Growing up, I was never completely sure about what I wanted to do in life. While all of my friends throughout elementary school talked about being teachers, firefighters, and soccer players in the next twenty years, I never had a clear idea of what my “dream” was. My family immigrated to the United States from our rural Vietnamese town when I was barely two years old, and after coming here, I saw my mother and father working day and night in an attempt to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. In the moments when my parents would be home at the same time, I would memorize the way my dad’s hands were calloused and dirtied by machine grease and the way my mom’s fingers were dry and reeking of acetone, and I would see their strength and resilience.

It was that same strength and resilience that I saw in the Latina women that would frequent our local Vietnamese-owned grocery stores and were none the wiser about the whispers that would pass between the aunties at the cash register. I would see those women picking up fresh fruits and vegetables to place in their shopping carts, next to a fidgety, whiny child strapped to the front seat, and all I could imagine was the visage of my mother shopping with my siblings and me. As a child, I never understood why the people in my community were so hostile and unwelcoming to our Hispanic neighbors; was it true that they were inherently more dangerous than us? Was it true that they didn’t value education in the same way as we did? What about them made them so fundamentally different from us?

I carried these questions with me through a series of experiences in my life wherein I was part of the group that was responsible for the “othering,” and I can’t say that I was particularly proud of that fact. How was I supposed to be fearful or wary of others when they shared so many resemblances with my own culture and family? As I got older and reached middle and high school, I began the work of deconstructing those internalized biases and prejudices against the Latino and Hispanic members of my community, and it wasn’t until I entered college that I realized exactly what I could do to 1) chase a dream that was evading me for the better part of a decade and 2) learn from the communities that my own had ostracized for so long.

Having learned Spanish throughout middle and high school, I knew that I wanted to continue learning the language in college solely based on a utilitarian point of view, where knowing another language could prove beneficial for my future job prospects. Since I started college with an undecided major, I didn’t think about how learning Spanish could impact my own perspective and understanding of myself and the world around me until I began considering pursuing a career in dental medicine, which combined my interests in science and humanities into something that I could consider a newfound “dream” that I had been seeking for so many years.

My perspective on Spanish began to shift when I took Spanish 323: Spanish American Literature in the fall semester of my sophomore year. In that class, I learned about the historical contexts of modern Latin American literature and how cultural interactions between various countries led to revolutionary movements in literature and the arts in the Americas. This realization led me to analyze my own awareness of the historic movements of people around the world and the formation of cultural diasporas in the United States, which have further developed into large-scale cities that are now home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from different countries, cultures, and religions. Because of this new perspective, I learned that division and cultural isolation does no good to any of our communities, and intercultural exchanges, where we find the similarities between ourselves, would benefit us more than seeing one another as the “other” and as the “enemy.”

To me, the drive to become a medical professional is not born out of a need for financial security; rather, my passion for caring for my fellow community members and my hope to build stronger relationships between groups that originally would have never thought to interact with one another pushed me to pursue a career where I could work with, learn from, and provide care for people from all walks of life every single day. Becoming a Spanish major was not an impulsive decision that I made to stand out from the crowd in my science courses; I wanted to be able to graduate knowing that the degree I achieved would be representative of the person that I currently am, the passions that I have, and the community leader that I want to become.