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Program in Religious Studies and Education |
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PRSE Alumna ProfileCati de los Ríos
"My passion in education has always been in connection with immigrants—immigrant youth, immigrant refugees, and their access to education," she says. In the PRSE, Cati is able to pursue vocation and interests. In her second semester she started teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) in the Harvard University Bridge to Learning and Literacy Program, an education program for Harvard's service workers. She tutored immigrant Harvard janitors and maintenance workers—people, she says, who "really resemble my father, who really resemble a lot of people who are so close to me." The daughter of immigrants (her parents are from Chihuahua, Mexico) and raised in Los Angeles, a city rich in many different Latino communities, cultures, and histories, Cati, 22, has firsthand knowledge of immigrant life. She built on that knowledge, earning a double major in Chicano studies and Spanish at Loyola Marymount University, and also undertook several service learning projects in Latin America, including time spent living among indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, and in Guatemala; working in coffee fields in the Dominican Republic; working with a faith-based organization in Costa Rica; as well as visiting communities in El Salvador and Panama, experiencing liberation theology, globalization, and social justice. Next fall, she'll be teaching Spanish and ESL at Fenway High School, an inner-city Boston pilot school with a mix of African American and Latino students, as well as large immigrant population—including students from the Ivory Coast, Cape Verde, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. "One of the most stimulating components to teaching is that I'm really learning more about the world and more about different communities and how interconnected a lot of struggles are, especially in education and language acquisition," she says. Posted July 2005
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Cati de los Ríos has always known that her vocation is education. The question was how to combine that calling with her interests in theology, especially
Meso-American religions and liberation theology in Latin America, and immigrants.
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