Browse Items (25 total)

Yazmin García Rico is Director of Latinx and Hispanic Policy and Strategy at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS). She recounts her activism during her tenure in college, helping Latinx youth navigate college enrollment and her outreach efforts to connect farmworker communities with healthcare and other resources.…

At a young age, Norma Martí migrated with her family from Puerto Rico to a diverse, working-class neighborhood in northwestern Indiana, part of metropolitan Chicago. She shares her formative experiences there, what enabled her to attain a college education, and her encounters with discrimination in her first role as an educator. She subsequently…

Adolfo Briceño is Program Manager of Human Relations and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the City of Winston-Salem. He shares his early life experience in Mérida, Mexico, where he was born and educated. Having studied economics, he grew disillusioned with the field while working as a mortgage analyst at a Cancún bank and switched careers to…

Katelyn Robalino is a Community Connections Coordinator for the Affordable Housing and Community Connections Department at the Town of Chapel Hill. She was first interviewed by New Roots in 2013 when she was a sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill; this 2023 interview is an update on her journey, the various professional roles she has held, and lessons…

Gianella Romero is the current Executive Director at El Centro Latino in Hickory, North Carolina. She begins the interview by talking about herself, her family roots, and her journey from being in the healthcare field to transitioning into her current role as Executive Director in the non-profit sector. Gianella also discusses her Mexican-American…

This oral history interview is the second in a three-part series with Peter Gordon in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on December 7, 2018. Peter Gordon narrates the WWII migration story of his father, Samuel Chrabolowski Gordon (“Sam Gordon”), who was born to a Jewish family in Poland. Sam Gordon escaped Nazi persecution by migrating to Mexico, where…

Frances Hoch, now a retiree and volunteer at the North Carolina Museum of History, served with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction for twenty-four years. She also taught Spanish at Greensboro College and High Point University. In this interview, she uses her vast experience and knowledge to explain the evolution of bilingual…

Elaine Townsend talks about the cultural differences that exist between her mother’s Peruvian family and father’s American family. She discusses her childhood and what it was like to live in an extremely conservative religious community. Townsend was homeschooled for much of her life. Making the transition into the public school system and…

Susan Clifford discusses her extensive experience with the Latino community through her academic work, professional career, and personal life. Her husband is from Celaya in Guanajuato, Mexico, where scant job opportunities pushed him to seek work in North Carolina. Today, Susan works at the Orange County Health Department as the Immigrant and…

Janell Smith interviews graduate student Felicia Arriaga in an effort to understand issues of diversity within higher education institutions, specifically as it relates to Latino faculty members. With the hope of becoming a professor, Arriaga is a graduate student in the sociology department at Duke University, where she began her undergraduate…