“The Pushouts” and a Conversation with Drs. Victor Rios & Rebeca Mireles-Rios

The next Dean’s Lecture on Education, Diversity and Democracy, presented by UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, will feature a screening of the award-winning documentary The Pushouts (2018, dir. Katie Galloway) and a post film Q&A with Victor Rios and Rebeca Mireles-Rios from the film. This event, which is free and open to the public, takes place on Monday, April 29 at 6 pm in UC Santa Barbara’s MultiCultural Center Theater. The film’s tagline: “People call them ‘dropouts.’ They tell a different story.”

“I was in prison before I was even born.” So begins the story of Victor Rios—a high school dropout, gang member, and three-time felon by 15. But when a teacher’s quiet persistence, a mentor’s moral conviction, and his best friend’s murder converge, Rios’ path takes an unlikely turn. Two decades later Rios—by then a 36 year-old tenured UC professor, author and national thought leader on the school-to-prison pipeline—gets a call. “Hey, hotshot.” It’s Martín Flores, Rios’ high school mentor, who he hasn’t heard from in 15 years. “I know you’re busy, but I need you to come down to Watts this summer and work with my kids.” It’s a make it or break it moment for these youth, Flores—who directs a program serving 16 to 24 olds who haven’t finished high school—warns. As he puts it, “We get them on the right path now, or we lose them to the system.” Woven with archival material stretching back 25 years to Rios’ own troubled adolescence and including the contemporary story of this fateful summer in Watts, The Pushouts examines crucial questions of race, class, power, and the American dream at a particularly urgent time.

After the hour-long film, Dr. Victor Rios and Dr. Rebeca Mireles-Rios (Victor’s partner both in life and in volunteering to run the 2013 YO!Watts intensive summer program) will join Gevirtz School Dean Jeff Milem and SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences Charles Hale for an on-stage conversation about the film, a hard knocks story told with an unusual degree of hope and inspiration, systemic critique, and aesthetic nuance.