5 Questions for Anabel Darini

I grew up in a town called La Villa, way down at the tip of Texas. It’s very close to the Mexican border, so Mexican culture is very big there, and Spanish was my first language. Many families, including mine, have lived in the area since before it was part of the United States. We often say that we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. It’s very agricultural, and that’s what my first memories are about.

My mother and father were both farmworkers — they met in the fields — and their work was a big part of my childhood. In the summers, we traveled to Michigan so they could work seasonally there. The conditions were tough, with multiple families sharing one house that didn’t even have a bathroom. When I was 7 or 8, my father became a truck driver for a local sugar mill, and my mother went to school and became a teacher, and that gave us more stability. Seeing my parents pursue new careers for themselves inspired me to follow my own passion and become a teacher.

I went to college not far from my hometown. A professor there told me about a summer internship in science education at the U.S. Department of Energy. Doing that program and visiting Washington, D.C., for the first time opened my eyes to the different ways you can be a teacher and the opportunities that are out there, like scholarships and mentoring. It was the first time I thought, “There are other colleges and other places I can go.” Two years later, I came to Stony Brook University to get my master’s degree in applied math.

When I first started teaching, I didn’t know much about unions because there weren’t many in Texas. Over time I’ve gotten more involved with my union, and I will be joining the negotiation team for our next contract. As I’ve learned about labor history and unions and the work they do to make working conditions better for people, I think about how different it would have been for my mother and father if they’d had a union. I didn’t see it growing up, but I now realize that we are where we are because of the people who came before us, who fought for what we have now.

My focus isn’t on math, but on teaching. I try different ways of explaining things, and I change the curriculum — not to water it down, but to make it relevant and understandable to my students. We have such a diverse campus, and I see a lot of students who remind me of myself. College is where I learned about advocacy, and I want to be an advocate for my students.