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Latino
alumni remember past struggles
July/August 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—to get him to listen to
Puerto Rican students. Rivera, who remembers his student activism as "almost
paramilitaristic," 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 on Latino history
at Yale.
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“What we want and have always wanted is a voice.” |
Alumni
panelists recalled their fight, as students, to increase Yale’s support for
Latinos. They traveled around the country each fall to recruit Latino students;
they argued for cultural deanships and student centers from a reluctant Yale
administration; and they united Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and others to found,
in 2000, a single Latino cultural center. These memories now spur both
nostalgia and resolve: "What other trouble can we get into?" demanded Rivera.
But the alumni said their goal today is largely to protect today’s Latino
students from the very struggle about which they now reminisce. Students in the
1970s, former assistant dean Melvyn Colon '77 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.”
The
April reunion—including lectures, events with current students, and a stop at
the local watering hole El Amigo Felix—marked the culmination of a two-year
effort to organize regional Latino alumni groups into one national network, now
called the Yale Latino Alumni Association. "This event is really to drive
people forward and get them energized," says 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 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 Colon 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.” 
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