Avance Latinx Académico Society- ALAS

06/17/2026

06/16/2026

📖 They expected Puerto Rican students to assimilate; Antonia Pantoja built institutions instead.

In New York, after leaving Puerto Rico, Antonia Pantoja saw what the city did to young Puerto Ricans who were treated as problems before anyone bothered to see their brilliance. Schools pushed them toward silence. Systems measured their accents before their minds. So she helped build spaces like ASPIRA, where students were not asked to disappear into someone else’s definition of success, but to become leaders with their identity intact.

That is the detail that matters. Pantoja understood education as more than classrooms and degrees. It was survival infrastructure. It was mentorship, language, confidence, history, and the radical act of telling a young person: you are not deficient — the system is underestimating you.

Some people change history by winning office. Others change it by teaching children they were never the failure.

Who taught you to see your own worth before the world was willing to confirm it?

06/06/2026

05/31/2026

🌙 At some point you realized you dream in both languages and you stopped thinking that was strange.

Spanish for the old things. For the voices of the people who raised you. For prayers and lullabies and the words that were said in the dark when you were small and everything felt large. Those come in Spanish because that is the language they lived in and your memory keeps them exactly as they were.

English for the world you built. For the work and the friendships and the version of yourself that moves through the days of your actual life. That language is yours too — fully, completely, without apology.

And sometimes in the middle of a dream the two switch without warning and you follow it completely because your brain has always known both and never needed to choose.

People who speak one language wonder what it is like. You wonder what it is like to not have this — to not carry two worlds in your mouth, to not have the ability to reach back into one and forward into the other depending on what the moment needs.

It is not a gap. It is not a confusion. It is a capacity. It is an inheritance.

You are bilingual in your bones. That is not nothing. That is everything. 🌙

05/24/2026

Cada lengua indígena guarda historias, raíces y una forma única de ver el mundo. 🌎🧵

05/20/2026

05/16/2026

The university will also cover housing, meals and fees for students from families earning less than $125,000 with typical assets.