Teenagers across Modesto are proving David Bowie right; the children are indeed “quite aware of what they’re going through.”
High school students are organizing civically-minded groups in response to what they see as a tidal wave of injustices facing their communities since the beginning of the second Trump administration. That includes constant battles over civil, environmental and educational rights that affect their everyday lives and futures in the Valley.
They’ve seen the often race-based tactics taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as they implement President Trump’s mass deportation policies. They’ve watched federal immigration agents shoot and kill American citizens in the streets who protested those policies. Yet they still feel compelled to speak out.
“We’ve been seeing all this stuff on the internet with people being killed, being arrested and just taken away from their families,” said 17-year-old Miah Hernandez, a Downey High junior and one of the organizers of February’s massive citywide student walkout.
“We really did not like that. We thought it was messed up. We hated the fact that people were being ripped apart, and we wanted to do something about it.”
For other students, more personal moments have spurred them into action and activism. Seventeen-year-old Moses Abeyta, a senior at Downey, said a few years ago he was a “mean, angry” kid who often felt hopeless about being able to make positive change in the world.
But the death of his grandmother Anna Marie last September, and subsequent memorial service, changed his perspective.
“It made me think a lot about when I die,” he said. “What are people going to say about me when I pass? I want people to talk about me like they did about my grandma.”
Valley youth spurred by the political, personal
He told the story in front of 2,000 people who took part in last weekend’s No Kings rally in Modesto, as part of the third nationwide protest against Trump. Abeyta was one of two featured speakers at the event, addressing the crowd alongside U.S. House candidate Michael Masuda, a Democrat running against longtime GOP incumbent Rep. Tom McClintock.
“It’s very easy to forget that you can do something, especially when you’re at an age like myself,” he said. “When you’re at 17… it’s very easy to think the world is so big you can’t do anything to change it. That’s not true.”
Valley students have used social media to connect to one another across Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Merced counties. An Instagram page created by Hernandez, and several other student organizers, helped spread the word and brought out more than 1,200 youth from high schools across the city for the February walkout.
Hernandez said teenagers’ concerns about current affairs are typically ignored, but that issues in government affect everyone including students. So along with classmates she organized another demonstration March 10.
The lunchtime walkout at the corner of McHenry and Briggsmore avenues, which was smaller than the first, still drew supportive honks and as well as a handful community members who served as legal observers. She said gathering on the street again was a display of local youths’ collective voice.
“(I protest) not just because I go against something, it’s just that I need you to hear me,” she said. “I need you to hear my thoughts and hear where I’m coming from.”
Student activists like Hernandez and Abeyta, have helped each other organize and bring people together – and provide moral support.
While Hernandez said her parents are supportive, they’ve raised concerns about how organizing walkouts and protests could impact her ability to find work. Abeyta’s parents don’t engage at all.
Their organizing has also exposed them to countless comments from others. During the February walkout, hundreds commented online about the youth ICE protests. Some were in support of the students expressing their First Amendment rights, others argued they were following a trend, ditching school and endangering future job prospects.
Student activists undeterred by adult criticism
Those comments have not deterred these student organizers.
“A lot of adults treat us as we’re supposed to be seen and not heard,” Abeyta said. “That doesn’t matter anymore. It really doesn’t matter anymore, because if they don’t want to hear us, we’re going to make them hear us and they couldn’t help but hear us when (1,200) of us walked out. So it doesn’t really matter what they think anymore. At the end of the day, the youth are going to lead Modesto.”
Still, Modesto students’ activism has not come without trade-offs. Abeyta, who recently transferred from Stanislaus Military Academy to Downey, is already condensing nine classes worth of credits into his seven-period schedule. And now he is also invested in local politics.
When it becomes too much, Abeyta said he looks to the mutual aid networks around him and is reminded to keep going.
“I’m so tired, but I suppose that’s one of the sacrifices everyone has to make,” he said. “I don’t care. I’ll keep moving forward. This isn’t going to stop me.”
While the moments leading up to his No Kings speech were nerve-wracking, he said afterward he “felt like the man,” and joined in the protest.
Modesto High freshman Russell Miller, the 15-year-old organizer behind Youth Leading Modesto, said connecting with Moses opened a door to advocacy.
Last spring, Miller said he and his friends were looking for ways to speak out against President Trump’s order to begin dismantling the Department of Education.
With three years left in school, Miller worries about how the policy will affect him and other students across the city. So his group began collecting contacts and passed around a sign up sheet to learn to see who was interested in protesting.
A few did, so last May Miller and others gathered at the Five Points intersection at McHenry Avenue and J Streets to demonstrate against the Department of Education’s closure. After that, in October he organized a protest against gun violence. Still, he calls Youth Leading Modesto an apolitical club that is aimed at opening conversations.
“We just try to get them especially used to having their own opinion on politics before they enter the voting age, so that they come in with a mindset that is their own, and not one that is just handed down from their parents,” Miller said.
Parents, adult organizers assist area teens
Leticia Senechal, Miller’s mother, supports her son’s organizing as much as she can.
“I just think we should do whatever we can do to wrap our arms around these kids trying to feel like they can get leverage in a world (where) they’re being inundated by news that we couldn’t even fathom when we were their age,” she said.
She said she and her husband have seen their son’s confidence go up since he’s gotten more engaged with civic life. Now, as a family, their lives have gotten busier, but she’s happy to make the effort and coordinate their schedules.
Since the first school-walk out in February, Senechal has noticed more neighbors and other adults want to give the children hope for a better future.
“I think (the students) have the moral support of the parents, motivated parents, helping them get together, make signs, go out and pull protests together,” she said, “and they’ve had wonderful support from older activists in the community.”
Efren Diaz, spokesman for the the Central Valley Black, Indigenous, People of Color Coalition (CVBIPOCC), is another community activist supporting Abeyta, Miller and Hernandez.
“I think what they’re doing is a very brave thing to do,” Diaz said. “I personally probably wouldn’t have done that when I was in high school, because I wasn’t so politically aware about my own conditions and the conditions of others. This generation of young leaders are just very emboldened.”
CVBIPOCC organizers, along with other partner community based organizations are seeing more high schoolers in Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Merced counties asking for advice and support for student organizing since the first ICE walkout in Modesto.
“It’s a very beautiful thing, a very powerful thing to know that youth from different parts of the Central Valley coming together to talk about what we can do,” he said. “Not only has it been them learning from us, but it’s been a very reciprocal relationship where we’re learning from them as well.”
As rallies and protests across the city become more consistent, Hernandez would like to see more students bring their ideas out of the group chats into these spaces.
“A lot of students have talked to me about wanting to feel more understandable, they just want to be heard, because they feel like they get shut out so much that no one’s really listening to them,” Hernandez said.
“I just want to let everybody know that even though we’re students and even though we’re young and everything, that we still have a voice and we still want to speak out.”
Vivienne Aguilar is a reporter for The Modesto Focus, a project of the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. Contact her at vivienne@themodestofocus.org.