I was a teacher for almost 10 years here in NYC. When I started, I was very young (21 years old) yet had had years of experience teaching children, teenagers and adult alike as a Spanish language instructor.

I decided to work as a teacher a few years after graduating from college, so when I started as a Public High School teacher here in NYC, I couldn't teach Spanish, for it wasn't my major in college. I was thrown into the History department of Eastern District High School to teach a mostly immigrant population of teenagers History and Social Studies in (mostly) Spanish and (some) English.

It was a horrible and yet formative experience in my life.

Years before teaching, when I was still a Catholic, I had studied the teachings of  Gustavo Freire's in "Pedagogia do Oprimido" and Leonardo Boff in "Teologia da Liberação". What struck me, as a  middle class intelectual wannabe of "grey collar" parents, was the focus on the violence of poverty.

Hunger, homelessness, unemployment, discrimination, illiteracy : We don't even have to talk about actual physical violence acts in order to think of all the different violent ways in which poverty and marginalization hit many communities of color.

Yet what reverberated with me was how the scars of slavery, servitude, apartheid, segregation and marginalization are carried into future generations. How in a family that had to endure years of the violence of poverty you could have newer, freer and more affluent generations still carrying that legacy through patterns of behaviour : addiction, abuse, low-self esteem.

I saw way too much of these kinds of behaviours around me teaching in a 90% children of color population where 30% were immigrants (a big chunk of them being Central American refugees of the Iran-Contra War) and where 95% of the kids needed government assistance for basics like school lunch, health care, housing.

Within Latinos and African Americans I can attest to the fact that flogging our kids if they misbehave is still a common practice. Too many kids are taught from an early age that their bodies are not theirs but "leased to them" by their parents until they reach either the age of consent or 21 years of age. Isn't it any wonder why so teenage Latina and Black girls may end up trapped with abusive boyfriends who think nothing of smacking them around? I even had one girl who ended up giving birth to a child at the age of 15 after being date-raped by a 20-something loser from the hood.

As a Public High School teacher and later on an Adjunct Professor in colleges and community colleges I could see the tell-tale signs of girls (and even some boys) who were abused. It wasn't just the Latinas. I had too many Asian girls at NYU who you just could tell lived in terror of doing anything wrong at the school because of the devastating consequences back at home.

So here's to creating a world free from racialized and gendered violence by being bold and working to end it.