'This is Yours'
El Centro a welcome invitation to HCC's Spanish-speaking students
Editor's Note: This story also appears in the Spring 2023 issue of The Connection, the HCC college magazine.
By DUSTY CHRISTENSEN
In September, on Greishenys Lopez's first day as a Holyoke Community College nursing student, she didn't know what to do. Concepts like "prerequisites" were new to her, and she felt surrounded by English – a change for Lopez, who grew up speaking Spanish and English in a bilingual home.
But then Lopez found El Centro, an academic-support space and community dedicated to the needs of Hispanic and Spanish-speaking students like her. Walking into El Centro's offices, where flags of Latin American countries hang on the windows and art from the Spanish-speaking world decorates the lobby, Lopez was able to connect with a bilingual advisor who made her feel a lot more comfortable with learning and the academic process.
"It almost feels like a family," Lopez said. "Here, we can talk our Spanish and we won't get made fun of for it. It's just the norm."
At El Centro, which opened its doors at HCC in the summer of 2022, students receive culturally responsive guidance toward graduation, transfer, or a career. In addition to academic advising and financial aid assistance, El Centro provides wraparound support services, helping students connect with HCC's tutoring center and child watch program, for example, or food pantry if they're experiencing hunger.
"El Centro was built from the ideas and beliefs of Latinx people on campus," said HCC alum Julissa Colón '13, the center's director. "We wanted something by us, for us. It's very different to be helped by someone who has walked the same journey you are walking right now."
Colón would know. At 19, she dropped out of college after giving birth to her first child and started working. When she was 28, she applied for a clerk job at Gateway to College - a dual-enrollment program at HCC that allows those who have dropped out of high school to take college classes for both high-school and college credit. By then, Colón believed her opportunity to attend college had passed her by. Her HCC supervisor challenged that assumption.
"She didn't say, 'Come in and answer phones,'" Colón recalled. "She said, 'Come and be part of building this culture – and then encouraged me to go back to school.'"
That's exactly what Colón did. She eventually received her associate's degree from HCC and a bachelor's degree from Smith College before heading to the University of Massachusetts Boston for her master's degree - all while working full time and parenting.
When Colón saw a posting for the director's position at El Centro, she felt all of her life experiences – including her childhood growing up as a Puerto Rican in Springfield's North End – leading her to apply.
"And I got it," she said. "It just blew my mind ... Just this incredible sense of joy and nerves, and I felt, and still feel, a huge sense of responsibility. Not just to the students but also to everyone at the college and in the community who pushed for so many years for something like this to be created."
Holyoke Community College is a federally designated "Hispanic-Serving Institution," or HSI, meaning that at least a quarter of its students identify as Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx. Many staff and faculty members are Latinx, too, and it was from those groups that the idea for El Centro emerged.
"This didn't just come up out of nowhere," Colón said. 'It wasn't one person's idea."
The college's support for Latinx students has evolved over the years. The El Centro space, for example, was built into the renovation plans for the HCC Campus Center, which reopened in September 2019, after a three-year, $43.5 million reconstruction. At first, El Centro was home to MAS, HCC's Multicultural Academic Services program, which began in 2006 as a way for the college to offer academic and personal support to its diverse student body.
But Hispanic faculty, staff, and students continued to push for a fully staffed, bilingual space with culturally responsive support services. Advocates included the college's Hispanic Leadership Committee, as well as HCC alum and longtime staff member Myriam Quiñones '95, the founding director of MAS, who left HCC in 2022 to move back to Puerto Rico.
"For HCC to have El Centro is really important because we are a Hispanic Serving Institution," said HCC Spanish professor Raúl Gutiérrez, a member of the Hispanic Leadership Committee and chair of the Latinx Studies program. "It creates this space where students who identify as Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx can find help, not only bilingual help but cultural help. It creates this possibility of belonging and placemaking to happen. There're always students there. It's important to have a vibrant space where students feel welcome."
