Power Autobiography: Mayra Canizales Cruz
Mayra Canizales Cruz, Founding Partner
“Youth, Identity and Power,” a book by Dr. Carlos Muñoz, Jr., was handed to me in middle school, forever changing me. I began reading critical race theory at 11 years old, and I never stopped - my entire world was shaped by the authors and professors my older sisters were studying at UC Berkeley. At the end of every semester, they would hand over their old books, and I would pour over them. My power lies in being the youngest of three sisters, the only one in my family with the coveted blue American passport and the silent, unearned privilege it carried within my community.
I was born into a one-bedroom apartment in the heart of the San Francisco Mission District, shared by 11 family members who had recently immigrated from Nicaragua. The real power was my parents’ hustle and inability to settle for anything less than their wildest dreams, no matter how many toilets they would have to scrub. As new immigrants who barely spoke English, they moved their three daughters. They took many other families into their home in Hayward, CA, where my neighbors were Japanese, White, Black, Hawaiian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Mexican, among many other cultures. Hayward, the “Heart of the Bay,” is known to be one of the country's most diverse cities. This diversity among a working and blue-collar population taught me the power of allyship in the shared struggle.
On the weekends, my childhood consisted of accompanying my mother to the hills to help clean beautiful homes. Throughout high school, my evenings involved accompanying her into cold office/factory buildings, where I took out all the garbage and vacuumed. Admittedly, I didn’t always do a great job as I was rushing to be able to finish homework and complete college and scholarship applications. This family experience went on for years, and it was not rare to come home for the weekend from UC Berkeley and hear my father say, “Vamos a las oficinas.” It was then that I knew that my classmates in my public policy seminar truly had no idea who I was or where I came from. I wanted to share my experience and my truth, and it was then that my work with young Latinas in my community fueled my desire to become a teacher.
As an adult, I feel most alive in a classroom. Young people have always been on the right side of history, and adults just need to get out of their way for them to reveal their power truly. At the beginning of my teaching career, I was a young, Brown, bilingual teacher at a turn-around Title 1 middle school that was about ½ Latino and ½ Black students; I once had a colleague describe my classroom as “magic that felt unattainable,” but to me, it felt natural. I tried to describe it to her, and at best, all I could say was, “To me, it feels like I am teaching a room full of my nieces and nephews.” She responded, “How do you get them to like you?”. It was a sincere question she truly didn’t understand, to which I replied, “I think the relationship works because I genuinely like them.” This was the precise moment when I felt called to shift and position my work to teach and empower other educators to own their own power in order to harness, unlock and ‘get out of the way’ of their own students’ talents and power.
Now, almost a decade into school leadership, 7 of which I spent as the principal of Oyster Adams Bilingual School, I learned that my power lies in courageous leadership. I am often asked where I get my courage from, but if I am being honest, I often experience fear but push through it. I push through it because I fear what society will allow if I do not interrupt the status quo. American schooling is not designed to center around Black and Brown children, and even less to recognize the innate talent and socio-cultural capital and power that emergent bilinguals are naturally born with. Our country’s monolinguistic norms design schools where Latino children from bilingual homes find themselves in “English-only” strands even within bilingual schools, not having been lucky enough to have “lotteries in.” Dr. Ofelia Garcia describes bilingual children in monolingual schools as students with a drum in front of them, one hand holding a drumstick and playing loudly, but the other hand tied behind their back. Their full power will never be unleashed until monolinguistic norms are dismantled and their other hand is let loose so that the music the child produces will fulfill its full potential and beauty.
Oyster Adams allowed me to play music with both hands and operated entire days, meetings, and professional developments in Spanish and English. It became a place where I felt whole and my most authentic self. I owe much of my liberation, joy, and power to the bilingual communities I have been a part of, starting with my own home and family, the schools I attended as a child, the schools I led, and the colleagues I met on the journey. I hope for a society where more emergent bilinguals can have the opportunities afforded to me. It is my duty to help create them so they can play music with both hands and so that the powerful music they create can be heard and danced to for generations to come.
