Q&A With Sofia Sepulveda (SHP ’21)

 

Sofia Sepulveda (SHP ’21): I got started at SHP a little bit differently than everyone else. I got in through the Sophie’s Scholars program, so, I knew about Sacred Heart when I was in the fifth grade. It's kind of crazy to think that as a fifth grader, you already know where you're going to high school, but it's not set in stone. There were still expectations, and you need to maintain your grades, all of that. But that's how I got started at the Prep, through the Scholars program, doing summer school and then Saturday classes as well. I've been here four years, and I’ve loved it; I’ve had a lot of opportunities to grow here. SHP was able to just push me out of my shell—in middle school I was a much more quiet person, which whenever I tell someone that, they're like, ‘no, you got to be kidding me,’ but I was literally that kid in middle school who would read during lunch. I've done a complete 180 since being here, in a good way. 

 

Definitely being able to just immerse myself in what I was interested in. I saw myself getting more confident as I was taking classes that I had more choices in—going into government and going into history classes that I liked and being able to take English classes that I liked. But government was the big one—I took AP US Government my junior year, and that's when I started growing more because the Socratic method of teaching means you need to be able to talk; confidence is number one if you want to do well in a graded discussion.

 

Last year, four other girls and I founded Social Unity Rooted in Justice (SURJ), it’s a new organization that was born out of our experience attending the Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC) in December of 2019; I went with five other students (two of those people are no longer working with SURJ). At the time, I had no intention of ever really doing anything in terms of leadership or entering that sphere. But we went there and we wanted to come back and do more than just the Espacio, because that’s what had always been done after prior [trips]: ‘Here's what we learned, it was great, we made lifelong friends,’—we wanted to do something more than that. We saw what SDLC did for us and we wanted to bring back something on campus similar to that, and that's when SURJ was born. We created affinity spaces, and we created a guest speaker curriculum. But then of course COVID happened, so everything had to be adjusted.

 

We started developing it after winter break [of 2019], meeting twice a week during our lunches. Then we pitched the idea to pretty much the entire administrative and faculty team in March of 2020, and it got approved luckily, because we were asking for money for guest speakers. Then we spent pretty much our entire summer finalizing everything, meeting for five hours on Zoom once a week.

 

 

Because of COVID, we couldn't do everything we wanted to do. We had been relying on the Espacio model and the ability to bring in speakers during those designated times. Obviously, that wouldn't work for this year, so we moved that curricular aspect of it to the side and focused more on our affinity spaces. We have the Black Student Union, Pacific Islander affinity space, Asian-American affinity space, LatinX affinity space, Mixed Person's affinity space, Women of Color affinity space, and we have the White Allyship space. There were other spaces as well that had already been available but are now under the SURJ umbrella for cohesiveness.

 

I led the Women of Color affinity space with two other people; at the beginning of first semester, after we got all the affinity spaces finalized, I started leading that affinity space because it was something I had been interested in for a long time, and it was something I wanted to put my time and energy into outside of SURJ. 

 

I think for these affinity spaces in general, but specifically for Women of Color, being in a community where you have similar shared experiences with other women is something that is needed, especially when coming to a place like Sacred Heart, because as much as I love Sacred Heart, the diversity here [means] sometimes you’re the only woman of color in a class—it’s usually not the best feeling in the world. Being in community with other women of color is definitely a significant experience—being able to have that community and safety net. 

 

After focusing on affinity groups, we were able to begin hosting guest speakers for SURJ over Zoom in December, and in fact we [recently completed hosting] a speaker series in May. 

 

 

We had been circulating emails around to faculty prior to SURJ being introduced to students, mostly because we wanted a lot of the administrative aspects of it out of the way. Word was spreading that we were going to be doing something after the Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC), specifically by the adults who had attended SDLC with us—they had been sharing our plans with other faculty.

