Dr. Luisa Heredia describes herself as both an activist and a scholar, stemming from her early life in California.
Born in the Golden State, Heredia describes her background as “multiethnic” — she is of Ecuadorian, Mexican and Filipino heritage.
“I saw the immigrant experience firsthand growing up,” she says, explaining that her maternal grandparents were farm workers and her father, who emigrated from Ecuador, “was undocumented at one point early on, so even though he had U.S.-born children and my mom was a U.S. citizen, he had some trouble obtaining legal status.”
Her family’s experiences helped shape her political and social views, which she began expressing in the form of protest as a teenager in California during the 1990s.
“The anti-immigrant initiative Proposition 187 was on the ballot, and I organized against it when I was in high school,” she says. “So I’ve kind of grown up with this strong sense of activism and of giving back to the community.”
When she entered college, Heredia says she was intrigued by her courses in sociology, but by the time she reached graduate school at Harvard, she noticed “there was kind of a lack of documentation of my community’s struggle within this field. … I’ve always had a commitment to thinking about how academia could help us to help our communities, and how we could make sure that our stories were being told.”
Now, as the Joanne Woodward Chair in Public Policy at Sarah Lawrence College, her publications include the telling of those stories. Her article, “More than DREAMS: How DREAMer Activism is Breaking Down the Walls That Divide the Undocumented Community,” published in May 2016 in the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) “Report on the Americas,” examines the issue from the perspective of the individuals on the front line of the protests.
