Roots, Resilience, and the Road Ahead: What Hispanic Heritage Month Means to Me

Every year from September 15 to October 15, Hispanic Heritage Month invites the country to celebrate the histories, cultures, and contributions of Latiné communities. For me, it is also a season of reflection: on where I come from, on who carried me here, and on how a path that began with a lot of unanswered questions led me to the work I do today.

Where My Story Begins

My dad was born and raised in Boyle Heights, in East Los Angeles. He remembers the Chicano walkouts and the Chicano rights movement, not as chapters in a textbook but as events unfolding in his own neighborhood. He experienced firsthand an educational system that was not built with him in mind.

That experience was shared by generations of Mexican American students. In the 1960s, many Chicano students in Los Angeles attended overcrowded, under-resourced schools. Too many were steered into vocational tracks that pointed toward manual labor rather than college. Young women were often expected to follow a different script, one where marriage and motherhood came before, or even instead of, a diploma. Speaking Spanish at school could bring punishment, and the curriculum rarely reflected their history, their language, or their brilliance.

In March 1968, thousands of students walked out of several East Los Angeles high schools, including schools in and around Boyle Heights. Supported by teachers such as Sal Castro and by community organizers, they called for bilingual education, curriculum that included Mexican American history, better facilities, more Latino teachers and counselors, and an end to the punishment of students for speaking Spanish. These "blowouts" were acts of hope. The students were declaring that they belonged in the classroom and that their education deserved to be excellent. They were part of a broader Chicano movement that fought for civil rights, political voice, land, labor justice, and cultural pride across the Southwest.

In search of better opportunity, my dad's family left Boyle Heights and moved to California's Central Valley, where they worked as migrant farm workers. Their arrival coincided with another defining chapter of the movement. Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers were organizing for dignity, fair wages, and safe working conditions. The marches, including the historic pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento, moved through the Valley and along Highway 99, right in my family's backyard.

These events shaped my family, my outlook on life, and, eventually, my work.

A Pathway No One Explained

Education researchers often talk about the "hidden curriculum," the unwritten rules of schooling that students are expected to know without being told. I lived inside that concept long before I had a name for it.

My family's own experiences with school had taught them to survive the system, not to navigate it, and no one had ever explained to them how the pathway to a four-year university works. That was not a failure of love or effort. It was a failure of access. The knowledge that opens those doors, like which courses matter, why grades in high school carry long-term weight, and how preparation connects to opportunity, simply never reached our kitchen table.

It did not reach me at school either. I did not have a counselor who talked with me about college, and no one in the system guided me toward a college pathway. I got a D in sophomore English, and no one told me that mattered. I learned it was a problem as a senior, when it was too late to fix. UC and CSU admission requires a C or better in the A–G courses, and that one grade closed the door to applying to four-year universities.

So I started where many Latiné and first-generation students do, at community college, in elementary algebra. As a chicana who would go on to study biochemistry and chemistry, I began my STEM journey several rungs below where the system assumed STEM students begin. I want to be clear that community college was not a lesser path. It was the path that held the door open for me, as it does for so many students in the Central Valley.

Then I found MESA. For the first time, someone was guiding me toward transfer and down an actual educational pathway. Someone saw my potential and showed me the map. I still had to figure out a great deal on my own, and I forged my way through many of my degrees with persistence, resourcefulness, and a lot of trial and error. That journey took me to a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UC Santa Cruz, an M.S. in Chemistry at Fresno State, and now a Ph.D. in Applied Social Justice from Dominican University. Every step carried the same lesson: with the right guidance, none of this had to be so hard to find.

Remembering the Boarding School Era

Our story is not the only one of an education system designed without us in mind. On September 30, in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, Native communities and their allies observe Orange Shirt Day and the National Day of Remembrance for U.S. Indian Boarding School Victims. It is a day to honor the children who were taken, the families who were separated, and the survivors and descendants who carry this history forward.

For well over a century, the U.S. government, often in partnership with religious institutions, operated boarding schools designed to assimilate Native children. The best known, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, opened in 1879. Its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, summarized the philosophy with the infamous line "Kill the Indian, and save the man." Children were removed from their families and communities. Their hair was cut, their names were changed, and their languages and ceremonies were forbidden. Many were put to work in place of receiving an education. A federal investigation by the Department of the Interior identified more than 400 federally operated schools and documented at least 973 children who died in their care, a number investigators expect to grow as research continues. In 2024, the federal government issued a formal apology.

I name this history during Hispanic Heritage Month for several reasons. Many Latiné families carry Indigenous ancestry, languages, and knowledge, and the Chicano movement drew deeply from Indigenous roots. The Central Valley where I live and work is also the homeland of Yokuts peoples. The punishment of Spanish in my dad's classrooms and the suppression of Native languages in boarding schools grew from the same belief: that a student's home language, culture, and community were obstacles to be removed rather than strengths to be built upon.

I also name the resilience that followed. Native communities are leading language revitalization, healing, and truth-telling efforts, including the work of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. Their leadership shows what becomes possible when communities reclaim their own stories.

The Talent We Lost, and the Talent We Can Honor

When I look at these histories side by side, I think about how many Latiné and Indigenous people were harmed by the education system, and how much talent and knowledge was lost or dismissed as "not legitimate." Think of the potential scientists, engineers, teachers, and physicians who were redirected before anyone asked what they might become. Think of the wisdom that families carried but that schools never learned to recognize.

Scholar Tara Yosso describes this wealth as community cultural wealth: the aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capital that students of color bring with them. My family had all of it. They had aspiration for a better future, navigational skill for moving between worlds, and the resilience to keep going. The system just wasn't designed to see it.

Why I Do This Work

Education has always held two possibilities. It can be a tool for sorting, silencing, and assimilating, or it can be what Paulo Freire called a practice of freedom. I believe education can be liberatory, but liberation does not happen by accident. We have to do the work of examining and dismantling the systems we inherited, the ones that benefit the few, so we can build ones that work for everyone.

That belief is why I find deep meaning in removing educational barriers in STEM. As an administrator at College of the Sequoias, a Hispanic Serving Institution in the heart of the Central Valley, I have the privilege of working with students who look like my family and carry stories like mine. I help others understand the experiences of non-traditional students, including those who arrive through community college, work full time, care for family, or are the first in their families to pursue a STEM degree. Most importantly, I work toward an educational system that accepts, values, and grows every student, and that treats their languages, cultures, and ways of knowing as assets that strengthen science itself.

I know this path personally. These students are not "at risk." They are full of promise, and often they simply need a system that is ready for them, and someone who explains the map before it's too late.

A Season of Gratitude

During Hispanic Heritage Month, I reflect on my roots, my family, and the sacrifices my students and our community make every day: the late nights, the long commutes, the family responsibilities carried quietly alongside coursework. I think about the raw grit it takes to persevere, and I am in awe of it.

I also think about the beauty of my people and our stories of triumph. Our ancestors and elders laid the groundwork through walkouts, marches, and everyday acts of courage, and we get to build on it, in solidarity with the Native communities whose own fight for educational justice continues. My hope for the future is a world where every student walks into a classroom and finds their culture, their language, and their brilliance reflected back at them, where no one's potential is discarded, and where STEM belongs to all of us.

To my dad, my family, my students, and my community: thank you. Gracias por todo. ¡Seguimos adelante!