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Latino alumni meet for first reunion
May 1, 2009
by Amy Fish '09

During his undergraduate days, says Orlando Rivera '77, he and some fellow Yalies planned to kidnap Yale president Kingman Brewster '41 -- just to get him to listen to Puerto Rican students. Rivera, who recalls the "almost paramilitaristic" tone of his student activism, was only half-kidding.

For Yale's Latinos, times have changed. This year, both President Richard Levin '74PhD and Vice President and Secretary Linda Koch Lorimer '77JD appeared -- voluntarily -- to speak at Yale's first-ever official Latino Alumni Reunion. Levin and Lorimer opened the reunion's April 3 panel, "Celebrating Yale Latinos: The History of Latinos at Yale."

Not long ago, Lorimer conceded in her speech, alumni "associated with Yale in rather strait-jacket ways," primarily through class year networks. But the university has been increasing its support for what it calls "shared interest groups" based on ethnicity, sexual orientation, and activities. "We need to be able to associate with this place in all manners and means." She leaned toward the audience. "Have a great deal of fun," she urged. "But also, for those of you who haven't been back recently, think about what else Yale might be doing for you."

Gone is the atmosphere of achieving rights and recognition from the university by "grabbing and taking," as Rivera put it. Now Yale says it wants to know what it can give.

Yet the work of the Yale Latino Alumni Association has just begun. In October 2007, Rosalinda Garcia, Yale College Assistant Dean and Director of La Casa Cultural, called together active Latino alums to discuss connecting regional activity into one national network. That network is now the YLAA. This month's reunion -- including lectures, events with current students, and a stop at the local watering hole El Amigo Felix -- marks the culmination of YLAA's efforts so far. "This event is really to drive people forward and get them energized," emphasized Eve Rojas '94, a member of YLAA's interim board. YLAA aims to channel that energy into expanding its network, supporting current Latino students, and advocating for increased diversity of Yale's faculty, students, and curriculum. Rojas summed it up: "What we want and have always wanted . . . is a voice."

At the April 3 panel, Yale Latino voices spoke out loud and clear, both at the podium and in the audience. Howls of laughter throughout Rivera's speech: "This is the largest gathering of Latinos that I have seen in New Haven that did not involve mariachi music, demonstration posters, or brown power signs." Nostalgic applause for Carlos Moreno '70, who read out the inscription on the gavel he now uses in the California Supreme Court: "Carlos Moreno, MEChA Vice President, 1969/1970." (MEChA is Yale's Chicano student organization.) And hums of agreement when former Assistant Dean Melvyn Colon '77 expressed perhaps the most pervasive message of the panel: the determination "to make sure that the Latino students who follow us have a different experience than we had."

As undergraduates, they traveled around the country each fall to recruit Latino students; they fought for cultural deanships and houses from a reluctant Yale administration; and they united Puerto Ricans' Despierta Boricua, Chicanos' MEChA, and a growing population of "other" to achieve, in 2000, the Latino solidarity of La Casa Cultural Julio de Burgos. These memories now spur both nostalgia and a will to keep fighting: "What other trouble can we get into?" demanded Rivera. Yet their goal today is largely to protect today's Latino students from the very struggle about which alumni now reminisce. Students in the 1970s, Colon said later, spent much of their energy "staking claims for greater representation in the school. And if there had been a more robust alumni presence at that time, then the alumni could have carried the burden of taking those claims to the university."

These alums won't sit back and wait for the university to come to them. As Cathy Sandoval '84 pointed out, history shows the "ebb and flow" of Yale's support for Latinos. The rise in Latino admissions in the 70's was followed by a roughly 25 percent drop in the mid-80's. Yale repeatedly attempted to abolish cultural deanships and, in 1997, even planned to demolish the cultural centers until student protests stopped them.

Just as they united at Yale as Boricuas and Chicanos and eventually as Latinos, alums reunite now to speak their minds. While we may have passed the era of "grabbing and taking," Latino alumni say that if they want Yale to keep changing, they must come together and make themselves heard.