La Casa Latina UPenn

Maritza Moulite is a first year PhD student in the Graduate School of Education focusing on Reading/Writing/Literacy. She aims to improve literacy in under-resourced communities after being inspired to study education from her time as a literacy tutor and pre-k teacher assistant. Maritza is the author of the young adult novels Dear Haiti, Love Alaine, and One of the Good Ones (Inkyard Press/HarperCollins). She graduated from the University of Florida with a bachelor’s in women’s studies and the University of Southern California with a master’s in journalism. Her favorite song is “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire.

Virgie Tovar​ is an author, activist and one of the nation's leading experts and lecturers on weight-based discrimination and body image. She holds a Master's degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. She is a contributor for ​Forbes​ where she covers the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work. She is the founder of Babecamp​, a self-guided online course designed to help people break up with diet culture. She started the hashtag campaign and in 2018 gave a TedX talk​ on the origins of the campaign.

To our Class of 2021 and Class of 2020 grads, we want to gift you a stole! If you are interested in receiving a La Casa Latina stole, please fill out the interest form by March 31. Form link: bit.ly/lacasagradstole

First inspired by Florida's Parkland shooting to get engaged in activism, Daphne Frias organized and fought for accessible transportation for her and her State University of New York College at Oswego classmates to attend the March For Our Lives protest. She succeeded in her efforts when 100 plus students from her campus received busing.
Daphne lives with Cerebral Palsy and invests her efforts in getting those with disabilities the outlets they need to participate in movements. In August of 2018, she was appointed as the NY State Director for March For Our Lives, and later won the campaign for County Committee Women in her district. She is also a founding member of the National Children's Campaign, which represents over 74 million children, and founder of Box the Ballot, a bipartisan initiative to ensure the voices of Americans are heard despite not being able to vote in person.

Happy Friday, these are photos from the Let’s Talk Natural Event with and Thank you to everyone who attended and we hope you enjoyed the event and your products! 💫Let us know in the comments if you want to see more events like this in the future💫

Berta Cáceres was an environmental activist and indigenous leader who belonged to the Lenca community of Honduras. She co-founded and coordinated the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) in 1993 as a student activist. She led campaigns on a wide variety of issues, including protesting illegal logging, plantation owners, and the presence of US military bases on Lenca land. She supported feminism and challenged traditional patriarchal norms,was vocal of LGBT rights, as well as wider social and indigenous issues.In 2015, she won the Goldman Environmental Prize for a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam at the Río Gualcarque. In April 2015, the international human rights organization Global Witness highlighted Cáceres' case as emblematic of the severe risks environmental activists face. A year later, Berta Cáceres was killed in her home. Her legacy of activism and protection of the environment and indigenous communities lives on.

Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro is an award-winning Afro le***an novelist, short story writer, essayist, and feminist activist from Puerto Rico, she addresses both racial and gender issues, and sexual identity in her combative, non-conformist, and creative works . She offers lectures about antiracist, decolonial feminism, LGBTTQ issues and how to be a black woman in today’s society. She is also the Director of the Department of Afro-Puerto Rican Studies, a performative project of Creative Writing based in San Juan and has founded the Chair of Ancestral Black Women to respond to the invitation promulgated by UN and UNESCO to celebrate the International Decade of Afro-descendants 2015−2024. Her book Las Negras, winner of the PEN Club Puerto Rico National Short Story Award in 2013, explores the limits of female characters during the slavery period that challenged hierarchies of power. She also won the Prize of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 2015 and 2012, and the National Prize of the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature in 2008.

Chef Cristina Martinez is a native of Mexico and an immigrant rights activist in Philadelphia. She started her work in American kitchens as a pastry chef in an Italian restaurant but was fired when they discovered her undocumented status. Martinez then began cooking food for other Mexican workers in her apartment, with her husband Ben Miller.As demand grew for Martinez's home-made barbacoa, she and Miller began selling tacos from a pushcart on weekends. In 2015, they opened a permanent restaurant, South Philly Barbacoa. In 2016, Bon Appétit magazine named it one of the top ten best new restaurants in America. Cristina is vocal in supporting undocumented immigrants in the restaurant industry, establishing an organization, the Popular Alliance for Undocumented Workers' Rights. In 2017, Univision produced a Spanish-language podcast about Martinez, called Mejor vete, Cristina, which won Mejor Cobertura Multimedia (Best Multimedia Coverage) at the 2018 Ortega y Gasset Awards. In 2019, Martinez was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic.

An Afro-Cuban American scholar, Amalia Dache is an assistant professor in the Higher Education Division. Her experiences as a Cuban refugee and student traversing U.S. educational systems—among them urban K–12 schools, community college, state college, and a private research-intensive university—inform her research and professional activities.
Dr. Dache’s major research areas are postcolonial geographic contexts of higher education, Afro-Latina/o/x studies, community and student resistance, and the college-access experiences of African diasporic students and communities. 💫Please show some love for Dr. Dache and let us know who else you want to see highlighted💫

In honor of Women’s History month, we will be highlighting Latinx womxn in our community every weekday. Please feel free to message us about Latinx womxn you want to see posted! When Antonia M. Villarruel decided to be a nurse, she never envisioned that she would become a pioneering nurse-researcher who would improve the health of underserved Latino communities or dean of the number one nursing school in the world. By taking advantage of opportunities — including earning an MSN at Penn Nursing — Dr. Villarruel is now the Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing at Penn Nursing and an internationally renowned leader in research, policy and practice. The sixth dean of the School, she is only the second alumna to serve in this position and the first dean to serve who has prior and current NIH funding.

Introducing our new Spotify playlist featuring AfroLatinx artists in honor of our AfroLatinx Voices series! Check out the bio link to listen and we hope you enjoy! What other songs would you like to see added? 🎶

In partnership with , we are excited to invite you to a virtual conversation on beauty, self-care, and hair with executives from ! Join us next Thursday for a relaxed and joyful conversation.

For students on campus who want to pick up a NaturAll product fill out the Google form at
bit.ly/naturallproducts by 3/5. Supplies are limited.