Browse Items (29 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…

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…

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…

Monica Pagnini-Ibarra is a former business owner and family lawyer from Maracay, Venezuela and currently serves as the Client Services Advocate at El Centro Latino in Hickory, North Carolina. Monica begins the interview by sharing what life was like for her and her family living in Maracay, Venezuela and recounts her favorite childhood memories.…

Isaías García García is a barber and local business owner of Barbería García, in Boone, North Carolina. He is originally from Totonicapán, Honduras and emigrated to the United States alone at the age of 16. Garcia, the youngest of nine siblings, explains what life was like for him growing up in Guatemala with his family. He shares the story of his…

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…

Victor Canales Gamiño is the youth organizing director at Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) at Duke University. In this interview, he discusses his migration to the United States from Mexico when he was only eight years old, his experiences working with farmworkers, SAF’s mission and initiatives, and he elaborates on the ways in which one can…

Ariana describes her Afro-Panamanian family history. She discusses the factors that shaped her identity as Afro-Latina: community, family, scholarship, and traveling experiences. She shares memories that compare her experiences as Afro-Latina in the South of the United States and contrasts them to experiences in other parts of the U.S. as well as…

Araceli Islas moved to the US from the Distrito Federal in Mexico 15 years ago and lives in Pikeville, NC. She has daughters who live in Mexico and sons who were born and live in the US, and has worked both in Mexico and the US as a seamstress. Her life in Pikeville is much different from the life she had in the D.F., particularly with regard to…