An Educator and an Activist

Maya Suzuki Daniels fights for her students and her community.

By KATHEE YAMAMOTO

Maya Suzuki Daniels’ dedication as a teacher and her role in fighting for students and her community are inspired by generations of educators and a heritage of activism.

Her late grandfather, Iwao Lewis Suzuki, was an award-winning artist and noted peace activist in the Bay Area.

And her family’s history of incarceration at Gila River in Arizona, even while Lewis Suzuki served with the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Service, informs her co-founding of the Harbor Peace Patrol, volunteers organized last year to track ICE activity and alert the community during federal raids that targeted and swept up anyone suspected of being undocumented.

At the Day of Remembrance program in February, Nikkei Progressives joined with the Harbor Peace Patrol at the Japanese Fishing Memorial in San Pedro, where the Terminal Island community — which had thrived before World War II — was rounded up and removed to camps.

The parallels between past and present injustices framed the commemoration.

ICE had been using the Coast Guard base there as a staging area, but withdrew just a week before the Day of Remembrance event.

When Suzuki Daniels was named one of this year’s Women of Impact honorees in March, Los Angeles City Councilmember Tim McOsker attributed ICE’s decision to leave the Terminal Island area “to the vigilance of community members and especially the Harbor Area Peace Patrol,” recognizing her for this accomplishment.

The victory of organized efforts over daunting circumstances is something Suzuki Daniels draws from the classroom itself, including the past 12 years teaching high school English in San Pedro.

“When we originally started the Harbor Peace Patrol this past summer (with husband Elijah Chiland, also a teacher), it was teachers that we knew,” she says. “We met in another teacher’s backyard, and we got trained by a teacher. So the whole thing from the beginning has been a project of teachers.

“And my patrols like to tease me about our binders and our organizational systems. But I think it’s because I’m used to pulling off a group project, with 30 students, so I kind of approached it like that!

“My mom Fumi is a retired family physician, but her mother was a teacher….and her mother’s mother was also a teacher.”

Suzuki Daniels’ father David is a retired special education teacher.

With her family background, did she always know she was going to be a teacher?

“Much to my dad’s chagrin, I think,” she laughs. “Because he understood that it’s an underpaid and a disrespected profession.” But she remembers leaning into teaching “since I was really little. I taught my younger brother to read! And I think that experience was really formative for me.”

Her advocating for students has been extending beyond the classroom and includes her involvement with Rethinking Schools, a nonprofit “dedicated to strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism.”

In an article she co-wrote with Chiland for the organization, they quote Ron Gochez, a fellow teacher and member of Union del Barrio, a community organization that supported the formation of the Harbor Peace Patrol:

“I think teachers make strong organizers because we are used to speaking with people on a daily basis and getting the best out of our students. Similarly, when we organize in the community, we try our best to get community members to participate in the work and to give it their best as well.”

Suzuki Daniels is also active in the UTLA (United Teachers Los Angeles).

“When I left my charter school in 2018, I was very invested in having
a union because I hadn’t had a union while I was there,” she recalls. “And I saw how much not having a voice in the educational system impacted teachers and ultimately students.”

She was “part of an Asian educator collective through Teach for America, and after our 2019 strike, we decided to reach out to [UTLA leader] Arlene Inouye. We really admired her, what it takes to be a Japanese American woman in the labor movement.”

Through Inouye, Suzuki Daniels says, they were introduced to educator/activist Cecily Myart-Cruz, who became the first woman of color to serve as president of the UTLA. From meeting “these really powerful women,” she explains, she became more involved with union efforts.

Now, she’s on the Harbor Area Steering Committee; on the Political Action Committee of Educators (PACE); and is a CTA (California Teachers Association) State Council delegate.

“I was recently elected to serve on the Harbor Area Board of Directors. My term starts in July.”

In appearing last month in a webinar presented by Rethinking Schools, with a panel of teacher leaders in other major cities, she spoke about another important influence:

“I grew up in rural Montana, and that impacts how I organize. Because there, first and foremost, you’re not going to get along with everyone. And you can’t afford to make enemies in a town with 1,500 people … and you don’t know who’s related to who. But secondly, you don’t know who you’re going to need to pull you out of a ditch in a blizzard!

“I think that’s so important when it comes to how we approach and navigate organizing. It’s understanding that we are not all going to get along.”

In addition to having diverse geographical experiences to draw on for her teaching and her activism, Suzuki Daniels also has a rich cultural history. “My mom is mixed Japanese Filipina. And my dad is Lithuanian and Polish. I think that being a mixed person allows you to see a lot of duality in things.

“Your world view is always bifurcated. It’s always a matter of your mom explains things to you – the world, your family’s history – one way, your dad explains it in another way. And then you have to kind of grapple with that, you’re synthesizing from a very young age.”

She especially enjoys teaching teenagers. “They give me so much faith in human beings!”

She adds, “My favorite part of teaching is actually not what I necessarily do for the students, but often what they do for me. They’ll bring in resources, readings and questions. Or they’ll bring in a video that they saw online, and they’ll want to talk it through and make sense of it. And then to facilitate that among students, to really get to learn from them and their life experiences is really special.”

Now that it’s safer to do so, Suzuki Daniels likes to take her two young children out to Terminal Island, “just to absorb the area … it’s so beautiful.”

In guiding their own development, she notes, “I think being a teacher, you see the remarkable capacity that young people have for understanding concepts. But it’s hard to explain something like racism to a kid.

“And I think there’s a balance — you do want your children to have the freedom to explore and make up their own minds.

“My parents taught me to have healthy debates and disagreements. So I think with my children too, I’m not gonna tell my son that something is right or something is wrong, as much as I’m gonna tell him, here’s what I believe.

“And more than anything else, and this is something I try to bring into my classroom as well, you have the right to hold a view. You also have the right to change a view based on new information or maturity or relationships.”

Through every challenging situation, Suzuki Daniels finds strength in family, including the memory of both of her grandfathers.

She has the paintings of Lewis Suzuki “in my home, everywhere … everywhere.”

“I actually have one of his paintings tattooed on my leg,” she laughs. “A memorial piece that I got after he passed — his koi fish — to carry him with me.

“And then I have a Johnny Cash tattoo on my other leg … a little bit of a tribute to my other grandfather who passed away maybe a year and a half ago. Both sides of my dad’s family are from Detroit, a lot of auto workers – a very, very strong union history.

“So I always feel like I have my grandpas holding me up!”

She recalls “the first press conference we did at Terminal Island” last June, announcing the formation of the Harbor Peace Patrol, to inform residents of their rights and to monitor ICE activity.

“My grandfather taught me the values of peace, justice, equality and compassion,” she announced then. “These are the values that guide me today, and that I see reflected in my neighbors here in San Pedro.”

Looking back to that day, Suzuki Daniels says, “My cousin Abby Chun was there — our great-grandfathers were brothers. And it was so moving because I could feel our ancestors looking at us and being so proud!”