For some people, social injustice is just something to talk about at the dinner table. 

For Collin College dual credit English teacher Ana Saenz, social injustice is something she actively fights against. 

“Activism is answering the call for change,” Saenz said. “It’s seeing a type of injustice that is there and then calling for that change through your own efforts, through the efforts of the community around you, and just searching for a constant need to right injustice.”

A member of the Next Generation Action Network, Saenz was first introduced to activism in middle school but has become more involved as she’s become an adult. She believes activism can cause change in many forms, none less important or influential than another.

“Activism can be more than just protesting. Activism can be these ideas, implementing these new ideas, these new causalities and different things like that,” Saenz said. “The reason activists are so needed is because they improve society. Without activism, we don’t realize how much further we can actually go.”

Though the network rallies for many social change issues, Saenz devotes her time to a few she’s most passionate about. 

“As of right now, I am most active in the Black Lives Matter movement. After that, I am most active in volunteer work for ICE cases, so being able to communicate with immigrants, being able to translate for them,” Saenz said. “And I have attended several protests and rallies for LGBTQ rights. So those are my three, but for now, the Black Lives Matter movement has tied in so many of those that you’re starting to see them be more united in that front.”

Having parents that immigrated from Guatemala, she feels strongly about helping any immigrant who has to come to the United States in search of a better life for themselves and their family.

“I’m the daughter of an immigrant, and they came over illegally, and I’m the product of it, so I can’t not help my people. I can’t not help every immigrant who has gone through this,” Saenz said. 

Following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and Daniel Prude, she attended several protests and supported other protesters fighting for justice.

“I would try to get as many friends as possible together over the summer so that we could do- we call them snack packs- they were protest kits for any of the protesters who went out,” Saenz said. “They would have tear gas- water, in case they got tear-gassed- bandages, Tylenol, peroxide. We started that back in June, after the first wave of protests.”

Saenz maintains that the work that she and NGAN do should be considered human rights work because it focuses on the problems that threaten lives. 

“We’re discussing; if we want to talk black lives matter, we’re talking about life expectancy. We’re talking it’s literally unhealthy to be a black man in America because of this possibility,” Saenz said. “We are talking about actual rights of living. Your right to a happy and fruitful life includes the right not to be killed and the right to be able to trust certain leaders.”

In her class, she assigns readings and assignments used to help expose students to different opinions and ideas. 

“Ms. Saenz has given us multiple readings that incorporate various social issues and allow us to see and understand different viewpoints of social topics,” student, senior Elizabeth Boss said. “We’ve also had some discussion posts going over similar social topics and what we felt the message of said passages was.” 

Boss feels that Saenz’s teachings don’t only have to stay in the classroom. 

“I think that many of these social topics can be taken into our lives,” Boss said. “Like history, how it is repeated, and how we feel we need to ‘act out’ or ‘misbehave’ to be heard.”

As a teacher, Saenz thinks that the curriculum concerning history and literature should be more in-depth for high school students and that students shouldn’t have to wait until college to learn particular things. 

“Once I got to college and I started learning actual histories and reading these different books, I was like I wish I had known about this sooner,” Saenz said. “What I really wish is that we could get an education system that trusts the minds of our youth enough to be able to start sharing a little bit more because the sooner you share, and the sooner you know, even as a child, that is the society that gets created.” 

Saenz believes that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that each person should educate themselves on issues going on today in order to make informed decisions.

“An education can be both a college degree or it could be investing the time and educating yourself through reading, through interviews, through anything like that,” Saenz said. “It’s you taking that time to understand more of what’s going on, and once you understand that, then you know how to prevent this stuff from happening.”