 

So, we did get some emails from faculty who said, ‘I want to be a part of this, let me know what I can do. Let me know if you need anything.’ Dr. Benjamin Su, [SHP English teacher who has recently been appointed SHS’s inaugural Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access (DEIA)] was one of those people. And when it came down to it over the summer while we were planning the launch, we looked at what SDLC had had in terms of affinity spaces when we attended in 2019, and we moved it over to a model that we felt was best, because SDLC is a huge convention, with attendees from across the United States and worldwide. SDLC was probably one of my best experiences as a Sacred Heart student, even though it wasn't on the campus, it was an opportunity given to me by Sacred Heart. 

 

[The attendees] were students of color who were attending predominantly white institutions and sharing their own experiences, what they were doing, and what that meant to them. What really struck all of us was how genuine everyone was; you went in to the conference and could be yourself, there was no need for code switching. 

I've gone to predominantly white schools my entire life, I was one of the few kids of color when I was in kindergarten, so I've never really had the experience of going into a school and not having some sort of mask on—that's kind of the expectation. So going to the conference, mask off, I was able to make a lot of friends, and I'm still friends with a lot of people that I met there. It was an amazing experience. It was honestly a little life changing.

 

We wanted the conversations about race to be had in the first place—because that was something that had been avoided, I think by a lot of people, for obvious reasons: if you're not well-trained in a conversation, you're obviously not going to want to engage in it. And that's fine. If you don't have the experience or the knowledge to engage in the conversation, you don't want to enter something you don't know anything about. So that was understandable. What we wanted was to have a student body who could engage in those conversations, who had the knowledge, who had the resources, because ultimately, race should be discussed, and that discussion should be widespread. I can say I'm lucky because I've had prior teaching, I've had mentors through the Sophie’s Scholars program, as well as other people who were able to give me the knowledge.

But other people may not have a Berkeley-educated professor who has a PhD in Ethnic Studies teaching them, and that's not on them. So, we wanted to engage in those conversations. As much as we loved Espacio, we didn't feel as though they were doing quite enough. We had said this in our presentation [to the administration], when Espacio was created for the time, I'm sure they were incredibly necessary and incredibly important. But as the conversation has evolved, as the climate has obviously evolved, we needed Espacio as to evolve as well. We needed them to become a little bit more informative and a little bit less on the nose.

 

SURJ really wanted to give people the tools to be able to discuss race. Even if people are not that receptive to it, at least they've listened to it, and maybe down the line in the future, they'll remember something from a talk and they'll be like, ‘oh, okay. I actually know how to engage in something like this.’ We noticed during a lot of our talks, students were asking how to be an ally, because on social media and in our society in general, we don't really discuss the depths or complexities of that, or the nuances, we kind of just say, ‘oh, to be an ally, you don't do this, this, this, and this,’ but we don't really go into what you should do instead. We noticed a lot of students wanting to know more than the base level, which is common right now for a lot of communities and is the bare minimum. Students here want to know how to go further—and that's the space we wanted to provide.

The way I've approached it, and I think the way a lot of the SURJ leaders have approached it, is we want to impart these tools, because we don't know everything. And that's what our guest speakers are for—to teach us as well, because it is a learning experience for everyone. We didn’t want it to be a lecture sort of experience, we wanted it to be an actual learning experience for everyone. No one wants to be lectured, no one wants to have a finger wagged at them being like, ‘no, no, no, don't do that.’ People want to learn in a way that's respectful.

 

 

Our hope for SURJ is that it continues to evolve. It's evolved over the year that we've been leaders of SURJ: we had a plan, we adapted, we changed, we saw where the school community was, and we shifted to accommodate that. When it comes to what we want to see, SURJ was meant to be a comfort for students who don’t necessarily have that comfort, especially if you're a student of color going to a predominantly white institution.

Because I led SURJ, and I led the Women of Color affinity space, I was invited to be a member of the Racial Justice Task Force, which is the administrative committee making changes to the school to improve teaching and awareness surrounding race.

It's been crazy to think that I had no intention of ever entering any sort of leadership position, but then I ended up a leader in SURJ, a leader of Women of Color, and in the Racial Justice Task Force. I, who had no intention of entering any sort of [leadership] space like this, am now very deeply ingrained in this work, spending hours upon hours on it. But I love it, I love doing it. It's really fulfilling.