Maribel Hernandez '04

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.