Whole Life Times: The Activist Home

October 2006 | Features

The Activist Home

How to save the world without losing your kids

By Claudia Pearce

Helen Caldicott. Martin Luther King. Betty Friedan. History-makers who dedicated heart and soul to serving the common good, they stood up to ignorance and knuckled through adversity, surmounting more hurdles in a week than most of us undertake in a lifetime.

The fact that their personal lives were reputed to be chaotic renders their accomplishments no less profound—they were changing the world! Who could blame them if they didn’t have dinner on the table by 7?

Like the proverbial psychiatrist’s child racked with neurosis, the offspring of career activists regularly bear the fall-out of growing up with a parent who’d rather hunger strike than play catch. Is it possible to juggle quality family time with fulltime worldchanging?

WLT interviews four activists on their work, families and the trials and rewards of taking on this daunting balancing act. —The Editors

For Alex Zucco, a 38-year-old Monrovia mother of two, activism is fast becoming a three-generation tradition. A pillar of her community, the stalwart Zucco has run public forums for Board of Education and City Council elections for more than a decade. A member of the 59th Assembly District Democratic Board, Zucco is happily married to a former Green who just re-registered Independent. During the 2000 presidential election, Zucco’s front lawn became a battleground; her husband posting signs in support of Nader while Zucco, a delegate to the Democratic Convention, pledged signage and support to Bill Bradley.

But Zucco insists her most important work isn’t in the political realm; it’s doing all she can to give at-risk kids the same chances that saved her from the pitfalls of coming of age below the poverty line.

“Growing up, our family had very little money. We were on welfare for much of my childhood,” Zucco remembers. “My sister and I spent summers at the free summer school offered by El Centro de Accion Social in Pasadena, which included lunch. The lunch was the clincher—food stamps and free government cheese only go so far. That place was a refuge for us, and a big reason why most of my focus today revolves around children.”

Despite their hard times, Zucco’s family was dedicated to service. She has fond childhood memories of joining her activist lawyer aunt doing “stoop labor” with farm worker children in the fields, of tagging along with her grandmother to pick up people to vote, and of getting to meet presidential candidate John Anderson when her mom worked on his campaign.

It’s a tradition she’s proudly continued. In addition to mentoring at-risk middle school girls, Zucco’s been PTA president for two years, as well as leader of her daughter’s Girl Scout troop. There are kids from all backgrounds in Zucco’s troop, including one child whose parents don’t always have a roof over their heads. When that little girl’s family goes through one of their periodic homeless stages, Zucco moves the girl in with her own family.

As you might expect, Zucco’s not the kind of den mother who dedicates her troop to topping last year’s cookie sales. The theme of her troop is service, and to that end, the group has adopted a family at Grace Center, a battered women’s shelter, and periodically helps pack food for 2,000 hungry kids at Unity Center.

“We do fun things, too, like visit places with animals,” says Zucco, laughing, “but I guess their little DNA is already geared for service. I asked them if they wanted to go see horses and they said no, they wanted to go back to Unity Center and pack up more green peppers for the hungry kids. They were worried that six to a pack wasn’t enough.”

Zucco’s two daughters—Zoe, 11, and Bonnie, 9—are as service-minded as their mother. In other troops, the required scout project could mean planning a trip or putting on a musical, but Zucco’s oldest daughter has decided that her project “must help little kids.” And her sporty youngest daughter decided to collect used athletic equipment and send it to children in their sister city in Africa.

Not, says Zucco, that her daughters don’t complain when she drags them to too many events. And when the little girl from their troop has an extra-lengthy stay, “Sometimes my girls ask when they’ll have mom and dad to themselves again,” says Zucco.

“But I haven’t seen any evidence of burnout in my daughters,” she insists. “Maybe I’m just in denial, but I don’t think so. I really like the fact that they feel their world is bigger than just us.”

Forty-year-old Yolanda Salinas of Baldwin Park says that in addition to saving the lives of the HIV-positive Latinas she works with, her activism has also been a lifesaver for herself and her son Samuel, now 15.

In 1990, Salinas was happily married and attending junior college. Then her world caved in. She was seven months pregnant when her husband was killed by a random bullet in a gang-related shooting. Soon after Samuel was born, her father and grandfather died. Devastated, Salinas was grateful for the new boyfriend who promised to help her work through her pain. He didn’t mention, however, that he was HIV-positive.

“When my son was one year and three months, I found out I was HIV-positive,” says Salinas. “I didn’t know anything about HIV and I thought I was going to walk out of that office and die a slow, terrible death. I thought, I might as well die numb. So I got involved with drugs—methamphetamine, marijuana, heroine, crack, everything. For the next seven years I was an addict, in and out of jail. My mother would watch Samuel when I was in jail. He went through so much.”

