- David Morales
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A Counter-recruitment Conversation with High School Students
From Draft NOtices, October-December 2022
— David Morales
Recently, the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (YANO) was invited to speak with students at Lincoln High School in San Diego, California. It was among the first of our typical counter-recruitment classroom talks since the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The invitation came specifically from the Lincoln High chapter of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MEChA). MEChA is a student organization with roots in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s that seeks to cultivate pride in one’s Chicanx/Latin American culture, promotes higher education, and instills a sense of responsibility to one’s community.
I was particularly excited to volunteer for this talk and to have the opportunity to share with these students. Thirteen years ago, when I was a MEChA member at Mission Bay High, it was both of our schools’ MEChA chapters that played a key role in a campaign to end JROTC weapons training in the San Diego Unified School District.
I was joined by Armando Pérez for the conversation at Lincoln H.S. Armando is an Army veteran who is now a middle school teacher in San Diego and a volunteer with Project YANO. We joined the students via Zoom — a novel way for us to engage in our outreach work as a result of the pandemic. We spoke to a group of approximately 15 students and 2 teachers. The week before they had watched the counter-recruitment video “Before You Enlist,” www.beforeyouenlist.org.
After introducing ourselves during the Zoom session, students proceeded to ask us some really direct questions that demonstrated their genuine desire for this important information and conversation. As always, the most valuable contribution came from Armando and his ability, as a veteran, to speak from first-hand experience.