WASHINGTON – Stories of growth, perseverance and lessons learned were part of a farewell reception for 15 Latino college graduates who spent the last nine months as public policy and graduate fellows in an annual program sponsored by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.
At Wednesday evening’s event, CHCI Alumni Association national president Amilcar Guzman congratulated the nine women and six men and welcomed them into the ranks of more than 3,800 other alumni of the Public Policy Program and Graduate Fellowship Program, which the CHCI established more than three decades ago to introduce young Latinos to careers in public policy.
“We’ve come a very long way as a cohort,” said Antonio De Loera-Brust, the Google Public Policy Fellow, addressing guests on behalf of the 10 public policy fellows. “We proved ourselves as worthy of being here.”
De Loera-Brust, who earned a bachelor’s degree in film and television production from Loyola Marymount University, said his Mexican-immigrant father taught him to have a strong work ethic and that each fellow’s story is one of American greatness.
He praised the program as a way of helping to decrease underrepresentation of Latinos on Capitol Hill, and has been hired to work full-time for a House member.
“To our leaders, be bold, because we are behind you,” he said. “We must recognize the weight of the inheritance we have been given.”
Gidget Gabriela Benitez, the PepsiCo Foundation Law Graduate Fellow, spoke on behalf of the five graduate fellows. A graduate of Washington College of Law at American University, she said the opportunity fellows were given “in a city that wasn’t really built for us in the first place” was extremely beneficial and helped them build the confidence to “tell imposter syndrome to sit down and be quiet.”
