Christopher Gomez Blank: Transforming the Latinx Student Experience From Within
Christopher Gomez Blank | he/him/his | CLAS ‘09
B.A. in Foreign Affairs and Spanish
Christopher Gomez Blank (he/him/his) attended UVA from 2005-2009, and graduated with a double major in Foreign Affairs and Spanish. He currently runs business operations for diversity recruiting in New York City.
The short answer of why Christopher ended up at UVA was the price tag. As an in-state student, UVA had always been on his radar, but he wasn’t sure if it would be where he’d end up until all of his decisions came out. UVA was the best school academically and the cheapest option out of those he applied to, and that ultimately is what brought him to grounds.
When asked how his parents reacted to the decision, he says their excitement was delayed but real. Neither are from Virginia or the D.C. area, so while they knew UVA was a decent school, it wasn’t until they started sharing Christopher’s news with their community that they realized just how good it was. He also shares that his parents always encouraged him to go to a school he was excited about more than a school that was simply prestigious.
Adjusting to UVA, like for so many students, came with a number of culture shocks. Christopher says that even though UVA is technically a public school, and that he had attended public schools his entire life, at UVA there was a certain level of privilege that he hadn’t previously been exposed to. He found himself in classes with students who had always gone to private or boarding schools, and while his community back home was always roughly 30% white, 30% black, and 30% hispanic, as well as socioeconomically diverse, at UVA differences in identity were much more obvious and pronounced.
During first-year, he shared a triple with a white roommate from Roanoke and a black roommate from Hampton, and remembers how different their views on racial tensions were from his own. Christopher grew up in a multiethnic household and attended a multiethnic public school, and he came to UVA thinking that ‘people are just friends with everyone.’ He thought that since UVA would bring together students on the same intellectual level, there would be a sense of being able to relate to one another right off of the bat. He quickly realized that people from other parts of Virginia did not think in those idealized ways.
Christopher would grow to have a very diverse friend group and UVA experience, but he believes that had to be an active choice and effort. He eventually saw himself as a “bridge-builder,” becoming comfortable being the only person who looked like him in the room.
“Being able to relate, or being able to be open and wanting to get to know and wanting to engage with different people was a strength of mine that I’ve been able to carry throughout my post-UVA career as well.”
He jokingly refers to his adjustments first-year as being all about developing “cross-functional skill sets.” He could build relationships and friendships with people who were more hesitant to be friends with those outside of their in-group identity, and he says the most important part of being an ally to all different types of communities was his willingness to say point blank, ‘I’m here, and I want to be here.’ It was this mindset that helped him find other friends who were somewhat ‘counter-cultural’ for rejecting the seemingly predetermined groups defined by ethnicity.
Outside of the classroom, Christopher got really involved with the then Latino Student Union (LSU), and was part of the team that helped transform it into the Latino Student Alliance during his fourth year. He reflects that the Latinx student community at the time could primarily be split into three groups: first generation students whose parents were often immigrants from Latin American countries, 2) folks like him whose parents are Latinx but had been in the U.S. for more than a generation, and 3) Latin-American international students. During his third year, he developed a strong group of friends who identified with that second category, and some of his fondest college memories include having in-depth conversations on race relations and other important ideas with them.
Other fond memories include streaking the Lawn on the day Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008. He’d been involved with University Democrats over the years, but worked officially for the Obama Campaign in Charlottesville leading up to the election. He also remembers staying up late in their friend’s Lawn room singing songs and sharing a bottle of tequila in celebration. He remembers even getting the police called on them that night, and at that point Kayla asks if he felt having the police called on a party of mostly minority students was indicative of a more systemic issue. He pushes back saying that on that particular night they were being especially loud, but does go on to say that he and his friends felt that playing music loudly was part of trying to express their identity--they would drive through grounds blasting reggaeton just to let people know they were there. He didn’t see it as “reclaiming” space, but rather creating new spaces and marking their presence.
Other than working on the campaign, Christopher also worked as a Spanish-language translator at the UVA hospital, and during his third-year he studied abroad in Buenos Aires. The pinnacle of his UVA involvement, though, was being president of the Latino Student Union (LSU). He speaks in-depth about the intricacies of the organization’s structure at the time--mostly because it was so disorganized. His fourth year, he and other Latinx student leaders spent a lot of time figuring out how to consolidate some of their groups so they could better advocate for Latinx resources and create a sense of community for current students.
While presidents of student organizations tended to be in their third-year, Christopher was pushed to run for the position in his fourth year because, as he says, “the wheels fell off of the bus.” The only people who were very involved with LSU were its leadership, and most were graduating that year. Christopher says that the LSU was supposed to be the agnostic organization bringing together all the individualized aims and goals of other Latin-American interest groups, but at the time he was elected there was a lack of clear purpose. La Alianza served as a leadership group for Hispanic and Latino student leaders, but after they were unable to fully coordinate events for the Hispanic Heritage Month during his fourth year, the leaders realized they needed a change.