When Sharale Mathis arrived in 2021 as HCC's new vice president of academic and student affairs, the process of creating El Centro was already moving forward. Because HCC is a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and because the college is located in a city where a majority of residents identify as Hispanic, Mathis said college leaders wanted to ensure HCC was doing all it could to meet the community's needs.
"How do we do this?" she asked. "How do we provide the support services that they need to get them in the door, support them while they're here, and then make sure they're successful upon completion?"
For starters, El Centro's five-member staff is entirely bilingual – an important detail not just for students who feel more comfortable speaking Spanish, but also for their families as they navigate the often esoteric world of academic credits and financial aid. Like Colón, many of the staff are from western Massachusetts and have experienced some of the same difficulties their students are now encountering.
"I've been there before," said Sintique Carrillo, El Centro's senior community outreach counselor and a Springfield native. "I know what it's like to be a first-generation college student, to have that barrier with the language and terminology."
El Centro's staff includes a financial services clerk, academic counselor, senior community outreach counselor, and student success counselor. Together they work to actively recruit students to the college, help them with applications and financial aid, provide academic support, and connect them with partners out in the community.
But more than that, Colón said, the staff wants to make El Centro a place "where you feel comfortable bringing your culture, bringing your language, bringing yourself." Students can stop by for a biweekly café con leche gathering at El Centro, where, Carrillo said, staff "get some energy up" and check in with students.
El Centro has also co-organized and hosted events and activities to make students feel welcome on campus. Those include a Latinx Fiesta, and a "Bienvenidos" event - Spanish for "welcome" - for first-time students arriving on campus in the fall. Also last fall, El Centro was the location of HCC's first-ever celebration of Diá de los Muertos, a holiday celebrated in Mexico and other parts of the Spanish-speaking world that pays respects to those who have died. That event was organized together with the student-run LEA Club, the college's Latinx Empowerment Association.
While events like these can be fun, Colón added they are also part of HCC's efforts to make the college feel like home for students, where they don't just get by but can thrive as their authentic selves.
That kind of support is critical in Holyoke, where around half of residents have less than a bachelor's degree, Mathis said. If HCC wants to have an impact in its home community the college has to be able to communicate to families the importance of education and to push back against the perception of HCC as the "college on the hill," isolated from the rest of the city.
"It is truly equity-focused and understanding of the community that we serve," Mathis said. "We want to be Holyoke's college - a place for career growth, lifelong learning, workforce advancement, and just a place where people feel they are at home, where they're welcome and they're appreciated."
That's how Dylan Guzman feels. A first-year art student, Guzman stumbled upon El Centro one day when he was looking for the Student Engagement office to get his photo taken for his student ID. He said an El Centro staffer joked with him and made him feel at ease. Since then, he has made friends with other students at El Centro and has returned there often for academic support.
"If you need to catch up on anything, you can come in here," he said.
Rosie Lopez, who came to HCC through the Gateway to College program, said El Centro's staffers are "very understanding and supportive, whether it's school related or home related."
"I had this fear of coming into the room and there being a whole bunch of advisors with a serious demeanor," Lopez said. But instead, "it's like a family member telling me, 'I want to be supportive but I also want you to be successful.'"
One of those academic counselors in El Centro is Sully Netti, who, on any given day, can be seen helping students with everything from scheduling to email etiquette and understanding their syllabi. Netti said that El Centro's being a bicultural environment "shifts the space, even if whoever walks in doesn't speak Spanish."
"They help you with everything," said psychology student Diomary Guzman, Dylan's sister.
For many years, Colón said, if you were Hispanic on HCC's campus you likely had a story about feeling out of place and even, at times, unwelcome. The mission of El Centro is to change that.
"This was a commitment from the institution and the people building it to say: 'No more,'" Colón said. "'Not only are you welcome, this is yours.' It has just been huge."
Dusty Christensen is a freelance writer living in Easthampton.
PHOTOS by CHRIS YURKO: (Above) Academic counselor Sullynette Ortiz, right, works with student Diomary Guzman in El Centro. (Thumbnail) The newly painted entrance to HCC's El Centro program.
