Graduation Ceremony Student Address

I would like to begin with a story, as a way to frame what I’d like to say today. At the age of sixteen, I had the opportunity to visit Peru in South America. During this particular trip, my aunt who was very much involved with issues of social justice decided to act as my cultural broker. She began to speak to me seriously about the inequitable access to education, exploitive and abusive conditions of workers, and inadequate health care for the poor. As she spoke to me, I remember distinctly taking it all in, absorbing the information she was sharing with me, but not knowing really what I was supposed to do with it. I remember thinking to myself, “Well, what does this have to do with me? I live in the United States. What can I do about it?” Little did I know the influence her exposure was going to have on me.

When I came back to the United States, I immediately became aware of things I had not noticed before but that had always existed. Inequities and injustices had now become apparent to me and I suddenly found myself asking “Why? Why did I not see this before? Why are we not talking about this in school? Why are we not being told the truth? It was in this process of asking questions that my aunt’s teachings became clear: Even if the experiences of others appear to not have an effect on us, they do. We have a responsibility to one another. A responsibility to help each other achieve internal/external liberation, a responsibility to work for equity and justice for all marginalized people, based on race, class, gender, language, sexual orientation, and other differences. With this epiphany I knew I could no longer look at our world or my role in it the same.

I contemplated whether to share this story, but I felt it reflected, for many of us, our experiences here at the University of San Francisco. This story, in particular, had a tremendous amount of influence in my pursuit for justice in our society, especially in education. As you all reflect back to when you started at USF, I am sure your aspirations in obtaining your degrees were based on values and beliefs that have inspired you to do the work that you do. That is why, when we entered this institution, paraphrasing Paulo Freire, we were not empty vessels, ready to be filled. We entered with concrete ideas and goals of what we hoped to accomplish through education and nursing. We entered with the consciousness and understanding that our eyes were wide open, we were ready to work, we were ready to make a difference.

However, even with this mindset, our ideas and goals did not go unchallenged. In fact, as my aunt did for me in Perú so did USF with all of us. Our professors pushed us to question and be critical of what we viewed to be our truth. We were challenged to examine points of view that went beyond the scope of our realities. We were asked to truly reflect on what the words justice and equity truly meant in our areas of study. For me, my experiences in IME taught me to constantly name, reflect, and work for transformation. And it was in this looping of naming, reflecting, and transforming that I understood that our work for justice is ongoing. It is not stagnant, it is not complacent, nor is it just a cycle that goes nowhere. It’s a process of thinking and acting that constantly moves forward but never forgets the actions of others that came before. More now than ever, it is departments like IME that need to continue to grow in order to challenge practices that perpetuate inequities, that need to be supported in order to prepare more students to go out into the field with the objective of creating positive change.

When my aunt challenged me to open my eyes, my charge in life changed. As graduates of this institution, we have experienced an education that puts us in a similar crossroads. We now must ask ourselves, where do we go from here? In my mind this is a critical question to reflect upon. In a powerful early 60’s indictment of the teaching profession entitled “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin (1963) states:

[O]ne of the paradoxes of education [is] that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. (p. 11)

As conscious educators and nurses in the field, we do not have the luxury to not put into practice what we have learned. This is relevant now, when in the state of California access to higher education is being threatened with increasing fee hikes of up to 14% with simultaneous cuts to programs like EOP. This is especially relevant, when in K-12 education students are expected to learn under a scripted curricula mandated by “No Child Left Behind” with no equitable resources which, in turn, debilitates especially those that are poor, and linguistically and culturally diverse. Moreover, this is all the more damaging when the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. This is all the more evident when access to healthcare is continuously being threatened for the elderly, young children, and poor communities. This is all the more inhumane when this country is steeped in wars.

Yet, with all this said, do we have hope, can we have hope? Yes. A strong yes! That is why we are here. As I look out to all of you that are graduating, I know in my heart that our goal together is to make a difference. I know that our goal together is to make the invisible visible. Most importantly, I know that we are not sitting here today, for things to be the same tomorrow. Though difficult moments will come, we have to remember that our hope for change is our hope for humanity, it is our hope for the present and the future. Overall our hope embodies as Paulo Freire would state “a pedagogy of love.” Because as he shared:

As individuals or as peoples, by fighting for the restoration of [our] humanity [we] will be attempting the restoration of true generosity. And this fight, because of the purpose given it, will actually constitute an act of love.

I congratulate all of you on your achievements. I acknowledge the families that have supported us, & I hope for all of us a future of justice, peace, & hope.
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