Aria Vue

INTERVIEW BY MOLLY MCNAMARA

ARIA VUE, STUDENT ACTIVIST AND PTSA BOARD MEMBER

SANTA YNEZ VALLEY UNION HIGH SCHOOL, SANTA YNEZ, CALIFORNIA

On her place of special meaning: My name is Aria Vue, and I am a senior in high school at Santa Ynez Valley High School where we are today. I went to Dunn Middle school and I then after I was in online school and then school in Connecticut where my grandmother lives for a semester. But all throughout that time, any time I said, oh yeah, I might, I might go to Santa Ynez High School at some point, um, anyone I said that to would immediately give just the most horrible reaction and say, “Oh, no, don't go there. It's horrible. You don't want to go there. It's gross.” That kind of thing. And so I had this sort of preconceived notion of what the high school would be like. And then after my semester in Connecticut, I sort of realized that that was some opportunity that I had taken advantage of all the opportunities there. I had joined every club and gone to every school production just because it was such a unique experience and something I normally wouldn't get the chance to do.

And it had been so great that I thought I should take that same, um, same sort of outlook and same attitude towards Santa Ynez high school. And so I agreed to come here and at least try it. And even though it has a lot of problems, I have been able to take advantage of lots of the opportunities on campus and I hope to have some positive impact on the school and the community here. And I ended up enjoying it a lot and learning a lot, both from an academic standpoint and from the high school community. So that's why this is special to me because I think what it helped me realize that I'm going to get out of any experience or any opportunity what I put into it, and that if I go in with a negative outlook, I'll probably have a bad time. So I should just be open to trying new things. And if you hope that things could be good, then they might be. This, this school, has it met a lot of my expectations about the quality of certain aspects of parts of the administration and in other ways, like the great teachers and the really caring staff has totally exceeded what anybody told me about it. And I wouldn't have been able to realize that unless I had gone.

On her attendance of the 2023 Seneca Falls Convention: The main impetus for going to the East Coast this time was to attend the Centennial Convention of the Equal Rights Amendment in Seneca Falls, which a hundred years ago, June 21st, 1923. There was a women's convention in Seneca Falls at the First Presbyterian Church of Seneca Falls and this immediately followed the 19th Amendment’s publishing. So, these women were writing on this sort of wave of success and decided that the next issue they were going to tackle was constitutional sex equality and gender equality. And so, they drafted the Equal Rights Amendment And since then it has been a hundred years, and this has still not been published. Modern day advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment gathered in Seneca Falls and we were maybe double or possibly even triple what they were a hundred years ago. And we were so much more diverse. And this time there were a lot of youth involved. Before it had been primarily older women. So, it was really great to see how the movement has evolved and and also sort of heartbreaking that we had to be there a hundred years later, that we still don't have this um, we still don't have any mention of gender equality in the Constitution even a hundred years after. And so, I was there to fight for that and to gather together with other organizers and it was essentially to work on our strategy for how we're going to Cross the final steps and get this amendment published, because in the 70s it was passed in Congress and from then on it only needed 38 states to ratify it. And after those states ratified it, it would be free to be published. We got the 38th state in 2020. Um, but there was a deadline in the fine print of the preamble on the bill that would have passed the amendment. So, it was not published.The President at the time, told the archivist not to publish it, even though legally and constitutionally it has every right to be published. Um, so we still do not have a published gender equality amendment in the Constitution. We were there to, to sort of strategize and put pressure on Congress and the President to put put this in the Constitution.

On one of her greatest accomplishments: Essentially in the city of Solvang, recently I've been more involved with, with city politics, as Solvang has been likewise politicized in the same manner as the school. There was an ordinance up for…not an ordinance, I think it was, an approval of some banners and some crosswalks for Pride in Solvang. And the city council had made it clear that they were not in favor of any display of Pride in Solvang. They had rejected a proposal to paint the crosswalks and have banners all through Copenhagen Street and around the city. And so, when we went back, when, the Rainbow House and Pride went back to them, they sort of shrunk themselves and cut their proposal to only eight banners. And that was still up for very serious debate. The city council, particularly the three men on the council kept going back and forth and they just, it was very clear that they did not want any display of pride. And, and so a large group of people, there were a lot of people there weren't enough spaces in the city hall. We had to, you know, pile out into the sides, into the lobby. They opened the door to the outside and people watched from outside because there were so many people that were there to support, um, SYV pride and just the general queer community in Solving. And I wasn't planning on speaking, but I was just so infuriated by what some of the City Council members were saying about how it was inherently political. These banners, that it would be bad press or it would, you know, deter tourists, tourists, and everything just made me so angry that I went up and I spoke and I told the city council and particularly the three members that weren't in favor of this, the perspective of, what I believe to be the, the greater perspective of most young people because it was only adults speaking. And a lot of them were in favor of the rainbows. It was a big group of people, but none of them were touching on the fact that the youth living in Solvang were just generally disgusted by the blatant homophobia and, and that, you know, I see every day the kids I'm in classes with that are applying to college and they just want to leave. They're trying to leave. They don't want to be here anymore. And it's because of intolerance like this. And I told them that. And I think I think it did have an impact. Hopefully, um, because the mayor who had been waffling back and forth, and it really didn't seem like he was going to vote in our favor, but he did, and he said it would be okay and he mentioned just everything that was going on and the impact it was having.