After Salinas finally got treatment (she’s been clean for nine years), her case manager helped her get a makeup consultant job at a local department store, despite her police record. But after four years of retail, Salinas wanted to do something more. Her case manager advised her of a job opening at Hollywood’s Women’s Care Center, working with HIV-positive Latinas, and, says Salinas, “I got the job.”

That was the beginning of a new era for Salinas. No longer was life simply a struggle to stay clean, earn a living and make up to her son for the bad times she had put him through. She was inspired, reaching out to sister Latinas to make sure they didn’t give up, helping them to actualize their chances at a good life despite their illness.

Realizing that the young Latina community was full of women like herself who were at risk of infection, Salinas decided to add AIDS-education to her efforts. She began attending health fairs and other events outside of work, and determined to empower her clients to speak out instead of hiding their diagnosis. Now her co-workers refer to her as “the activist.”

Her work has had a positive effect on her son, says Salinas. “Samuel lived through terrible chaos in his younger years, and finally got to have a better life. He likes my job now because it’s for a great cause and I’m much more motivated,” she says. “He’s really busy with school, sports, Urbandale Explorers and other community events, so he hasn’t come to many of my activities, but he helps out when he can. This year he dressed up as Santa Claus for our office party.

“I don’t spend as much time as I would want to with him, so that’s made him independent, which is good, but it also means he has a hard time listening to my advice,” Salinas continues. “But I’m not worried. It’s a blessing that Samuel’s making something out of himself. We encourage each other.”

Embarrassed to admit that’s he’s probably responsible for turning his son off to activism, John (not his real name) agreed to interview on condition of anonymity. A physician on a mission ever since completing his residency in inner city Detroit 25 years ago, John spends his workdays at an urban clinic, and vacations providing much-needed medical care to patients in underdeveloped countries.

Harboring secret hopes his brainy son would be inspired to follow in his footsteps, John brought him along to an annual clinic in a dirt-poor Dominican Republic mountain village.

“I’m fluent in Spanish and jumped into the work wholeheartedly, like always,” admits the father. “I hardly saw my son the whole time, but I didn’t worry, because the other doctors and I were helping so many people so much. These people have no medical care the rest of the year, so the help we give them is critical and often life-saving. And it really gives me a rush. I assumed my son was having an equally fulfilling and inspiring time. But I found out differently on the flight home.”

While John was enjoying his “rush,” his son, then 16 and with next to no Spanish, was on his own helping register long lines of patients and conducting them to temporary examining rooms.

“The conditions were truly pitiful,” John’s son remembers. “There was no running water, the electricity would go on and off—mostly off—and I couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand me. I just pointed all day long. I was lonely and depressed. We walked through the town and saw their homes. Most of them had holes dug in the ground for toilets with hordes of bugs surrounding them. It was really disgusting. When I got back from the trip I counted more than one hundred mosquito bites on my body.”

Although the son says it was a terrible vacation, he concedes that he’s glad he went. “It enabled me to see how much of the rest of the world must live, and it made me more thankful for the life I have here. It also made me sure I’d never want to do that kind of work.”

For longtime activist Jodie Evans, 52, co-founder of the national “women for peace” organization Code Pink, the choice rarely came down to deciding between her activism and her kids. She just incorporated her two sons in her work, whether they liked it or not.

“I was pregnant with them in activism,” says Evans, “I nursed them in activism, and I dragged them here, there and everywhere for activism. They lived their lives on the floors of campaign offices. Sometimes they would complain, but now they’re very proud of the work I do. And I think it was good for them. They learned a lot of skills and it made them very independent. People always commented on how mature they were.”

Evans proceeds to proudly divulge an example that some parents might be less quick to share: When her son, Jan Krajewski, now a 26-year-old artist, was 10, Evans says, she was going to a march for choice in Washington DC, and he really wanted to go too.

“We took a red-eye and the plane was full of parents with girls his age,” says Evans, “and the kids stayed up all night while the adults slept. So when we arrived in Washington, Jan was just dead tired, in no condition to march. I took him into the National Gallery and put him to sleep on a bench and told him I’d be back after the march. So I did the march without him, and when I got back, he was still asleep!”

Evans says her younger son, Matthew Palevsky, now 21, has always been an activist. When he was 12, he organized Santa Monica private school students to visit the City Council to lobby for gun control; he spent time in Scotland working on drug policy and was part of the effort to legalize medical marijuana in Rhode Island, where he’s now working for a Democratic congressional candidate. Evans is thrilled that Matthew has continued her legacy.

Wanting your child to carry on your legacy isn’t, of course, unique to activists. While not every parent has a trust fund to bestow, most endeavor to pass along their hard-earned lessons about life, happiness and fulfillment. For activists, that invariably includes a measure of service—and the fervent hope their kids will follow in their footsteps.

Claudia Pearce is a frequent contributor to WLT. As the daughter of activists in the Religious Right, her activism consists of trying to counteract her parents’ activism.

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