place that they learned about their own history and culture in school.
This remains a huge problem. Across the country, Latinos now constitute the largest nonwhite population in the United States. A majority of Denver Public Schools, Aurora Public Schools, Greeley District 6, and Pueblo School District 60 are Mexican, Chicano, and Latino students. Thus, if we constitute the demographic majority of public school students, but do not learn our culture and history at school, that is an intentional, systemic consequence.
I’ve taught on the weekends and throughout the summer in community programs like the La Raza Youth Leadership Conference, the Rita J. Martinez Youth Leadership Program, the Greeley Chicano Studies Conference, and the Aquetza Program at CU-Boulder. I personally witnessed how having individualized, intentional programs responsive to the needs of each respective community is imperative. Yet, right now, many of these programs rely on at-will and unreliable institutional grants, oil and gas funding, and large corporate awards. Thus, I determined that supporting grassroots programs with expanded, sustainable funding was the best path to enshrine the integrity of these programs as autonomous, power-building spaces that politicize and organize our community for the future– especially if we don’t get to learn our history in school in the first place.
The idea of the Chicana/o Special License Plate had been run before by Joe Salazar to support Latino nonprofits in the State of Colorado. It was strong, community-led legislation, but it fell short of passing. We decided to try again with a nonprofit partner ready and able to facilitate the funds to horizontally support and fund Chicana/o youth leadership programs in Colorado. I knew immediately who to call, my second grade teacher, Mrs. Denise Torrez, and the President of El Movimiento Sigue in Pueblo. I asked if El Movimiento Sigue would like to pass the bill with me. They agreed, and the work began.
Together, we collected above the mandatory 3,000 petition signatures in record time (4,000 signatures in 48 hours). Together, we organized statewide testimony that answered many ignorant questions by white legislators.
We counted votes, wrote applications, negotiated with the DMV, and built statewide community support and awareness about the plate and its ability to help support our youth for over a year. Together, we also pondered the ethical questions about the state of Colorado using prison labor to manufacture license plates because we as advocates universally aligned against Colorado’s prison labor system. Yet, after several conversations, we decided the right path was to also ask those incarcerated themselves the ethical question we were considering: where should we manufacture the Chicana/o License plate?
To get this answer, we visited the tag plant facility in Cañon City, spoke with incarcerated workers, and heard their concerns and perspectives over several meetings. While we as advocates still do not agree with the labor practices of the Colorado Department of Corrections, it was clear from the incarcerated workers we spoke to that the manufacturing of license plates remains a coveted, important, and fulfilling job for many of the incarcerated workers in Cañon City. We decided that our abolition work would not achieve anything silencing the experiences of incarcerated people. While we remain aligned against the prison-industrial complex, who would we be if we neglected the voices of incarcerated workers to better align with our own personal values? We chose to instead center the voices of incarcerated people–despite our personal reservations about where the plate would be manufactured.
Together, we listened to the incarcerated workers we spoke to, who said to us, “My family calls me every time they see a new plate on the road telling me they’ve seen my work and that they’re proud of me,” and “Don’t cut us out — we want to be a part of this for our community, too.” Together, El Movimiento Sigue and I agreed to develop long-lasting, sustainable solutions to support incarcerated workers instead of abandoning the workers for the sake of principle with no real solution to our collective complicity in prison labor in sight. Together, we invite anybody reading this who is interested in the abolitionist work of supporting incarcerated workers who make each plate to reach out and build with us.
Renown artist Leo Tanguma (left) and Tim Hernandez met with a group of artists who contributed their talents to the project.
Don’t get me wrong: a license plate is only a symbol. Symbols and symbolic victories will not be enough to save us from the jaws of poverty, violence, corporate power, and white supremacy in a state that denies us housing, education, and healthcare for all. Symbols do, however, inspire us to think, study, and build differently for ourselves. The Chicana/o Special License Plate is a symbol that invites us to invest in the cultural education of our young people, like was once done for me. It invites us to put our money where our mouth is and support Chicana/o organizations across our state, like El Movimiento Sigue. And, the Chicana/o Special License Plate invites our young people to one day achieve more than just symbolic victories for our community — to build a world without prisons, exploitation, oppression, or capitalism at all.
