| Bridging two
realities A “friendship gang”? Sorry, said Carla Bustillos to the kids who approached her as the new Latino girl in high school. Her mother wouldn’t let her join anything with the word “gang” in it. “They said, ‘Oh, I get it. You’re the skirt kind,’” Bustillos recalls. She laughed off the put-down and walked away. She was confident enough to fend off gang recruiters, just as she would be confident enough to start a high school club to offer positive alternatives to Latino students, and later, to find a full-time staff position at the Washington College of Law (WCL) that is helping her work her way through AU. Her goal is to work with public campaigns and Latino community development, and perhaps go to law school—one reason, she points out wryly, not to accumulate debts as an undergraduate. Her experience as a Latino in the Washington area helped shape her goals and her determination to make a difference. “People had strict stereotypes. If you were Latino, you had to wear baggy pants and fit into that L.A. gangster profile,” she says. “A lot of times, American kids didn’t understand the new arrivals, and the new arrivals didn’t understand American kids, and found more acceptance in gangster wannabe community.” Bustillos is a junior double majoring in communication studies at the School of Communication and foreign languages in the College of Arts and Sciences. She also keeps a busy schedule as the administrative assistant to WCL dean Claudio Grossman and the dean’s office liaison to Latino students, often corresponding in both Spanish and English in e-mails that crisscross the Americas. Born in Takoma Park, Md., while her father was an international student at AU, she grew up in Venezuela until returning to the United States as a 10-year-old who spoke almost no English. “I have to say the fact that I had two different realities really shaped my personality,” she says. She knew what it meant to be from an educated, professional family in a majority Latino culture; and she knew what it meant to be a minority in Maryland and Virginia schools, faced with stereotypes that were far from positive. In her Virginia high school, Bustillos founded a club for Latino students that also did translation for new immigrants, so they could participate in school activities and see the range of choices available for them in an American school. At the law school, her responsibilities include working on the Hispanic Law Conference and orientations for first-year-law students. She is particularly proud to be part of a law school that is among the most diverse in the nation, with a Latino student population that, she says, matches the population as a whole at around 13 percent. “It’s very rewarding. The atmosphere at the law school and [AU] is wonderful,” she says. “And the dean is amazing. He’s just a role model for everyone.” —SA |
