Honoring Our Roots: Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Through Education

[MichaelE1]

Hispanic Heritage Month is the celebration of Hispanic and Latino/a/e culture, which often gets overlooked in education and work environments. At Macmillan Learning, we celebrate the vibrancy of diverse communities, and it is important to recognize the people who helped to get us to where we are today.

As a member of Macmillan Learning’s employee resource group for Hispanic/Latino/a/e employees, Viva@ML, I would like to highlight a specific educator who had a great impact on me: my aunt. She served as an educator for 30+ years in California before retiring to Arizona with her husband. She was born in Texas to a Mexican father and Spanish mother. Not too long after, they moved to California where the remainder of her siblings were born, including my mother. Both my aunt and my mother grew up in a Spanish-speaking household. As my aunt was the oldest child, she helped her parents significantly, as she knew English the best out of all of her siblings. Eventually, she would attend university and become an elementary and middle school teacher. I was fortunate and honored to have been taught by her in fourth and fifth grade.

As a teacher, during Hispanic Heritage Month, she displayed her heritage and identity more prominently to the classroom and allowed students to ask questions and comprehend how important it was to celebrate every culture. She shared her culture by teaching basic sentences in Spanish to students, playing various music styles to the class that are prominent in Latin America, and explaining the importance of various holidays to a mostly non-Hispanic/Latino/a/e class. Throughout most of her teaching career, she had mostly non-hispanic students, to my recollection, so she wanted to display the importance of all cultures in our multicultural society. This is increasingly important today as California’s demographics are constantly changing. As I continued my education, she was there to cheer me on, while keeping me rooted in my culture, even when I decided to leave the United States to pursue a masters degree abroad. 

My aunt was one of the many influential educators (from elementary teachers to university professors) who were there to cheer me on throughout every step of my life journey, and we know everyone has their unique educational influences. These educators stimulate your mind and encourage you to search for knowledge while learning more about and staying true to yourself. 

In my current role at Macmillan Learning/Bedford, Freeman & Worth as a Media Editor, I use the lessons I’ve learned from every teacher and professor, including from my aunt, to connect with people and to learn from others that comprehend the publishing industry better than myself. I’ve witnessed the impact of education on one’s life, as a one-time university lecturer in Germany, and comprehended how it can make a difference in one’s life, which is why I chose to work for Macmillan Learning/Bedford, Freeman & Worth. I believe that the work I do today equally impacts the lives of students as much as a teacher like my aunt.

During this Hispanic Heritage Month, I remember my aunt as she taught me and my classmates and displayed the importance of both celebrating diverse cultures in our ever-evolving world and making sure we always remember our roots as we explore them.