Why I Speak at Hispanic Serving Institutions

I grew up the son of undocumented parents. I walked 5,328 miles across Latin America. Now I stand on stages where students like me are still learning they belong.

My mother left Atencingo, Mexico, when she was seventeen. My father left Santa Ana, El Salvador, at eighteen. Neither of them had papers. Neither of them had a plan beyond the belief — unshakable and, to this day, not fully explainable — that whatever waited on the other side of the border would be worth what it cost to get there.

I grew up in New York City, in the architecture of that belief. There were Saturday mornings spent in other people's houses while my mother cleaned them, my sister dancing barefoot in kitchens that were not ours. There were nights when the table was empty but the room was not. What I remember most is not the absence of things. It is the presence of something harder to name — a love so total it made hunger feel like an abstraction.

I did not understand any of this as a child. I understood it on a road in Colombia, at mile two thousand and something, when a stranger handed me a plate of rice and said nothing, because nothing needed to be said. I understood it in the Darién Gap, where the swamp swallowed my shoes and a man I had known for three hours carried my pack so I could keep walking. I understood it in every country I passed through on a journey that was never really about me at all.

In 2010, I was a senior at North Carolina State University. I bought a one-way ticket to Quito, Ecuador, and spent three months walking and hitchhiking 5,328 miles through ten countries and nine border crossings. I called it The Walk of the Immigrants. The goal was to retrace, on foot, the path that millions of Latin Americans take north — and to document it with my camera so that people who had never made the journey might begin to understand what it asks of a person.

The secondary goal was to sell the photographs and use the money to rebuild an elementary school in my mother's hometown — a cinder-block building from the 1970s where 124 children still gathered each morning to sing the national anthem. A school that was scheduled to be shut down. A school I would have attended myself, had my mother not crossed a border so that one day I might sit in a different kind of classroom.

I made it home. The school was rebuilt. But the walk did not end. It simply changed form.

The Distance Between Designation and Culture

There are now more than 500 Hispanic Serving Institutions in the United States. That number is growing, and it should. But I have learned something in the years I have spent on college campuses, standing in front of audiences whose faces look like mine and whose stories rhyme with the ones I carry: there is a distance between designation and culture that no federal threshold can close on its own.
An institution becomes an HSI when twenty-five percent of its full-time undergraduates identify as Hispanic. That is a demographic fact. It is not, by itself, a commitment. And the students know the difference. They can feel it in the spaces between the programming. They can feel it in the way their families are discussed in classrooms — as case studies, as abstractions, as problems to be solved rather than communities to be honored.
This is why I do the work I do. Not because I have the solution, but because I have the story. And in my experience, the right story told at the right moment can do something that no strategic plan can accomplish alone: it can make a young person feel, for the first time, that the institution they are walking through was built to hold someone exactly like them.

What Happens in the Room

When I speak at an HSI, I am not delivering a lecture on immigration policy. I am not running through a slide deck on retention metrics. I am standing in front of a room full of students and asking them to do one of the hardest things a young person can do: look clearly at where they come from and decide that it is not something to overcome, but something to build upon.

I tell them about the sugarcane workers in Atencingo who walk a hundred miles every year through the fields — not because anyone asks them to, but because the walking itself is a declaration. I tell them about the woman in Guatemala who fed me when I had nothing and asked for nothing in return. I tell them about my mother, who cleaned houses with a dignity that I have spent my entire adult life trying to be worthy of.

And then I ask the students a question I was once afraid to ask myself: What are you willing to walk toward?

The silence that follows is never empty. It is full of recognition. Of first-generation students realizing they are not alone. Of young people from immigrant families understanding, maybe for the first time in an academic setting, that their history is not a liability — it is the most powerful credential they possess.

A Conviction, Not a Checkbox

I have spoken on more than three hundred stages. I have stood in auditoriums at NYU and Notre Dame, at community colleges in California and state schools in Texas. I have been booked for Hispanic Heritage Month events and first-year orientations and leadership conferences. Every venue is different. The feeling in the room when the work is real is always the same.
It is the feeling of a door opening. Not a programmatic door — not a DEI initiative or a compliance milestone — but something closer to what my mother must have felt when she crossed that border at seventeen. The feeling that on the other side of this moment, something is possible that was not possible before.
That is what I want for the students I speak to. Not inspiration in the shallow sense — not a motivational sugar rush that fades by Tuesday. I want them to leave the room carrying something heavier and more durable: the conviction that they were meant to be here, and that being here comes with a responsibility to reach back for the people walking behind them.

An HSI is not a label. It is a promise. And I believe the students sitting in those lecture halls deserve to feel that promise kept — not in the brochure, but in the room.

I am the son of undocumented parents from Mexico and El Salvador. I walked across a continent and came home alive. I rebuilt a school and then I stood on stages and told the story until the story became larger than me — until it belonged to every student who has ever sat in a classroom wondering whether anyone in the building understood what it took just to get there.

That is why I speak at Hispanic Serving Institutions. Not because the designation asks for it. Because the students deserve it.

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I work with HSIs on keynotes and programming for orientation, convocations, Hispanic Heritage Month, leadership development, and cultural events.