Every summer growing up, Emily Sánchez crammed into a car with her parents and three siblings to visit their beloved Southwest desert. On their long road trips from Longmont, her dad vividly described living with his Native Apache great-grandparents while his mother was in jail or when he was homeless.
Her mother spoke of walking across the hot desert sand, escaping violence and poverty in her rural Mexican hometown after her father was brutally murdered.
“But besides the disenfranchisement, poverty and premature deaths in my family, my parents always share the history of resilience and bravery,” Emily wrote in an essay for a college scholarship. “The experiences of those that have walked before me propels me forward. Regardless of the challenges I face, I know my veins are filled with the blood of resilient people that have withstood throughout time.
Emily graduated from Longmont High School in 2019 at age 17 and was headed to Harvard in the fall on multiple prestigious scholarships. Her future is beyond bright, and her focus is on others. She is determined to help find equity for her people and for the community that raised her.
“I came to understand there’s systematic faults and inequities that exist in the education system that don’t support students as much as they could,” she said.
Emily’s insight into the needs of her community began when, as a 12-year-old eighth-grader, she was enrolled in an 11th-grade math class. Suddenly, everyone was white, in contrast to the very diverse, working-class neighborhood elementary and middle schools she attended. The whole school felt segregated.
She sees a need for more family engagement nights with interpreters, so schools can reach out to Latino families.
“It’s basically representation and access,” she said.
Emily allows that she’s more assimilated than other Latino students. Her parents exposed her to wonderful, enriching experiences. Even though they didn’t have much money, they took their kids to the free family days at the museum and the zoo. They toured Hindu and Buddhist temples in Houston. They took a road trip to a Jazz Festival in Atlanta. They tried the food in East St. Louis and New Orleans.
“I always try to have my kids be proud of their cultural identity,” said her father, Israel Sánchez. “So they can embrace other people, so they can understand the personal value in that self-discovery. Because it’s all about differences.
It’s about us accepting and understanding our differences.”Emily has participated in prestigious summer programs at Stanford, the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado Boulder. She has met children of the rich and famous, who walk around with four bodyguards. She’s met students from China. She had a roommate from Brazil. Another roommate was Muslim.
She wrote a poem during a summer program at CU that reflected her unfolding understanding of her cultural identity and her observations as “the only brown kid in a sea of white.” It ended this way:
I yearn for Chipe Totec
Transformation.
To hire more teachers that look like me
Because you can’t teach what you don’t know
And white man, now I want you to see
It’s the system that’s broken not the people
One of her undocumented friends was frustrated that her Anglo high school counselor had no experience with immigration issues. She needed more specialized help than her counselor could give her. The political climate scared her. She went to one of very few teachers with a Latino background. He understood her and was able to give helpful advice.
We need teachers with more cultural awareness, Emily said. One of her mentors, Marjorie McIntosh, has developed a curriculum that helps teachers incorporate Latino history into their lessons. “It helps with empathy and understanding all the way around,” said Emily, who added she’d also love to see Chicano studies, ethnic studies and sociology offered in high school.
She was a little scared but mostly excited to enroll at Harvard, where she planned to pursue a pre-med course of study and also a major in government and policy with a focus on education, global health care and immigration.
“As the product of a mix of Mexico, the United States and pre-Columbian America, I am proud to say that I am Emily Sánchez, an inquisitive intellectual, a passionate activist, a warrior for social justice, a revolutionary storyteller,” she wrote in her essay’s conclusion. “I am the 21st Century representation of the strength, determination, and greatness of my people.”
