The Kenwood Neighborhood
"Unlimited Potential was Born in Kenwood."
When Jearnine Wagner and her colleagues established Unlimited Potential in the summer of 1966, the neighborhood of Kenwood was a small, mostly African American and Mexican American community located on the Northside of San Antonio. Some observers referred to the neighborhood as a “poverty pocket,” or a comparatively poor area surrounded by wealthy suburbs. Kenwood is located west of McCullough Avenue, across from one of the most affluent residential areas of San Antonio, Olmos Park.
Wagner worked closely with Joyce Sowells, principal of Sojourner Truth Elementary in Kenwood. Together with student instructors from Trinity, they implemented a semester project titled "I See Me," with 50 school children. The project aimed to provide an opportunity for each child to gain an enhancement of their identity by having an idea and following the idea through to a finished communicable form. Students could choose from various art mediums: theater, painting, sculpture, music, writing. In addition, the children were taken on field trips in order to observe other creative works to stimulate ideas.
Sowells and the students found the project to be so beneficial that she continued it throughout the next school year. Student instructors from Trinity volunteered their time and students of the elementary were free to come and go as they liked, but coalesced with a spring production.
However, before the program found its rhythm, Unlimited Potential quickly developed an awareness of the disconnect middle-class instructors and under-served students and came to understand that the success of the program would be a result of how well the community was involved with the project.
Provided is an exceprt from page 11 of the Unlimited Potential report that expresses this awareness and education in the instructors.
Confronted with the separation and the differences, the teachers began to try to learn to. see through the children's eyes. They had to begin to enter into the world of Kenwood and attempt to understand what life was in Kenwood. This meant many hours of home visits, of time spent in the community, of attendance at church services , conversations with priests, teachers, ministers, storekeepers, and people in the street. In order to understand Kenwood they had to understand themselves better; they had to examine their neighborhood, their environment. Doing this was a second phase of discovery.
By attempting to learn about the differences between themselves and the children, they discovered the similarities. They found how much alike they were, and in what ways. The teachers began to see that often the same forces moved in the children's lives that moved in their own. Only these forces in the lives of the children looked different and were unfamiliar in form.
Because they had been looking for a form similar to their own, and had not found it, the -teachers had assumed the children lacked certain concepts. They discovered that the children had these same concepts, but they were expressed in a different way. Slowly the barriers to communication began to be broken. By discovering universals common to both of them, the teacher found a way to touch the child.
Stereotypes ceased to control thought on both sides. The teachers perceived the children in new ways; the children saw the teacher in new ways. They both found that the other had strengths they had not expected. And they began to understand that when they failed each other, it was not because either wanted it that way but because they had not yet found the way to communicate. They did not give up as easily as before. Failure came to be regarded more as a temporary setback, not a bitter judgment pronounced by one upon the other. The teachers' report began to change in tone. No longer did they say, 'I can't get through to these kids.' Now they said, 'I haven't found the way to communicate this concept yet, but I have some new ideas I'm going to try.' The children were no longer passive, but began to take an active voice in the classes. They did not fear and distrust the teacher as much, nor regard the teacher as alien. They were more honest, open, and aggressive about their thoughts, reactions, and ideas."
Kenwood Players
As a branch from Unlimited Potential, The Kenwood Players were formed. With guidance of Wagner mentees Johnny Gutierrez and Cindy Ridgeway Herbert (and Later Charles Jarrell), the troupe presented at Hemisfair and toured Texas with a review of songs, dance, and dramatizations of real-life situations.
The troup lasted several years, eventually being able to tour the states. Gutierrez said in an San Antonio Express News article from March 4, 1973 that the Kenwood Players was never about getting people to learn how to act, but to study problems by using drama.
