Daniel Aguilar, 16, identifies as Latino.
Eric Hernandez, 17, said he’s Mexican.
Valerie Herrera, 16, calls herself Mexican-American.
Others might identify as Hispanic or Chicano, Mestizo, Spanish, indigenous or Afro-Latino, among many other possibilities.
Whatever the preferred identifier, all were united with hundreds of others who attended Highline College’s second annual Latino Summit Feb. 23-24.
About 60 Thomas Jefferson High School students, Aguilar, Hernandez and Herrera included, spent Feb. 24 listening to speakers who discussed topics ranging from identifying cultural identity, Latin influence in popular music and preparation for a first-generation college student.
“A growing percentage of our student body identifies or is identified as Hispanic or Latino and, with our revitalized heritage Spanish program in our international baccalaureate school, we’re really trying to promote and support both mother-tongue and the ability for our bi-cultural and bilingual students to be fully participating in … secondary education,” said Thomas Jefferson High School Spanish teacher Rebecca Friedman. “So, bringing them to a college campus, exposing them to professionals that are reflecting their own ethnicities, that is very important.”
Two of those professionals were Doris Martinez, Highline’s Director of Student Equity and Inclusion, and Adam-Jon Aparicio, a faculty counselor at the college.
Martinez told students of her own path toward identifying her cultural identity and asked students to participate in the “The Label Social,” an activity that prompted groups to write words that they thought corresponded with several Latin identities.
“I enjoyed it very much since there are so many different … this was just seven examples, and there’s more than just seven, but these are the main ones and it was pretty fun to separate how everyone else sees it,” Aguilar said, adding that he thought most of the words matched the cultural identities except for the word “immigrant.” “I don’t think that’s true, that every single Hispanic or Latino is [an] immigrant, because I think that word is used as a negative instead of as a positive.”
Rodriguez also enjoyed Martinez’s activity and learning about her Afro-Latina cultural identity.
“I’m in leadership at my school, so I was like, ‘Oh, we need to get her to our multicultural assembly’ because she conveyed a lot of good messages that, at this moment, we [don’t] allow other students to get, not just people who come to meetings like this,” Rodriguez said. “Doris was an amazing speaker that had a lot of good messages and had really creative ways of showing them.”
Rodriguez said Aparicio’s activity, which taught students about the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) community and the offensive language people often use as slang, was eye-opening. While some students from other schools had a hard time grappling with why a term would be offensive if they used it in a joking manner, Rodriguez said he believes Thomas Jefferson High School students are more accepting because of their strong anti-bullying initiative.
Herrera spent her time learning about how Hispanic culture has influenced music and art.
“It’s just a new experience and, because I’m Latino, I would like to gather with more people from my culture and see what they’re all about,” she said. “It was nice, too, because I get to meet a lot more Latinos that have the same aspirations in life that I do, from other schools.”
Thomas Jefferson’s Latino Student Union adviser Julie Cabanas said it’s important for Latino students to see students similar to them in an academic setting, recalling that one of the first questions a speaker asked was whether the students had ever “been in a room with this many people who looked like you.”
“My table said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been to a Quinceañera’ – a dance – but if the question had been ‘in an academic environment,’ they might not have raised their hands,” Cabanas said. “So I think, just by being here, seeing people who have been like you and where you’re at, those role models [are] No. 1, and being treated like a young adult in an academic environment is a big deal.”
Adrienne Chacon, principal at Thomas Jefferson High School, said Latinos make up the majority of the school’s minority population, coming in at 28 percent. The school also holds the highest population of refugee students in the district.
“I related so much about being the first generation in college,” Chacon said a speaker who discussed college readiness. “That was me, and what he’s talking about is for me. I’m the principal of this school, and it took me 6-7 years to get through college because my parents supported me while they could, but I had to quit for a year-and-a-half to work. And then I came back and I quit for another year to work again.”
Chacon said Thomas Jefferson will definitely be back next year.
And Rodriguez recommends students who don’t identify as Latino would benefit from the summit as well.
“There’s a lot of political issues going on; Donald Trump saying how Mexicans bring all of those bad people to America,” Rodriguez said. “Those are things that we don’t really talk about in school and we don’t try to discuss. It’s like a joking matter because nobody takes him seriously, but it’s still something that people think and have their opinions about. We as a community should be open to hearing them, but we should also be open to teaching about the Latino community and not just telling people what to think.”
Last year, approximately 300 students attended the Latino Summit. This year, about 350 students and teachers were invited from Evergreen, Franklin Pierce, Kentlake, Kent-Meridian, Kentwood, Mount Rainier and Tyee high schools.
