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Laughter and joy fill the air as the Latinos In Action students play a game together on the soccer field. Each student, with a different background and different lives, finds joy in each other’s presence. They have differences from each other, and may not always get along, but that doesn’t stop them from having fun. Their diversity isn’t repelling them away from each other, but making them closer to one another.
LIA, which stands for Latinos In Action, is a program offered for any student to join. While the majority of the club is Latino, it isn’t just for Latino students, but for everyone to learn and celebrate Latinos and to learn about leadership skills. Eventually, they want to use this club to bring more diversity not only to NS, but to the community as well.
“You have the Scandinavian days, and it’s all based on Scandinavian culture, you have the Pioneer days in Fairview, you have Welch days over in Wales,” Latinos In Action teacher Rhett Bird said. “In the grand scheme of things, we’re trying to build something here in our community where we eventually have a Hispanic fair, where we can start sharing culture to our community and not just the students here at our highschool.”
LIA is not a program unique to our school, but is a nation-wide program. LIA was founded in Provo, Utah by José Enriquez. He started this program because he saw Latino youth were disengaged with school. In this program, students learn about college and career readiness, leadership development, as well as literacy tutoring.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re from, it matters who you are and how hard you work to make your dreams come true,” senior Jasmin Canales said.
Since LIA is an organization, the students get to go to competitions with other schools. At these competitions, people show off their talents in many different forms, including dancing and reciting poems. At the end, the organization gives out scholarships to different students to help them with their education. LIA does this because they want to inspire Latino students to go to college. LIA focuses on helping students find their voice in the world. The club is helping students pursue higher education such as college, trade, etc. The club wants to help students, particularly Latino students, with their pursuit of higher education because they want to see those same students succeed in life.
“No matter how low your GPA is, you can still go to college,” Canales said.
They want to show that no matter how low a student’s GPA is or how much they struggle in life that they too can succeed, just like the founder of LIA. In the class, they spend a lot of time helping each other out with classes they are struggling with. The club encourages all of its students to be successful.
“We are trying to get more involved in every single thing,” LIA president Diego Reyes said.
While NS LIA is a part of a larger organization, it is special here because the club doesn’t only do things involving the organization. They plan their own activities just for NS students. Sometimes, they do activities with just their class or club, like playing games at the soccer field. Other times they plan activities for the whole school to enjoy. While they haven’t had any major activities so far, they do have one important activity they are currently planning, which is the Day of the Dead celebration.
“We just do projects together like Homecoming, Cinco de Mayo, Día de los Muertos,” Reyes said. “When we do fun projects like that, it just brings everyone together.”
Day of the Dead, also known as Día de los Muertos, is a holiday of paying respects to people who have passed on. For this holiday, LIA decorates the school and will be giving out an assortment of foods and beverages. The foods that are being handed out this year are Pan de muerto, Conchas and Empanadas. The drinks they will be giving out as well are Agua Frescas and Horchata. They celebrate at NS on November 2nd, but since that is a Saturday, they are giving out food on November 1st this year.
“We just highly encourage to participate and to help us to celebrate not just Day of the
Dead, but to celebrate culture in general,” Bird said.
FThrough clubs like LIA, we are able to make NS a more diverse environment. They bring diversity to our school by showing others leadership, involvement, and culture. Everyone at NS brings their own culture to the school, making it a better, more diverse environment.
“We always say we like to encourage everybody to step in with us and help us to continue to share culture because we all have different backgrounds and we all have different traditions that we do,” Bird said. “We just want to create an environment and we ask everybody to help us create that safe environment for us to be who we are.”
