How Chicago Moms Sat Down To Stand Up

Editor's Note: This is Part 1 of an interview with Laura Ramirez, an ally to the Chicago moms staging a sit-in to demand a library for their children. Part 2 is posted here.

A 3 a.m. shift? Laura Ramirez looked at the sign-up sheet for the Whittier Elementary School sit-in and thought, Isn't that a lot to ask?

Ramirez had no personal connection to the group of South Side Chicago moms fighting to get a school library for their children. But she'd heard from a close friend that they had been organizing for seven years and still had gotten nowhere in their negotiations with the city and Chicago Public Schools.

“I got a phone call at work,” she remembers. It was her friend. “Hey, the moms took over the field house,” she said. “You need to come see this.”

After seven years of trying to change things through the system, the moms, mostly Hispanic, working moms in the Pilsen neighborhood, had decided to take a drastic route to action. Risking arrest and threats of deportation, they were going to stage a sit-in on September 15 in an old field house next to Whittier Elementary School. The moms wanted a library for their children in the building, but Chicago Public Schools called it “unsafe” and planned to knock it down, replacing it with a field.

Now, after a 44-day sit-in, national media coverage and hundreds of phone calls and letters sent from the community and beyond, the Whittier moms may have finally reached an agreement with Chicago Public Schools. CPS head Ron Huberman has agreed to build a library inside Whittier, and the field house will be leased to the moms for $1 a year to be renovated and used as a community center. A full agreement has still not been reached, however.

Ramirez, an ally to the moms, helped start their Facebook and Internet campaign under their leadership. The moms credit social media for part of their success, she says. Change.org caught up with Laura Ramirez earlier this week to talk about lessons learned from the sit-in:

Change.org: When did you first arrive at the sit-in? What was it like?

LR: I went over on the second day. As soon as I got there, I started talking to the parents, who were asking me to help their children with their homework. Suddenly, the police came and tried to arrest us. One of the organizers asked us to go inside the field house and lock the doors. We were there for about four hours. The cops were trying to charge us with endangerment, with disturbing the peace. From that moment on, Whittier has become my other life. My second life.

Change.org: Even though you could have been arrested, you stayed at the field house. Why?

LR: Once I got locked inside, there was no going back. These moms really know what they're doing. They were so passionate, and so sure of what they wanted. They told me all the work they'd done for seven years -- it was a very long-term process. Once I found that out, I thought, “Wow, [the sit-in] is not just some crazy decision. This is a huge decision.” That kind of grounded me in their space, respecting where they came from and knowing their struggle.

Change.org: How did the Facebook page for the sit-in get started?

LR: The parents had videos of what Chicago Public Schools had done to the children – they had pushed, intimidated the parents, tried to start fights. The parents told me, “You need to put it on Facebook, so people know about this right now.” We knew that unless we got the word out through social media and social networking, we were not going to make it.

Change.org: Why?

LR: When the police came, we understood that the only way we were going to be able to protect the mothers was going to be through getting the media out there. We realized that the most important thing for that movement was to be able to educate everybody about what was happening. We didn't have the power to control what the police were going to do, what CPS was going to do. Our only power was going to be able to connect to the larger public. We know now that if the media wasn't there, those mothers would have gotten arrested on Day 2. We realized the value of visuals.

Change.org: How did the social media network grow?

LR: Many of the people who were inside the field house were people who had connections. There were people from community organizations, Ph.D. students, professors. When we stepped into the space, we decided to use what we had in the service of the struggle. A lot of us have like-minded friends and connections. I sent emails to other people who had other networks, people who already had a cemented platform of concerned educators.

Click here to read Part 2 of our interview with Laura Ramirez, who is a Ph.D. Student in Education Policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago. You can find out more about the Whittier Parents at http://saveourcenter.com.

Photo credit: Whittier Parent Committee