SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — From cultures to customs to changing the narrative. We get to the root of one of the most diverse communities, rapidly growing in San Diego.
ABC 10News anchor Lindsey Peña hosts a panel of community leaders and learn more about what it means to be Latin in America. The different stories and cultures with the same goal.
Join us Tuesday at 7:30 for an ABC 10News Special: Latin in America.
Learn more about the community leaders featured in the panel below:
Luis Martinez/ Honduran-American, Entrepreneur
Luis Martinez, MSOL is an Afro-Latino from Honduras and raised in Brooklyn, New York with an M.B.A. in Organizational Leadership, Luis is an advocate, networker and ecosystem builder for Blacks, Latinos in tech & innovation throughout the United States and abroad.
A Former Pro Basketball Player and U.S. Navy Veteran, currently he is the Director for Startup Grind San Diego. Startup Grind is the largest independent startup community, actively educating, inspiring, and connecting 3,500,000 entrepreneurs in over 400 cities.
Luis felt the need to create a movement aimed at creating the super ecosystem for Black & Latino Founders, Venture Capitalists & Angel Investors. The lack of access and information about tech and innovation that flows to these underrepresented communities is causing these communities to be behind in Math, Science & current Technology.
Also, there is a disconnect between minorities that have been successful in tech & innovation and those back in communities in which they came from. By creating “We Tha Plug”, Luis is connecting businesses, organizations, and individuals, leveraging their resources and talents to build a stronger Black & Latino tech and innovation community through collective efforts.
Jennifer Rocha/ Mexican-American, SDSU police officer
I am the daughter of two Mexican immigrant agricultural farm workers who crossed the border from Michoacan, Mexico to Calexico. I was born and raised in Indio, CA and I am the third first-generation graduate following my older two sisters. My dad always spoke about the dangers he had to undergo in order to attempt to cross. By having to go under a train, risking himself getting crushed by it, crossing the long hot desert on foot for days, being an eyeopener for what immigrants have to go through in order to achieve that “American Dream.”
I began working as a migrant farm worker with my parents as a freshman in high school and all through my college years. I have always been surrounded by Latinos/Hispanic individuals due to Indio, CA /Coachella, CA has a diversity where the majority is Latino/Hispanic. Throughout my K-12 school years, I went to schools that were predominantly Latino student populations. I had to take ESL classes in order to learn the English language. However, I never felt isolated because the majority of the students were like me.
On another note, when I graduated high school, I was accepted into UCSD and it was a culture shock due to the low percentile of Latino students. I began to take classes that focused on the growing Latino population/culture in San Diego. I was able to realize the importance of immigrants in the United States as they are essential to our economy and bringing unity together through our culture. Latinos are the breaking bone of our economy as they work in hazardous, back-breaking jobs such as gardening, cleaning services, agricultural farm workers, factory workers, and so on.
To focus mainly on agricultural farm workers, I was able to experience hot summers of 120 degrees with minimal short breaks, hazardous conditions, and low wages along with cold winters of 20 degrees not being able to move my fingers or toes. As individuals, we do not realize how essential agricultural farm workers are, without them we would not have food on our tables. Even though here in San Diego, you do not witness many agricultural fields, you are able to see the hardworking immigrants through food trucks, ice cream carts, fruit carts, and so forth. In San Diego, we witness a different way immigrants contribute to our economy (as mentioned above) and how they bring the culture of different parts of Mexico and Latin America together.
With that being said, I am now serving and protecting the community as a Peace Officer. So many incidents where I have had the privilege to help Haiti, Mexicans, Salvadorians, and many more different ethnicities and it goes to show how San Diego is built as a unique city with so many cultures and languages. Being a bilingual speaker in a city where the Spanish language is crucial, has made me realize the importance of ensuring our language never gets lost.
Therefore, immigration is more than just individuals crossing borders to reside permanently in a country. They flee their places of birth with the hopes of wanting to give their children a better and safer life away from the violence and poverty they undergo. Yet, they bring with them their cultures, experiences, and willingness to survive and work hard making contributions to our city/communities/economy.
Dr. Roberto Hernandez / Mexican-American, SDSU professor
Dr. Roberto D. Hernández (Xicano) is an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University and an actively engaged, community-based researcher, scholar, teacher and writer. Born in Mexico, but raised in San Ysidro, within blocks of the busiest port of entry in the world, the U-S///Mexico border has figured prominently in his intellectual, political and professional development and commitments. He earned a Chicana/o Studies Honors BA (with an emphasis in Political Theory), as well as a Master and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies (Black, Native and Chicana/o Studies) from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a Researcher with the Center for Latino Policy Research and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Social Change. He was previously a Visiting Researcher in the Center for Black Studies Research and the Chicana/o Studies Institute at UC Santa Barbara, where he taught in both Chicana/o Studies and Black Studies. Dr. Hernandez also coordinates several advanced international research institutes for junior scholars: Decolonizing Knowledge and Power (in Barcelona), Critical Muslim Studies (Granada), and Latin American Decolonial and Feminist Thought (Mexico City).
Dr. Hernández’s research, publications and teaching focus on the intersections of colonial and border violence, the geopolitics of knowledge and cultural production, decolonial political theory, social movements, hemispheric indigeneity, masculinity and comparative border studies. Specifically, he teaches courses on the U-S///Mexico border history, theory and contemporary issues, Chicana/o and border folklore, Community Studies, and racialized/gendered captivity and incarceration from colonialism and slavery to the prison industrial complex and migrant detention centers. He co-edited the anthology Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without (Lexington, 2016) and is the author of Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative (Univ. of AZ Press, 2018). He has served on the governing board of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) and was involved in the writing of a NACCS Amicus Brief at the height of the legal battle over the attempted banning of Mexican American Studies in Arizona in 2010. Lastly, Dr. Hernandez is an accomplished translator of important scholarly works and has several ongoing translation projects underway.
Fedella Lizeth/ Nicaraguan, Chicana, Photographer
Fedella Lizeth is a 22-year-old Queer, Nicaraguan and Italian photographer from San Diego, California. Her father having migrated from Nicaragua, Fedella continues to embrace her experience as a first-generation Central American, a new-generation Chicana, and simply a community member with a passion to commemorate the cultures that have nurtured her.”
