On October 5, Cesar Chavez Courtyard hosted International Dress and Piraguas Day, organized by El Centro. The idea behind this event was to bring people of all Hispanic culture celebrating Hispanic heritage, uniting everybody together to be able to celebrate their legacy.

Moreover, to show a diversity of culture to people  that attend and work at Chabot College.

A lot of students do know about Centro, but I think not everybody’s aware of the work that we do, or they think we only support certain specific groups of students. And so I think it’s just also an opportunity for us for students to connect with us even more. ’’, explained Angela Munoz- specialist for El Centro. 

Networking among students  is one of the reasons for them to come on campus at this event. El Centro also encourages other staff and faculty to have an opportunity for them to socialize amongst themselves and with students. 

The President of Chabot College welcomed all the guests and higlighted the importance of celebrating this day: ‘’ Network with one another to make sure that you’re here to truly celebrate not only yourself, but also the heritage and culture of other folks as well. I think that that’s very, very important. And although this is only one hour today, we definitely encourage you to celebrate all the time all year around.’’

Event was not only rich for networking, but also for tasty traditional Puerto Rican food. ‘’ I really do love this. I feel like there’s a great way to represent our Hispanic heritage. Whenever you see these stands, you see chips, you see shaved ice cream, you always see the Hispanic behind it, said Kevin Madina, one of the Chabot students. 

Indeed, Hispanic heritage was represented by the great variety of traditions, for example, a competition for best dress. This idea made it even bigger than just Hispanic Latinx culture. 

‘’So this is just a way to not only celebrate Latinos, but to honor them. And Chabot College is a College where more than 25% of the students are Latino. So really having this type of representation and events really brings our people together so we can not only connect with our culture, but to connect with each other. We all, there’s so many Latinos from all these different countries, so really coming together is a really important thing. ‘’, Claudia Silva, a student assistant at Chabot. 

All the guests were involved in dancing, eating, and having fun. This could only be possible because of the Dj who was providing an electrifying atmosphere. 

We’re in California, especially here in the Bay Area, we don’t really have, from my knowledge, we don’t really have a large Puerto Rican population. And so trying to find someone that’s actually Puerto Rican that makes Piragua basically impossible. And so we have to kind of step away from that and just make it shaved ice, but call it Piragua’’,  highlited Angela Munoz.

This event truly expressed an appreciation for the representation of Hispanic culture by the food stands and other traditions. Many of the students found the support from El Centro and students had meaningful and engaging time. Attandents learned about the importance of celebrating heritage and school spirit from this event, something they say they had not experienced before..