Browse Items (7 total)

Pilar Rocha-Goldberg is the President & CEO of El Centro Hispano. She begins by recounting her early life in Bogotá, Colombia, where she attended university and became a nutritionist-dietitian in 1988, later working for Nestlé. During a neonatologist conference hosted by Nestlé in 2002 in Cartagena, she met Ron Goldberg, a neonatologist at Duke…

Paola Saldivias Méndez was born in Quito, Ecuador, before moving to Bolivia with her family as a baby and begins by detailing her family’s story. Her educational experiences included her “American” bilingual school, where teachers fostered her love for education, and her degree in Science and Social Communication from Universidad Católica…

As Bishop of the Diocese of Raleigh, Rafael Zarama oversees a network of about one hundred Catholic churches in the eastern half of North Carolina. Parishioners in this region are diverse and include people who have immigrated from Latin American countries such as Mexico, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, where Catholicism is a prevalent religion. He…

Leticia Zavala was born in Michoacán, México and moved to the United States with her parents around the age of 6. Zavala is the former Vice President and a longtime organizer with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), one of the country’s oldest and largest agricultural labor unions and the first union to represent migrant H-2A workers on…

Luis Olivieri-Robert is Community Relations Analyst for the City of Raleigh, a role through which he has served Latine and migrant communities since moving to North Carolina from his native Puerto Rico in 2002. He recounts his early life, educational experiences, and professional development in Puerto Rico and the continental U.S., having taught at…

Born in Guatemala but raised in Siler City, North Carolina, Hannia Benítez currently serves her local communities as Deputy Director at El Vínculo Hispano/The Hispanic Liaison’s office in Lee County and as Chair of Siler City’s Immigrant Community Advisory Committee (ICAC). Hannia shares her foundational experiences, including the need to be her…

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…