Words by Nicholas Valdez

Inspiration is a funny thing.

It creeps up when we least expect it, and it is deeply infectious.

When students at UC Merced launched the massive “We believe” campaign to woo First Lady Michelle Obama to speak at the university’s first ever graduation ceremony, Christopher Ramírez, an instructor in the Merritt Writing Program on campus, was skeptical.

“Because of the proportion of the campaign, even at the level at which it was operating, I still was a little reluctant to believe that they would be successful in bringing Michelle Obama,” Ramirez admits.

But on May 16, 2009, First Lady Obama came to Merced. Instantly, the city of Merced was thrust into the national spotlight. Downtown businesses prepped for an inundation of people who were coming to see and hear the First Lady speak. The city was brought together for a common purpose, seemingly overnight.

“It was really inspiring,” says Ramírez. “That re-energized me. It re-energized the purpose for why I came here [to UC Merced] as an educator.”

After being so inspired by the students and the city, Christopher Ramírez is now working to return the favor by inspiring them to continue to actively engage in the transformation of reality.

The first thing he did was to reshape his classroom to draw the focus of the class back to the community, to demonstrate for his students that the classroom is a porous space and that the lessons of the classroom need to spill out into the local and global community to enact positive change.

Ramírez took his writing class and crafted it into a dynamic mechanism for social change. He broke the students into groups and allowed them to choose a social issue to tackle in order to begin enacting positive, concrete changes on its behalf.

Enter Robert Machado and Carla Saldana, two of Ramírez’s students.

Machado and his group decided to take their campaign global, starting a “penny campaign” in conjunction with the non-profit organization Roots of Peace, helping to raise money to disable land-mines in developing countries.

“On a daily basis, young children are playing soccer in a field and the next thing you know they step on a land-mine and lose their legs, if they’re lucky,” Machado says. “But a lot of times death is the outcome.”
He and his team are working very hard to bring this devastating problem to an end.

Carla Saldana, a native of Merced who grew up in the downtown area, chose to pursue a project here at home.

“I grew up downtown,” says Saldana. “So I kind of know what most students are missing, what they don’t see ... Most students don’t see the amount of people that really need aid.”

Saldana and her group took a video camera downtown to film areas that most of the UCM students avoid or overlook: agencies that distribute food stamps, homeless shelters, etc. She says that she wants “students to see the downtown area that they’re not familiar with ... There’s definitely a need for students to get involved downtown.”

The projects that Ramírez is inspiring in his classroom are about unveiling the issues that remain hidden from the sight of the students on campus at UC Merced. They are about bringing to light the things that many shy away from: the legacy of abandoned, destructive weaponry on children and adults in developing nations, the poverty in Merced that stands in stark contrast to the affluent island of UCM’s campus, among others.

Ramírez, Machado and Saldana epitomize voices that attempt to inspire us not to sit idly by while their community and others remain depressed and degraded.

At the end of the class, Ramírez required his students to submit artifacts representing their projects.

Saldana decided to make a clock with a broken mirror in the middle of it. “[The clock] represents that we are the change; we are the possibility,” she says.

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