After that month, they all came together. La Alianza was supposed to be the group responsible for executing events, but it wasn’t equipped to do that. Basically, the president of La Alianza and other leaders, including Christopher, sat down and discussed what a reorganization should look like. They wanted to put a platform in place for the Latinx community at UVA to be able to mobilize if they needed to. There was an uptick in conversations around immigration in the early 2000s, and while they did mobilize for protests, it was difficult to mobilize quickly because there wasn’t a central organization with a lot of members that could be tapped into.
The questions became, how can they mobilize people faster, and how can they create a group that can interact with administration more easily? From the administration’s perspective, it can be difficult to want to work with a group when there isn’t an overarching voice. They wanted to mirror the Black Student Alliance’s (BSA) structure, as the BSA is the active umbrella for other constituent groups within the black community.
That is how LSU and La Alianza joined together to become the Latinx Student Alliance (LSA), allowing for presidents of the groups to coordinate community events and enable students to simply become members of a group without needing to take leadership positions. Christopher recognized the dual need to acknowledge the diversity of Latinx student experiences while also creating a central organization to serve as the voice when advocating for the entire community.
At this point in their conversation, Kayla and Christopher swap details about the current LSA structures and the old LSU ones. Part of the project of collecting Latinx history at the University of Virginia is recognizing that many of the current student efforts mirror those of the past. In 2018, the LSA, on behalf of a collective of Hispanic/Latinx students, published an open letter to the UVA community with many of the same demands and recommendations that Christopher’s generation pushed for. It is disheartening to realize that the lack of institutional history about Latinx students contributes to these repeats in history. Even as all the community is able to accomplish today, one can’t help but wonder if the strides would have come sooner if incoming students knew about these past efforts and could have built upon them instead of starting from scratch. For example, Christopher points out that pushing for a physical space was a huge part of his efforts to recruit more Latinx students. When Kayla helped write the Our University to Shape proposal, which included the need for a Latinx Student Center, she and the other authors had no idea Christopher had already done much of the research needed to bolster their argument. The Latinx Student Center, located in Newcomb Hall, opened in Spring 2020--over a decade after Christpher graduated.
When Christopher thinks about the difference between the Latinx community he was part of at UVA versus the one that exists today, he considers that current hurdles are more salient. The ‘value proposition’ for prospective Latinx students is complicated by the negative aspects of UVA history that contribute to its present day. He notes that the neo-Nazi rallies in 2017 made his job trying to recruit Latinx students in New York to attend UVA a harder sell, but hopes that a continued dedication to creating inclusive spaces will help make the community stronger. During his time at UVA, he met people from all around the country and at different points of their identity exploration, so as a leader he tried to create welcoming spaces for people to develop, including ways for non-Spanish speaking Latinx students to connect with their culture.
About the Latinx Oral History Initiative, Christopher says he’s excited someone is taking the time to leverage technology in a way to collect information while it is still fresh. In order to bring more opportunities for Latinx students, he says there needs to be accessibility of information. History on the Latinx experience at UVA has only been available in ebbs and flows over the years, but projects like these are steps in the right direction. The ability to simply call up an alumni and say “Hi!” can make a student’s time so much better.
If Christopher could give a piece of advice to current students, he would say, “as much as (college) is an opportunity to tap into your Latino identity, as much as you are going to establish friends in the Latino community who are going to be able to push this exploration and be a base of people who understand what you’re going through, don’t let that completely define your experience as well. Take the time to get to know people outside of the tempting bubble.” He wishes he personally had built more of a professional network during his time at the University, and that he had been able to balance having activist roles with time to explore potential career options and meeting new people that way.
Christopher felt that UVA is a place where most of the time given ‘freedom to run.’ You are able to pick up something you can dedicate yourself to, and change things for the better. Yes, the history of UVA is very hierarchical and stratified, and the experience can be that way, too, but the ability to take an idea and run with it is unique. For better or for worse, he says, you aren’t hand-holded as a UVA student when you want to see something done.
He goes on to point out that the relationships of students to administration is not as prevalent at other schools, so even as the latter can be slow moving or have blind spots, they are open to having conversations with the students who take charge. That has contributed to the idea that graduates of UVA are willing to get their hands dirty--they want to do the work, and they’re unique because they’re comfortable laying out the strategy and doing the ground-work, communicating the idea, and writing the presentation as well. Christopher looks back on his time at UVA fondly because of the people he met and the skills he gained that have been so transferable and applicable to his professional career, but it is clear from his interview that while UVA left a mark on him, he made his mark here as well.