Activist Voices Latino Concerns

When the father of Maribel Hernandez ’04 tells his friends that his daughter goes to Harvard, they don’t believe him.

That’s because many kids don’t even finish high school in the Houston neighborhood that the family—which immigrated to this country from Mexico City when Maribel was 13—calls home.

But now Mr. Hernandez, a forklift operator, has Maribel’s graduation announcements in hand, and his daughter is coming to the end of her tenure as one of the Harvard Latino community’s most prominent voices.

For Maribel Hernandez, Harvard provided the interest in ethnicity and the intellectual framework that may have inspired a life-long commitment to helping underpriviliged immigrants.

EMBRACING ETHNIC ISSUES

Starting in English as a Second Language courses when she first arrived in Texas, Hernandez quickly worked her way into honors-level classes and was recruited on a full scholarship to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy.

Active in both student government and Free Tibet at Exeter, she says that it was only after arriving at Harvard that her ethnic identity was awakened.

“I started becoming more aware of my ethnicity,” says Hernandez, a social studies concentrator in Adams House.

A high school friend introduced her to RAZA, the campus Mexican-American group, and she soon became deeply involved in the community, serving as the group’s president in 2002.

Hernandez also did a stint as co-chair of Concilio Latino—the University’s umbrella Latino organization—and was active in HACIA Democracy, which ran model Organization of American States (OAS) conferences for high school students in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

But it was as president of RAZA that Hernandez participated in one of the Latino community’s most prominent campaigns during the past four years, helping to lead a 2002 push for the establishment of a Latino Studies department.

Hernandez and other community leaders met with a number of professors and administrators, including University President Lawrence H. Summers, to plead their case.

They presented Summers with a petition of over 100 signatures calling for the creation of a department.

Summers opposed the initiative, citing the resources offered by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Committee on Ethnic Studies, and warned against “narrowly defined administrative curricular entities.”

But Hernandez—who herself will graduate with a certificate from the Rockefeller Center—continues to assert the academic importance of studying Latino culture and history as a distinct field.

“You can’t just lump everyone together,” she says, adding that even without the new department, she would still like to see more Latino professors being hired and more course offerings in the field.

AN INTEREST IN IMMIGRATION

Having matriculated to Exeter thanks to a minority recruitment program, Hernandez has spent her college years seeking to help minority and underprivileged high school students take advantage of similar opportunities at Harvard.

As the Mexican-American coordinator for the undergraduate admissions office, she spoke with prospective students and made recruiting trips to high schools in poor areas, encouraging kids to set their sights on college.

“We encourage them to go beyond what they see in

their communities,” she says.

Hernandez used her social studies senior thesis as a way to examine the lives of immigrants from an intellectual perspective.

For her research, Hernandez documented the lives of 22 illegal Mexican immigrants and their families in Los Angeles.

She found that—contrary to many of the arguments made by Weatherhead University Professor Samuel P. Huntington in his recent work, Who Are We?—these undocumented immigrants developed a type of citizenship not described by their legal status by becoming active members in their communities.

“By examining the ways in which undocumented immigrants are already living lives that have features we associate with citizenship—involvement in civic activities, political participation through activism and (clearly) economic integration—Hernandez is showing how merely legal understandings of citizenship are out of step with people’s lived reality,” Christopher Sturr, a lecturer in social studies who advised Hernandez’s thesis, wrote in an e-mail.

The experience of writing the thesis has also led Hernandez to change her postgraduate plans. After working at Goldman Sachs last summer, she had planned to take a two-year analyst position there and use her earnings to help out at home. Now she is planning a year-long stay in France—where she will study that nation’s immigration patterns on a Rockefeller fellowship—after which she will pursue a master’s degree in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Hernandez says she hopes that she will eventually be able to start an NGO in Mexico that will give students the resources to focus on their studies, just as her scholarship to Exeter allowed her to do.

“I have to do something, I cannot remain quiet,” she says.

—Staff writer Christopher M. Loomis can be reached at cloomis@fas.alumni.harvard.edu.