Maria Reyes Biography

Maria Reyes joined her father and grandparents in the family business of gangs in Southern California when she was 11 years old. Her early professional path was predictable: she spent most of her adolescent years in and out of juvenile detention centers. Nonetheless, she was one of the fortunate residents in her area. During the summer before her freshman year of high school, she witnessed more than 20 classmates slain by gang violence. Reyes' probation officer, in search of anything, anything, enrolled her at Long Beach's Woodrow Wilson High School. It's one of those locations that you won't find in any SoCal tourist brochures or on any maps of movie celebrity houses. Her exam results were similarly expected, and she was assigned to Erin Gruwell's English class, which was full of unteachable students. However, things do happen from time to time. Everything may change in an instant. The Diary of the Freedom Writers is accurate. When school began in the autumn of 1994, Erin Gruwell, a first-year teacher who was young and ambitious, was assigned to Room 203 at Woodrow Wilson High School. Reyes, a mix of African-Americans, Latinos, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Caucasians, was one of her unteachable kids. They didn't like her, each other, or themselves, and they didn't care what Gruwell had to say to them. They even made wagers on how long she would endure. Gruwell, on the other hand, did what practically no one else had done: she stayed with them. For everyone in the room, a single instant altered everything. A racist caricature of one of the African-American pupils was being sent about by the classmates. Gruwell snapped and snatched it, comparing it furiously to Nazi caricatures of Jews during the Holocaust. She waited for a response, but all she got were perplexed looks. The Holocaust had never occurred to these children. She was taken aback. She took a step back and attempted a new tactic, inquiring how many people had been fired at. They didn't know much about history, but she was curious about what they did know. It becomes out that they were aware of the threat of violence. Almost everyone had a horror story to share, and some of them started removing their shirts to show off their wounds in a battle-scar show-and-tell. For the second time in minutes, she was stunned and had her paradigm pounded. Her life, and theirs, would never be the same. She recommended Elie Wiesel's Night, Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, and Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo, all novels about teens who overcame adversity. Her pupils quickly developed strong bonds with Wiesel, Frank, and Filipovic. Each student began maintaining a secret diary in which they detailed their experiences with drugs, physical and emotional abuse, and their reactions to Gruwell's unusual teaching techniques. The kids went from indifference and dissatisfaction to a close-knit, determined family after naming themselves The Freedom Writers in homage to the Civil Rights pioneers the Freedom Riders. They wrote about gangs, immigration, narcotics, violence, abuse, death, anorexia, dyslexia, teen love, weight difficulties, divorce, and suicide, among other topics. They wrote about anything and everything they could think of. The Freedom Writers Diary, a number one New York Times bestseller, was collected and published from the diaries. They gathered funds so that Miep Gies, the Dutch widow who harbored the Franks during WWII, could pay them a visit in California. Zlata Filipovic accepted the Freedom Writers' several invites to Long Beach and spent five days with them exchanging stories and experiences. The Freedom Writers arranged Echoes of the Soul in 1997 to raise funds for a trip to Washington, D.C., where they visited the Holocaust Museum and submitted their journal to Secretary of Education Richard Riley. They visited Anne Frank's residence in Amsterdam, concentration camps in Germany and Poland, and Zlata Filipovic's hometown of Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, in 1999. Since then, Reyes has spoken to educators, at-risk children, and community leaders around the country about the importance of education and the need to offer pupils a second opportunity.

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