SF Mission School Students Talk Gentrification, Immigration Through Poetry

Writing on gentrification, immigration, Pac-Man, and the Virgin Mary, a class of fourth and fifth graders at Sanchez Elementary School recently published a booklet of poetry made after they walked around the Mission District and took in its murals.

“I wanted them to be looking at the murals in the Mission because they were such a powerful vehicle for talking about some of the issues that are going on in the community, like immigration and gentrification” said Annie Rovzar, a teacher-in-residence at the school who worked with the students to put the “Street Heart: Love Poems to the Mission Murals” booklet together.

The booklet was written last year and published in May, a collaboration between the school and WritersCorps, a program that sends professionals like Rovzar into schools for three-year rotations on creative writing. Students said the poetry project gave them an opportunity to deal with topics not usually covered in elementary school.

Ten-year-old Brian Pacecho, for instance, co-wrote a poem from a Native American perspective with one of his “best friends since pre-K,” Marciano Antone, who is part Native American himself.

“We wrote it so that Native Americans would be recognized for discovering this land first,” Pacecho said. He said he sought to bring attention to how colonial society would “use them as slaves, kill them, steal from them.”

“I just wanted to get that out there for people who didn’t know,” he said.

At school, his teachers would sometimes gloss over the more brutal aspects of that history, he added.

“Every time I brought it up, I was never looked at by the teacher,” he said. “I think it’s just because it’s too violent for the school. [But] they should teach that. It’s worse to ignore it. It’s worse to ignore the bad parts of history.”

Rovzar says that despite their age (all are between nine and 11), the students pay attention to their neighborhood and notice its changes. They even have opinions on national matters.

“For example, they have a lot to say about Donald Trump and the fact that if he were elected, that could mean really bad things for a lot of their family and friends,” she said. “Because it matters. If our laws around [immigration] became that much more strict than they already are, it could mean their parents not being here, it could mean some of the students not being here.”

A third of the 30 poems deal directly with either gentrification or immigration, though others deal with equally weighty topics from a more personal perspective.

“Nobody knows that I lost my mom and dad when I was little,” starts a poem by 10-year-old Yobani Arguello, inspired by the Pac-Man mural near 14th and Cypress. Arguello used her experience playing Pac-Man as a metaphor for dealing with her parents’ death.

“There was a war between Ghosts and Pac Mans and my parents got lost in the Ghost World,” reads the poem, recounting adventures wherein Arguello “eat[s] ghosts” and “freeze[s] ghosts” while searching for her family.

“My life is good because I get to go on adventures and try to find my parents,” it ends.

Some, of course, were inspired by the murals differently.

“It’s about animals and they’re everywhere,” said 10-year-old Luis Mederos about his poem “Animals Everywhere,” that he wrote after seeing the jungle-themed mosaic at the children’s park on 24th Street.

Rovzar guesses that being in San Francisco, and especially in the Mission, at a time of such change has given the students a more nuanced view of the social issues surrounding them.

“I am always impressed and surprised by their sensitivity about what’s going on around them, their ability to comprehend these issues that adults are struggling to figure out,” she said. “They can sense that things are changing and that there are these injustices around.”

The 59-page booklet can be bought online for $10 or at bookstores like Adobe and Modern Times and shops like Precita Eyes and Artillery.