Wendy Mateo-Pascual is passionate about helping Latino immigrants. She understands how difficult it is to move to a new country and adapt to the culture, because she herself is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. Over the last two decades, Wendy Mateo-Pascual has worked in the Charlotte, N.C., area by leading several organizations and committees all with the goal of promoting equity and strengthening the Latino voice in her community. In October 2020, Mateo-Pascual was awarded the Dogwood Award, a prestigious award presented by North Carolina’s Attorney General to North Carolinians who are “dedicated to keeping people safe, healthy, and happy in their communities.” Much of Mateo-Pascual’s work centers around getting Latinos involved in civics and politics. Even ...
“Ever wondered why your neighborhood looks how it does?” Jennifer Rangel once asked herself this question. To find an answer, Rangel got a master’s degree in urban planning. Along the way, this Latina planner learned that discriminatory urban planning practices, like the zoning of land, had been used for white advantage for over a century, segregating communities and forging inequities in health and wealth among Latinos and other people of color. Rangel wanted to share what she learned. So she helped create workshops─then bilingual animated videos─to train neighborhood leaders, social workers, and others about zoning and how to get involved in zoning changes. “Understanding zoning is a critical step for residents as they try to undo previous harms and to ...
Since childhood, Christina Duarte has wanted to help people. Helping people is why she became chief of health education and promotion for the Health Department of Laredo, Texas, a predominantly Latino city on the U.S.-Mexico border. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, Duarte immediately looked for ways to help her community, which struggled with disparities in COVID-19 case and death rates. So Duarte shifted the city’s in-person health classes to a virtual platform to help those at home during the height of the coronavirus quarantine. “Our participants continued to ask, ‘are you even going to have classes again? My mental health is at stake,’” she said. “Then the numbers increased. We started working on mental health preparedness here at the health department. ...
Since James Rojas was child, he has been fascinated with urban spaces like streets, sidewalks, plazas, storefronts, yards, and porches. He started noticing how spaces made it easier or harder for families, neighbors, and strangers to interact. For example, his urban space experience got worse when his Latino family was uprooted from their home and expected to conform to how white city planners designed neighborhood streets for cars rather than for social connection. “[Latinos] are a humble, prideful, and creative people that express our memories, needs, and aspirations for working with our hands and not through language,” Rojas said. “However, there are no planning tools that measure this relationship between the body and space. Therefore, our mobility needs can be ...
To his students, he’s Mr. Rodríguez. To his fans, he’s the creator and author of the comic book and graphic novel series El Peso Hero. When he noticed a need for more Latino representation in comic books and literature, Héctor Rodríguez launched his long-time project as a web series in 2011. El Peso Hero is a Latino superhero who fights corruption, drug trafficking, immigration, and other real-life social and racial justice issues happening on the Texas/Mexico border. Now almost 10 years later, Rodríguez has printed several comic books, produced a radio novella and short film, and is working on developing El Peso Hero into a Hollywood production. Rodríguez first found inspiration for El Peso Hero during his childhood on the Texas/Mexico border.
Inspiration on the ...
You probably haven’t heard of Jennifer Morris. She’s an English Language Learner teacher at Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School in Philadelphia. But to her students from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Honduras, and Colombia, she is a hero. When Morris noticed that some of her immigrant students weren’t as engaged, she felt a need to add more Latino culture to her classroom. That’s why she helped bring Hispanic Heritage Month to her school in 2019.
Becoming an ELL Teacher
Morris has always wanted to make a difference in her classroom. Her aspirations to become a teacher began early. “From as long as I can remember, I was always playing school at home. I would beg my mom to go out to buy my sister prizes so I could teach her how to do certain math lessons,” Morris ...
Denise Hernández is a proud Chicana and a 5th generation San Antonian. She is the founder of Maestranza, an organization based in San Antonio that empowers community members through education, activism, and collaboration with other local social justice groups. She also coordinates events and constituent services for San Antonio City Councilman Roberto Treviño. MySA named her a “Rising Star in Their 20s.” She’s led speaker series, workshops, and even a TEDx talk. Denise Hernández is an educator, activist, and advocate for her community. And at only 29 years old, she’s just getting started. But the journey here was anything but easy. It took years of self-discovery, unlearning biases, and confronting the discrimination that her family has faced for ...
Ángela García wasn’t planning on becoming an artist. She entered college in the pre-med track, intending to go into a medical career. But then she started taking art history classes. And she kept taking them, despite still being in the pre-med track. “I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t like this. Maybe I don’t like the sciences as much as I thought I did. And I’m really interested in this art history curriculum.’ So, I switched over at the end of my sophomore year,” García said. Now she’s a senior art history major at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, with several large-scale art projects under her belt, having rekindled a passion for creative work from her childhood. “I used to do painting when I was younger but I kind of fell out of it for a ...
The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is surging across the U.S., and the American death toll has eclipsed 130,000. Worse, this crisis is widening the gap experienced by households without internet access — a long-festering problem that has made unequal educational opportunities even more unbalanced, said Jordana Barton, a senior advisor in community development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. "The COVID-19 pandemic has brought national attention to the digital divide—the gap experienced by households without internet access," Barton wrote. "Directives for social distancing and stay-at-home orders have made access to broadband an urgent necessity for families as they struggle to stay connected with schooling, jobs, health care, government assistance, and more."
The Digital ...
