Notice, Name, and Build
June 8, 2026
Bobby Gaytan’s mother worked the fields. While most children were expected to stay there with their parents, Maria Luisa Gaytan insisted that her six children always be enrolled in school. She did not stop at her own family. Maria Luisa passed out college applications, helped families fill out their income tax forms, interpreted, and navigated systems that most people found impenetrable. There were often long lines at her door of people seeking her aid.
She kept at it. Maria Luisa went on to earn a GED and a teaching certificate in college and worked as a liaison for migrant families in her school district. Her kitchen table was a command center for change.
The building where the Wassmuth Center does its work is named for another Idahoan who understood farm labor: Governor Philip E. Batt, a former onion farmer who advanced fair wages and safer working conditions for farm laborers. He also founded the Idaho Human Rights Commission. Maria Luisa and Governor Batt never worked side by side, but they were working toward the same goal. One through grassroots aid. The other through institutional authority. Both through the power they had.
After his mother died, Bobby began seeing butterflies everywhere. Travelers. Carriers of beauty. And then he did something with that. His mother’s work — the kitchen table, the tax forms, the college applications, the long lines at the door — could have disappeared. Most unglamorous work does. But Bobby noticed what his mother had built. And he named it — in color, in light, in a painting that now hangs in a building dedicated to human rights.
At the Wassmuth Center, we call this practice Notice and Name Bright Spots. It is the discipline of paying close enough attention to your community that you can see where the world you want is already being built. It requires looking past what is broken — not to ignore it, but to identify what is working.
That discipline matters right now. It is June in Idaho, and there is plenty to worry about. The 2026 legislative session brought bills targeting immigrant communities, trans Idahoans, and the basic question of who belongs here. It would be easy — and not inaccurate — to call this a hard time for human rights. But what you pay attention to determines what you can build.
During this session, while harmful bills moved through committee after committee, over a thousand Idahoans contacted their lawmakers. Faith leaders showed up at the statehouse in solidarity with immigrant and trans neighbors. And SB 1293 passed, restoring access to crime victim services for undocumented Idahoans. For years, that access had been blocked. People who experienced domestic violence or assault could be denied help because of their immigration status. This bill’s passage didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people had been doing the work for years: building relationships, showing up to testify, making the case that everyone in Idaho deserves safety. If you only watched for what went wrong this session, you would miss it.
Every community has bright spots. Most go unnamed, which means they cannot be learned from and they cannot grow. Maria Luisa Gaytan’s work at her kitchen table could have been one of them. But her son saw it, and named it, and now she stands on the wall of a human rights center in Boise — in a wide straw hat and work gloves, a hoe in her hands, monarch butterflies lifting off around her, smiling.