Latinx Heritage Month Assemblies Reflect DEIJ Push for More Student Choice
By Leo Wan ‘28
On September 29, Milton students chose between four programs for this year’s Latinx Heritage Month Upper School Programming: a first-generation student panel, a salsa workshop, a faculty presentation about a trip to Peru, and a guest poet’s discussion on identity. This format replaced the usual K-12 assembly with a few smaller workshops, a change that Melissa Lawlor, Director of Equity and Inclusion (DEIJ), attributed to DEIJ’s intention to “show the utter breadth and depth of programs within an hour” while giving students freedom to choose which program they are interested in attending.
Dr. Lawlor connected the workshop format to previous student feedback, saying that students at Culture Fest “really liked the opportunity to choose and shop around the workshops and get more than a surface-level thinking about a particular topic.” She also pointed to an earlier Black History Month program with four panels, recalling that “the audience behavior was just generally better” when students chose the panel that interested them.
Dr. Lawlor also tied engagement directly to freedom and choice, explaining that “we listen better when we are not crammed into spaces, and we listen better when we’re interested in what we’ve chosen.” Latinx Association co-head Victoria Rivera ’27 identified a limitation in this year’s selection process, though, stating that “in the future, I would push more kids to choose their assemblies because a lot of people didn’t choose theirs and then were upset with what they got assigned to.” Dr. Lawlor hopes to continue offering multiple options across the heritage-month assemblies she oversees. She said, “We’re gonna either try to keep it to two or four, but we’re trying to move away from one assembly with everybody in the ACC.” The greater purpose, as Dr. Lawlor puts it, is to “increase our students’ exposure to stories and histories of communities and cultures that they might not encounter on a daily basis.”
Aside from the new format, Rivera explained the choices of content and focus points in this year’s workshop. Challenging what she described as an oversimplified portrayal of Latinx people, Rivera stated, “I believe that at Milton, and also in our country in general, there tends to be a single story about Latinx people…the hardships we are facing.” Thus, Rivera wanted “this Latinx Heritage Month assembly to expose people to [our] beautiful culture… and remind [people] that we aren’t just the challenges we face.”
Specifically, during planning, co-head Raphael Rufino ’27 proposed the first-generation panel. Rufino expressed, “We should have more student voices, because I feel like a lot of times we don’t have that in spaces like assemblies.” The co-heads proceeded to curate the workshop from their own experiences as first-generation students at Milton. They incorporated Rufino’s artwork on the gap between representations of immigrants and their lived realities. Rufino summarized the workshop as “built on storytelling and artwork and how we navigate being first-gen at Milton.”
Moreover, Rufino recalled that some students cried during the panel and, even after the panel ended, approached him to talk about the presentation. He said, “The fact that people were listening and the fact that people were caring and paying attention surprised me because I didn’t expect that.” Rivera also stated, “I think the workshop... worked well because it was very intimate and vulnerable, so I would want to carry that type of workshop into future Heritage Month events.” Both co-heads praised the salsa workshopbecause the intimacy and interaction allowed students to engage more.
Ultimately, Dr. Lawlor conceded that, even with more programming options, one specialized session could not provide a nuanced, holistic understanding of a culture, but instead could serve as the impetus for conversation. She encouraged students to “keep learning about stories that aren’t [their] own” to broaden their perspectives.
Source: Milton Academy