Nadia Celaya Carrillo

Being first-gen means to me today that my life values and passions are something I need to be in alignment with when creating a project or taking on a new opportunity, a rule not many folks have, to just increase work experience. Being queer, nonbinary, first generation, and the oldest sibling has unique identities that have allowed me to reflect back and always think with a futuristic perspective when taking on a new opportunity. With my lived experiences, this program reaffirms me in my roots and that I have a special gift of being a visionary. I hope that with this reminder, I allow myself to dream of a future with liberation and love centered at its core roots.

I’ve felt that there isn’t a desired need for folks in higher education to address social justice education, and as a leader, it's helpful to have been refreshed on the types of education I can do. With the several topics discussed in the organization, oppression stood out to me, and it made me reflect on the different types of oppression that I have witnessed or experienced during my time at UCSD through classes, personal experiences, and social justice moments. I also started thinking about the way that oppression has affected my life and how I have limited my voice or actions due to the inner beliefs I have been taught to believe in as a person or activist. The different subtopics in oppression, such as pervasive, cumulative, and socially constructed categories, allowed me to see how my inner way of thinking on social justice and its framework, along with my personal experiences, have built a cumulative understanding of oppression.

Leveraging the resources you have gained from the built communities around you is very important, and trust that your community will sustain you in difficult times. You hold great power as you are the first one in your family/ close circle to break generational barriers in education, construct generational wealth, and pave the way to prioritize collective healing and well-being for yourself & your loved ones. I encourage first-gen Tritons to become enthusiastic about becoming a more effective, passionate, and kind leader who can make significant contributions to a space/ organization while still including every voice at the table.

Being able to remain rooted, build my dream life with hard work, and honoring my family’s history and legacy of care work has allowed me to sustain the work I have done at UCSD. I admire how love and persistence stayed at the root of my family's everyday resistance. Their stories sparked my lifelong interest in creating a new legacy for my family and honoring their stories of labor, health, and political resistance through my career, research, classes, and projects. In our intimate conversations, their hope for a better future remained alive in the wisdom and joy they passed down. Learning from my grandma taught me my first lesson as a public health professional: never force more dependencies on an individual than what they are already experiencing, and to always view them as a whole person. This practice has set me on a lifelong journey of consciousness, allowing me to learn the importance of familial wisdom, becoming proactive in finding solutions, and creating amazing results with what little resources/ time I had in a professional situation

Throughout my public health career, I hope to show how students within the CA public school education system are developing firsthand the skills to build immense community resilience, create community cultural wealth in their education, and become their own teachers towards social justice & decolonial liberation practices. I hope to remain involved in academia, teach on education inequities and Latinx mobility in higher education, create spaces for other first-generation students, and serve in director roles for nonprofit organizations that support BIPOC students from my similar background.

As an activist and womxn leader, I’ve learned how everything within community health is interdependent: disability, socioeconomic status, immigration, personal health, poor health infrastructures, and the value of time. I hope to leave a strong and multifaceted legacy by showing what a cycle breaker is capable of creating and someone who wasn't afraid to speak up, even in those hard and scary times. My future aspirations are to continue reclaiming my power as an individual/ leader through past moments in my academic, personal, and professional background. My leadership in organizations such as MEChA, SOHIL, SPACES, OASIS, and the Cross-Cultural Center has shown me the power of storytelling, community building, and embracing my identity as a queer, nonbinary, first-generation, low-income student rooted in past, present, and future resistance.