Nearly 500 high school students from the Jefferson Union High School District gathered at San Francisco State University today, for the Ethnic Studies Youth Summit.
The event, which ran from the morning to the afternoon, brought together students from the Jefferson Union High School District to engage with workshops, panels and performances celebrating ethnic studies education and connecting them with the history of the 1968-1969 Third World Liberation Front strike at SFSU. That led to the creation of the country’s first College of ethnic studies and the start of the ethnic studies movement.
Keynote speaker Dregs One connected his personal journey as an SFSU alum who initially struggled academically to how ethnic studies changed his perspective and put him on the path to become a lawyer.
“For the first time in my life, education had a real value, a practical application, other than getting a good grade in a class I didn’t really care about; I was motivated to succeed as a college student,” said Dregs One in his speech. “I learned things that were never taught to me in school. My experiences as a youth started to make sense. I began to see systems that were built into bigger system, the education system, the economic system, the labor system, the criminal justice system.”
This year’s summit also featured a student panel, another panel with original strikers from 1968-1969 and workshops around campus.
Arlene Daus-Magbual, assistant professor of Asian American studies, was the main organizer of the event on the SFSU side.
“The strikers wanted students, especially those in high school or those in our communities that surround San Francisco State, to have access to higher education,” Daus-Magbual said. “Ethnic studies is the heartbeat of us.”
According to Daus-Magbual, the summits began seven years ago with the San Francisco Unified School District, but the event has evolved since then. During the pandemic, the summit had to be canceled in 2020 but was shifted online the following year. Since then, the summits have changed with various high schools participating. Last year and this year, summits have happened with JUHSD.
Dan Arzaga is the diversity, equity, inclusion, and ethnic studies teacher on special assignment for JUHSD. He was credited by Daus-Magbual with attending meetings since January to organize things on the school district’s side.
“There was only 215 people that came last year,” Arzaga said. “Since then, the ethnic studies programs doubled, and so that’s why this year we had about 490 students here today.”
According to Arzaga, Raymond Tompkins, a member of the 1968-1969 striker panel, made a significant impact on student participants. He was the second chairman of the Black Student Union and vice president of Associated Students during the strike.
“Tompkins stood out to me because of the health advocacy that he’s still a part of,” Arzaga said. “Backstage, he had really encouraged one of the student speakers actually to keep going with science because she was interested in science. To have that sort of cultural racial awareness, even in the field of science, is important.”
The summit also included eleven different workshops covering topics such as financial literacy, climate justice, media literacy, and storytelling. Students had the opportunity to reflect on their communities and create poems about their hometowns.
Olympia Pereira, an Access, Relevance, Community peer mentor, facilitated one of the workshops and appreciated the opportunity to connect with high school students.
“I think it’s beautiful and powerful to hear the different ways the different ideas that the youth have when talking about themselves and their communities,” Pereira said.
High school junior Sean Villegas appreciated the chance to meet peers from other schools.
“It was so nice getting to know people from other schools,” Villegas said. “I learned that we all have different experiences and we come from different places. I think we should understand that we’re all different.”
The summit faces uncertainties for next year due to President Trump’s executive order to eliminate the Department of Education and grants to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The grants fund campus initiatives that allow the summit to be hosted and other programs. Despite these challenges, Daus-Magbual said the College of Ethnic Studies will remain committed to continuing the summits in some form.
“We’ll find a way,” Daus-Magbual said. “We need to bring more young people on campus, so they know what’s up — that they know what’s happening at San Francisco State, they know what we offer here, and they want to come here, especially those that live close to SF State. I think as long as we’re still here, we’re still going to throw something. It’s just going to look a little bit different from what it is today.”
Today, the summit wrapped up with high schoolers’ screams cheering for their peers during the open mic and performance portion.
A high school student presented a poem titled “Racism is So Stupid,” reflecting on his experiences and perspectives as a student of color.
“If I’m being honest, racism is so stupid,” the student said. “Why do you care what the color of my skin is, what the shape of my eyes are, and where my family comes from more than you care about yourself?”
