Hispanic Heritage Month 2024

Welcome to the 2024-25 academic school year and to this year’s Hispanic Heritage Month!

Celebrated from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, Hispanic Heritage Month recognizes and honors the histories, cultures, and peoples that make up the varied, powerful, and beautiful Latinx/e communities throughout our nation. This year’s Heritage Month theme is “Pioneers of Change: Shaping the Future Together.” That theme calls us to look back, recognize, and learn from the strengths, strivings, and achievements of Latinx/e peoples, and bring that knowledge and vision to building a future marked by equity.

Latinx/e history is American history, and the National Archives Museum chronicles an array of pivotal historical moments, including the story of school segregation in California:

“Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez moved to Orange County, California, with their children Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr., and Jerome in 1944. When they tried to enroll in the majority-white school near their home, they were instead sent to a segregated school for Hispanic students. The Mendez family filed a lawsuit. [The courts] ruled in favor of the Mendez’s in 1946. A year later the Governor signed a law ending school segregation in California.”

Sylvia Mendez says, “What inspired me is that my parents fought for me. … They wanted me to know that I was an individual, … that we’re all individuals, that we’re all human beings and that we’re all connected together and that we all have the same rights; the same freedom.”

This month, PBS will air a docuseries from the Colombian American actor and activist John Leguizamo entitled, “VOCES American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos”. Like this year’s theme, Leguizamo hopes that learning this history will strengthen identity and inform the shaping of our future. In describing his reasons for doing the series he said, “[Latino] buying power is $3.4 trillion dollars. … We are a third of the U.S. box office. We’re a third of subscribers on streaming. We’re a third of sports fans, but we’re less than 4% of the leads in movies, less than 1% of the stories being told, less than .09% of the executives making the decisions. That’s Hollywood, … but it’s in the tech industry, it’s in medicine, it’s in banking, it’s in the corporate world as well.”

Despite the Mendez legacy, we find similar representational issues in Higher Ed, with Latinx/e student numbers far surpassing Latinx/e faculty and administrative numbers. That is why we must make our efforts to become a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) a campuswide effort, so that collectively we increase representation in every sector of the campus, move beyond the numbers to center “servingness”, and ensure we are a place where Latinx/e culture and brilliance shape our excellence.

I encourage you to use this month, and every month, to learn more, utilize OUR shared history for the building of our future, and engage in the many campus-based events this month, including Student Diversity and Belonging’s Latinx Heritage Month Celebration 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 3, and the State of Latinx from 4-7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 7.

The entire campus community is invited to engage in ¡Adelante! 2024 Cal Poly HSI Symposium on Wednesday, Oct. 30, which will feature an HSI update, a series of workshops, a resource fair and more.

"Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk." – Dolores Huerta

Dr. Denise Isom,

Interim Vice President, Diversity & Inclusion / Senior Diversity Officer