We spoke with Emely Rauda, Community Education Specialist, about her work leading the Lawson/Huerta Nonviolence Education Project.
Emely Rauda, Community Education Specialist at the UCLA Labor Center, sat down to speak on the experiences that led her to work leading the Lawson/Huerta Nonviolence Education Project. Emely was first introduced to worker justice during her time as a labor studies minor, where she found representation of her own life experiences. Her time working with the late Reverend James Lawson Jr. and Kent Wong served as a launching point for her work in the nonviolence advocacy movement and her current role implementing the nonviolence curriculum in public schools.
What initially drew you to the labor studies minor, and how did it shape your academic journey at UCLA?
I first discovered the labor studies minor when I enrolled in Janna Shadduck-Hernández’s class, “Social Movements and Labor in LA.” I immediately knew this was relevant work for people in my community. It was the first time I saw my parents’ work being talked about. My mom is a domestic worker, but she’s done a ton of different jobs at factories and other places. And my dad has always been a construction worker and also done other jobs in between.
As an immigrant family, I saw within labor studies that our stories were reflected, but also that they were given dignity and deemed as important. I had never really seen this anywhere else. I was also very much drawn towards the social justice aspect of labor and coming together and fighting for your rights.
What inspired you to lead the Lawson/Huerta Nonviolence Education Project, and what impact do you hope it will have on students and educators?
It was my journey that led me to this role; that journey looked like being a student of labor studies. Then from being a student, I took it to the next level and became a TA. That’s where I got to not only learn more, but also work with people like the Reverend James Lawson Jr. and Kent Wong and to learn directly from them on their lessons of organizing for decades. I learned from their victories as well as their losses.
That’s where I really saw the ability that nonviolence has to create a difference. Through learning from the Reverend and his lessons, and the way he frames nonviolence as power and a tool for us to create change, is how I got more deeply involved in seeing nonviolence as a philosophy, a social science and a complex theory that we are able to put into practice.
Pictured: The Nonviolence Teaching Team of Spring 2023.
What are the pillars of the nonviolence curriculum?
One of the pillars is education: to bring people more knowledge about things that have worked in the past — these histories of victories and lessons.
Action is another pillar, and I think education is the conduit for action. Once people are able to see the world around them in a different way, they are driven toward some form of action.
There’s also empowerment, which we hope people are gaining and learning from this curriculum, but also understanding through the power of community and solidarity.
These three things — action, education, and empowerment — are what creates that hope for a better future. Instead of falling into despair about all of the things going wrong around us, we can see that we do have power, and we can come together to create change that ensures no harm to any form of life.
So I always tell students, “Most of us have heard of MLK, and we’ve heard of Rosa Parks, but these are histories that have been romanticized or whitewashed, and we don’t see the full picture of what happened during these moments.” It was actually folks at all different types of levels coming together. In the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it was the church, lawyers, the NAACP, and women’s groups coming together. All facets of a community came together and formed a coalition to say, “We’re not going to continue to put up with this horrible treatment on the buses.” By focusing on that, that was their way to create change. Through the demystification of these complex movements, students are able to learn how to use their own power.
What have been some successful strategies in implementing the Nonviolence Education Project?
We have been going to different teacher conferences in the past year. I presented at a few, and it’s really interesting to see that as soon as I start talking about these ideas and the legacies of Reverend Lawson and Dolores Huerta, the teachers tell me, “We need this in our classrooms — we need this at all school levels and in different languages.” Building relationships with teachers has been really important in implementing the program. I go and support teachers through the Young Workers Education Project led by Nicolle Fefferman by facilitating collective bargaining and practicing simulations at different schools. While I’m at a school, I take it as an opportunity to talk directly with teachers and expand the program.
It was through this approach that I was able to also secure a week of facilitations at Garfield High School, where we were able to connect with over 170 students. We have also been aligning our curriculum with history, social science and ethnic studies. Our newest strategy is reaching out to community colleges. At the LA Community College District, there is a group called the Dolores Huerta Labor Institute. Their mission is to promote labor studies throughout the district, and so we partnered with them to teach a class on nonviolence.
In conjunction with teaching that class, we have also started an internship program where we hired community college students to put on different programming about nonviolence to connect students on their campuses to these ideas. We have also prioritized connecting community college students to the Opportunity For All movement — a movement that has been led by students who were actually in Reverend Lawson’s nonviolence class, who belong to the Undocumented Student Led Network. For the past three years, the movement has been advocating for employment rights and labor equity for undocumented students. The Nonviolence Education Project still has many opportunities to grow in the future and much more to come.
Pictured: Nonviolence Education Project students and leaders gathered for Reverend James Lawson Jr.’s 95th birthday.
