Margot Pepper

by Margot Pepper

1.
The night of November 4, 2008,
when Barack Obama was declared the first Black man
to receive the key to the White House,
we danced and sang in the street to stars beyond storm clouds.
Drivers honked and cheered each other through open windows;
pedestrians hooted back, slapped palms,
Families spilled out of porches and driveways
and it didn’t take a ballgame.

We could have been in post-apartheid South Africa,
after Mandella was freed and elected president
or in the streets of post-fascist Spain after Franco died.
“It’s like we’ve been released from jail,” I said

by Margot Pepper
First published by Rethinking Schools, Spring 2008

Six years into the “War on Terror,” my second grade Spanish immersion students found that aggression, selfishness and insults have exploded on national television.

For the last decade, I’ve had my students at Rosa Parks Elementary in Berkeley, California analyze television shows preceding National TV-Off week organized by the TV-Turnoff Network, which this year is April 21-27. I ask the seven and eight-year-old students to collect all the data themselves, since I’ve never owned a television. For seven days, students study a random sampling of about 35 English and Spanish-language children’s television shows—and one or two soap operas or reality shows.

by Margot Pepper
First published by Race, Poverty & the Environment, Fall 2007
For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was signed into law in 2001 by President George Bush, backed by both Democrats and Republicans. The backbone of the program, allegedly designed to hold schools accountable for academic failure, is standardized state testing for students and educators. Rather than improve public education, however, there is now ample evidence that NCLB testing is part of a systematic effort to privatize diverse urban public schools in the United States. The objectives of privatization have been threefold: first, to divert taxpayer money from the public sector to the corporate sector; second, to capture part of the market, which would otherwise be receiving free education; and third, to drive out middle class accountability, leaving behind a disposable population that won’t have a voice about the inappropriate use of their tax dollars, nor the bleak outlook on their futures.

by Margot Pepper
First published by Race, Poverty & the Environment, Fall 2007
For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org

For over a decade I’ve been teaching my six-, seven-, and eight-year-old students to strike against me in the classroom. I drew the inspiration from “the Yummy Pizza company” labor unit1 and my own experience in the Berkeley Federation of Teachers and National Writer's Union. Instead of producing pizzas, students at “Pepper Ink.” produce laminated bookmarks of the best poem they’ve written in a year-long study of the genre. This year, however, the experience took a different turn when one of our potential Pepper Ink. workers was forcibly removed from the school.

by Margot Pepper
Watershed Festival Reading August 18 at noon

I.
They came shackled, scarred, half-drowned on Yemayá’s back:
queen mother of the sea;
children like limbs, severed,
settled by Oshun, the Mississippi river;
clandestine gods and shells stowed behind catholic crosses:
vadu, voodoo, santería.
Where once sweat lodge smoke smudged the view
an auction block now stood.

And so, the great city rose up, multiplied--
cries of birth pains muffled in traffic,
throaty blues and hypnotic jazz,

by Margot Pepper
First published by Counterpunch, June 2007

ZNet, June 2007

For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org

Recently, sending a message of resistance to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Berkeley and Oakland, California adopted sanctuary city measures disallowing the use of city funds and staff time in aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Over 60 sanctuary city initiatives protecting immigrants have been promulgated in 21 states across the United States. Critics of immigration reform argue that sanctuary proposals send the wrong message to immigrants who, they argue, are responsible for eroding citizens’ living standards. They claim stiffer penalties and stronger barriers are the answer. Little publicized is the fact that actually the opposite is true. Rather than posing a monumental problem, undocumented migration is a desired outcome of unequal international trade policies, boosting the living standards of U.S. citizens and enriching a powerful sector of the U.S. economy. Rather than discourage migration, dangerous but surmountable barriers and unenforceable, cruel laws only contribute to the “illegal,” status of needed workers, rendering them a cheap, profitable source of labor.

by Margot Pepper
First published by the Berkeley Daily Planet, February 23, 2007

Monthly Review MRZine 7-03-07

Spanish Version
El Tecolote, Español
For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org

by Margot Pepper
First published by the Monthly Review, November 2006
For reprint requests please contact the author via wall@Freedomvoices.org

“I feel like a bad person.”

“I feel like a snail without a shell whose heart has been stepped on.”

These feelings were jotted down in Spanish by my second graders during the four weeks of standardized tests required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The educational policy was instituted on the heels of the September 11 attacks by President George Bush, backed by both Democrats and Republicans. My students are required to take tests in Standard English, though half have yet to make the transition from Spanish to a second language in my immersion classroom.

Margot's students read their poems

Featuring Margot Pepper, Lorna Dee Cervantes and Ina Cumpiano
Saturday, October 6, 2007 • San Francisco
El Tecolote Office
2958-24th Street
Several blocks East of 24th Street BART