Amigos Latinos Student Association | Photo by Kelsie Tomlinson | The Wright State Guardian
Amigos Latinos plans for events this Spanish Heritage month, Sept. 15 through Oct. 15, to celebrate and spread awareness of Spanish culture.
On Spanish Heritage Month
To kick off the month, Amigos Latinos had Reggaeton in the Woods on Sept. 15. The event preceded the trivia week where students could go and answer different questions on Spanish heritage each day. If students got the answer correct, they got a stamp in their “passport.”
Felipe Perez, the president of Amigos Latinos, explained that the Spanish department provided the trivia.
At the end of the week, students turned passports in, and if they had two or more stamps, those students were entered into a raffle for prizes. At the Family Weekend salsa and dominos event on Saturday, Sept. 23, the organization announced the winners.
The organization expressed that anyone is more than welcome to attend their events and get involved.
“We always say, ‘You don’t have to be Latino to be an amigo.’ You can be any identity, anything you want, you can come. We love seeing new people and seeing their new faces. We welcome anybody,” Andrea Hernandez, the social media chair and secretary of Amigos Latinos, said.
The next event will be the Amigos Latinos Gala on Oct. 7 in the Nutter Center with a theme of “Our Journey” and the Latino student scholarship.
Importance
Hernandez explained why this month is so important to her and many others.
“Our actual independence day was Sept. 16, and I feel like nobody knows that except us. Americans have the whole year and we have only a month, so we try to use it up as much as we can to express our culture, show that we don’t only eat tacos, we eat different types of food,” Hernandez said. “We also have different types of dances, different styles of clothing and how we got here. So, that’s really why we want to express what our month is and just to spread the word out.”
Amigos Latinos and the Latino Center
According to Perez, Amigos Latinos and the Latino Center do work very closely together, but there is a difference between the two.
Amigos Latinos is the student organization with events to get people involved and have fun, whereas the Latino Center is a resource for students. Catherine Hernandez Hogan, the assistant director of the Latino Center, facilitates different types of workshops for students. For more information about Amigos Latinos, visit the organization’s Engage page. For more information about the Latino Center, visit the Division of Inclusive Excellence website.
