Reflections on Growing up Latina — Originally delivered as a talk at Worcester Academy on 10/15/2021 First grade. I was pulled out of class to pass an ESL test. I was in a predominately white school, and I remember hearing all the kids with Hispanic last names being summoned over the intercom. My mom had indicated…

Words hurled like daggers from the lips of a teacher at my high school who’d overheard me criticizing George Bush. Words I’d never heard before moving to the Sunshine State to a mostly white city known for white sand beaches, fancy retirement homes, & Scientologists. I learned I was too…

Massachusetts, the state ranked highest in educational attainment nationwide, is frequently lauded for its public education system. It is clear, however, that the system is failing students of color. The four-year graduation rate for white students in the Commonwealth is 93%, compared to 80% for Black students and 74% for…

I was recently reminded that first-generation college applicants often don’t know what they don’t know. I was speaking with a student in my school’s Latinx affinity group about the colleges she’s considering applying to next year, and was surprised that such a strong student was looking mostly at colleges with…

I have had a complicated relationship with race since childhood. I remember filling out a form for a standardized test in middle school and checking off every single race box, just to be difficult. Racial categories felt limiting. I knew I was Puerto Rican, and I identified as Latina because…

When I was six years old, I was obsessed with a book called Striped Ice Cream. It actually belonged to my older sister and was the first chapter book I read on my own. The cover was yellow, with a smiling young girl in the foreground and a Neapolitan ice…

No, my name isn’t Prieta — When I was young, I liked asking my grandmother about her life back in Puerto Rico. I’d ask her what it had been like to move to the mainland as a young woman. Memory is undoubtedly fallible, and while other family members often warned me that Nani’s stories were half-remembered…