Aldo Garcia-Guevara, PhD, professor of history and chair of interdisciplinary studies at Worcester State University, was the keynote speaker at UMass Chan Medical School’s Hispanic Heritage Month Celebration on Sept. 26.
In opening the celebration, Marlina Duncan, EdD, vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion, said, “This month, we take time to recognize the remarkable triumphs that Latinos have achieved in all walks of life. From medicine to education, sports to the arts, the Hispanic community has continually demonstrated resilience, creativity and determination.”
Chancellor Michael F. Collins further set the tone of the event by calling for the renewal and reaffirmation of UMass Chan’s institutional commitment to fostering, preserving and celebrating a brighter and better future in which core values like diversity, inclusivity, civility, mutual understanding and shared humanity pervade.
In his talk, Dr. Garcia-Guevara made the distinction between the many ways Hispanics identify. The word Hispanic points to the shared language, Spanish, which is spoken across 20 countries. Terms like “Chicano” used by Mexicans and “Boricua” used by Puerto Ricans make further distinctions by country of origin. Garcia-Guevara explained that the term Latino was adopted due to the limitations and exclusions that came with being labeled Hispanic. Latino is inclusive of people from Brazil who do not speak Spanish as well as African and Indigenous people whose ancestry have no ties to the Spanish language.
Though the speaker hailed celebrations of Hispanic culture as testament to the sea of change in the United States, he provided context for the journey toward this transformation.
“Thinking back as an historian, in the past, we often talk about USA as a nation of immigrants, but anti-immigrant publications are a reminder that we have also been hostile to immigrants and resistant to immigration at numerous times in our nation’s history,” Garcia-Guevara said. He named the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 as examples of attempts to roll back immigration and racial and ethnic diversity to pre-1890, which marked the beginning of a quota system to enter the United States.
Garcia-Guevara mentioned the Nationality Act of 1965, and the “Harvest of Empire,” a term borrowed from author Juan Gonzales that identifies U.S. military interventions, corporate banking and other social conditions as responsible for the influx of Hispanics to the United States.
Despite the many reasons Hispanics have had to leave their homelands for the United States, Garcia-Guevara used his personal narrative and that of Hispanics in Massachusetts—and Worcester particularly—to celebrate the ways the Hispanic community has grown and thrived. Those ways have included being community for one another through helping each other navigate life in a new place and access public health education; and advocating for diversity and inclusion, especially in the form of translation services in public institutions.
“History is about the past, but it is also about the present and the future,” Garcia-Guevara said. In the same way the Hispanic community has worked together to bring about change, the speaker challenged future physicians who will serve the Hispanic community to listen to their patients; to not let assumptions and biases cloud their judgment when providing services; and to ask for help when working across cultural differences.
