When Fernando Romero (b 1946) started school as a Spanish-only speaker in the barrios of El Paso, Texas, he quickly picked up English, excelled in classes, and proudly claims his Chicano identity. Education came with good and bad teachers, the bad believing they were entitled to pick on the brown-skinned children. These were early lessons for Fernando, who describes his harsher lessons would come when he enrolled at Nevada Southern (known as UNLV today.)
Dr. Anita Tijerina Revilla is an associate professor for the College of Liberal Arts in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies. She is a Queer Chicana scholar whose work has focused on student activism, Chicana feminism, joteria, and the Latinx educational pipeline.