Celebrating La Raza Honors Some of Our Community's Best

This month the La Raza Historical Society of Santa Clara Valley celebrated some of the most important and influential Latinos and Latinas in our community at its annual Celebrating La Raza banquet.

Rose Amador has been president and CEO of ConXión to Community, formerly known as the Center for Training and Careers, for more than 30 years. ConXión to Community has provided education and transitional employment opportunities for some of the most vulnerable members of our community since 1977, including those who are undocumented, facing language barriers, unstable housing, unemployment, and the formerly incarcerated. Her service to her community has not ended there. She is also a co-founder of La Raza Roundtable de California and has been producing and hosting Native Rock TV, an award-winning weekly community television program, for 19 years.

Professor Al Camarillo is widely regarded as one of the founding scholars of the fields of Chicano Studies and Mexican American history. He grew up in Southern California and received his bachelor’s and doctorate in history from UCLA before becoming a professor at Stanford University in 1975. Al helped create the institutional infrastructure for ethnic studies both at Stanford, as founding director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and across American higher education as the founding director of the Inter-University Program in Latino Research. Currently the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor, Emeritus in the Stanford University Department of History, he is the only faculty member in Stanford history to receive six of the highest and most prestigious awards for excellence in teaching, service to undergraduate education, and contributions to Stanford and its alumni association: the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Bing Teaching Fellowship Award for Excellence and Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching, the Miriam Roland Prize for Volunteer Service, the Richard W. Lyman Award, and the President’s Award for Excellence Through Diversity.

For more than 40 years, Bob Nunez has served students in Santa Clara County and California as an educator, including serving as Superintendent of the East Side Union High School District and on the Milpitas Unified School District board of education. He has also served as a Milpitas city council member and vice mayor. Outside of education, he has been a past president of the San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP and chair of La Raza Roundtable de California. In retirement, Bob has continued to focus on ensuring students in our community receive the best education possible by serving as a mentor to early career administrators and school board members.

From Mexico to Gilroy High School to a prison in Argentia, and back to the San Francisco Bay Area, Olga Talamante has devoted her life to organizing for social justice and advocating for human rights. The Peronist government of Argentina imprisoned her for more than a year in the 1970s because of her activism. She served as the first executive director of the Chicana/Latina Foundation and her life inspired the opera ¡Chicanísima! performed earlier this year in San Francisco.

Santa Clara County and the entire region has been so fortunate to benefit from the wisdom and service of Rose, Al, Bob, and Olga. They have been trail blazers and continue to be role models to us all, particular the next generation of leaders in our community.