Hilda Villegas
Hilda Villegas is resisting the inevitable. A self-described “barrio kid,” she dropped out of high school and had a kid at 18 years. Sixteen years after the birth of her first child, she is fighting to protect her daughter and her classmates at the school she never graduated from.
Bowie High School is located in the Chamizal neighborhood of El Paso. Administrators at the El Paso Independent School District voted to place a new bus hub at the high school with no study of the environmental impacts. Villegas said that “no one is taking the extra step to ensure that our kids are not being killed, especially the entities who are responsible for doing so.” Chamisal and Barrio Durangito are amongst the poorest neighborhoods in El Paso and sit directly on the border.
Because of the high density of trucks and cars idling and waiting to get into Mexico, the area has high levels of air pollution. Asthma, birth defects, and ADHD are prominent issues within the neighborhood. For years, the Bowie community has faced discrimination, and although Hilda knows her fight will be grueling, she continues anyway.
Juan Sybert-Coronado
It was once common for law enforcement to harass students about their immigration status on school grounds. Juan Sybert-Coronado, a teacher, supported students who took matters into their own hands, filing—and winning—civil rights suits against the government.
Yes, I am comfortable standing up. That’s the short answer. It’s not a matter of heroism. It’s a matter of being pissed, okay? And when you get pissed enough, and you see abuse going on, if you don’t stand up, then there’s something wrong with you.
Patricia Scott
Students at Bowie High School can look out of their classroom windows and see Mexico on the other side; they’re less than a hundred yards away from the border. While technically on American soil, their approach to education is anything but. Patricia Scott had been a guidance counselor at the school for 16 years when she noticed errors on several sophomore students’ transcripts. She initially brought the concern to her supervisors, working overtime for several weeks to determine that credits were missing for 77 students, who were held back as a result. Many of these students had recently transferred from Juaréz and spoke limited English. Their poor standardized test scores were pulling down the school’s ranking across the state, and as a result, the district’s superintendent Lorenzo Garcia had instructed various administrative officials to hold the students back rather than have their test grades count.
Patricia Scott faced an enormous amount of pressure and backlash for her decision to bring the cheating scandal to light, but her commitment to academic justice allowed hundreds of students access to the education that motivated them to seek better lives in the first place.
