ORONO, Maine — University of Maine master’s student Yamil Burguete was born in Texas to Mexican parents from Pueblo, and has spent his life living all over North America.
When people ask where he’s from, “I just say I’m a citizen of the world,” said Burguete, who came to Maine to study two years ago.
The university held the eighth annual NASPA Region 1, New England Latino Student Leadership Conference, which began on Friday with a dinner and dance and continued into Saturday with speakers and workshops designed to offer networking opportunities and leadership. NASPA stands for National Association of Student Administrators.
Carlos Diaz, Maine assistant attorney general, spoke to a large crowd of multicultural students at the dinner Friday. Dr. Rafael Grossman Zamora, a trauma surgeon at Eastern Maine Medical Center, was the keynote speaker on Saturday.
Diaz, whose father is from Bogota, Colombia, was born and raised in Maine.
Grossman Zamora was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, and came to the United States in 1993 as a clinical research visiting fellow at the University of Chicago. He is trained in trauma, acute care surgery and advanced minimally invasive surgery, and was hired by EMMC in 2004. He moved to Maine with his wife and three children.
“I’m really 100 percent Venezuelan,” he said. “My kids are 100 percent Venezuelan, even though they were born in Michigan. We’re 100 percent Venezuelan at home.”
Grossman Zamora said that even though he’s from South America, he’s also a citizen of the world.
“Some people don’t like to be called Latino, and some people don’t like to be called Hispanic,” he said. “I don’t care.”
At the beginning of his speech, Grossman Zamora told a story about treating a trauma patient in Chicago who wanted to know what race he was because of his thick Venezuelan accent.
“I said ‘human race,’” Grossman Zamora said, getting a laugh from a mostly Latino group that gathered for the Saturday morning speech. “We’re all human.”
According to U.S. Census data from 2000, there were 35.3 million people of Hispanic descent living in the U.S., and that number has grown to nearly 47 million in the past decade, he said.
“It’s the fastest-growing culturally ethnic group in the U.S.,” Grossman Zamora said.
Even with greater cultural diversity in the U.S. there are still problems with discrimination, he said, telling those at the assembly not to let anything stop them from achieving their goals.
“Don’t get discouraged,” Grossman Zamora said. “Sometimes you get all these negative feelings, but if you want something you work at it.
“It’s up to you … to make something extraordinary for you, for your family and for your community,” he added.
Keys to reaching goals are educating yourself, working toward becoming an ethical leader and connecting to people, Grossman Zamora said.
“If you don’t network — reach out — then you might miss an opportunity to go here or there,” he said.
After the speech, the students, who came from all over New England, dispersed to the workshops, with titles such as empowering leadership, understanding your roots for building a successful future, race vs. ethnicity and others.
Nydia Santana, a higher education graduate student from the University of Vermont, accompanied a group of 10 Latino students to the UMaine conference.
“We need to empower our students and make sure they know they can all make it,” she said.
The Latino conference is a great way to “bring Latinos together to show them they are not alone and to [expose them to] role models in leadership capacities,” Santana said.
The Latino conference was founded seven years ago by Brown University administrator Salvador Mena, who saw the need to connect Latino students with one another, their schools and their communities.
This year’s conference theme was “Attaining Leadership: Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling.”
For UMaine students Burguete and Justin Umel, a master’s level social work student, who both helped to organize the event, hosting the conference was an honor.
“It’s a leadership conference,” said Umel. “These students are coming here and learning skills to empower themselves.”
Burguete added, “The magic of this, for the students, is broadening their horizons and to see that they are