Latino Heritage Month Spotlight | Dr. César Cruz
During Latino Heritage Month, Eat. Learn. Play. celebrates influential Latino/a leaders in the Oakland community who are doing fantastic work supporting our mission of providing access to the three essential pillars of a healthy childhood — nutrition, education, and physical activity.
Meet Dr. César Cruz. Executive Director of Homies Empowerment. Dr. Cruz’s dedication and love for Oakland spans over 30 years. This love is grounded in the Town’s culture, roots, resistance, and inspiration. Through Dr. Cruz’s passion for education and civic engagement, he co-founded Homies Empowerment to uplift the community and provide food and other basic necessities for those in need.
We remain inspired by Dr. Cruz and Homies Empowerment for their commitment to community giveback. Because of this, in 2020, we were able to provide a new refrigerated truck so they could continue serving meals to families in need. Additionally, we helped serve food, groceries, books, and other resources to Homies Empowerment families during last year’s Christmas with the Currys Drive-thru Resource Fair.
Continue reading about Dr. Cruz’s work below, and thanks for tuning in for Latino Heritage Month as we’ve highlighted our amazing friends in the community.
What do you love most about Oakland?
I have been blessed to be here in Oakland for the last three decades. Over those 30 years, I have gotten to know Oakland’s swag, Oakland’s toughness, and its history of the Black Panther Party, particularly from one of its founders, Tarika Lewis, a mentor of mine, who was the first woman to join the party.
This is where my wife and I have chosen to raise our three children in East Oakland; our kids are in all East Oakland public schools. We love that Oakland has a rich African-American and a rich Raza Latino history. So many people don't know the rich Latino history that is here in Oakland. You think about the Peralta family and how this used to be Mexica land and also Ohlone land. One of the neighborhoods here is named after its original name, Temezcal, which is the Nahuatl, an Aztec word, for sweat lodge. Oakland is culture, resistance, roots, and inspiration.
What does Latino Heritage Month mean to you?
I hate to break it to you, but that term, Hispanic, is derogatory, a government term created in 1980 claiming we all have Spaniard or European roots. We don't. We also don't all speak a language from Europe, Spanish. So, I'll answer a different question: What does it mean for me to honor indigenous Raza roots?
It means I honor the astronomy in me, and we honor the fact that we are architects, archaeologists, caretakers of the land, and healers with thousands of years of history in the Americas. We are part of the original people from here; we are not immigrants. The fact we get a month means that for 11 months, we get nothing. Our history and traditions are "subtractively schooled." That is a term coined by Dr. Angela Valenzuela, and it means the more time we spend in most U.S. schools, the more things get subtracted from us, like our history, our roots, our pride, and our languages. English is from England, and Spanish is from Spain. We are neither. We must honor nahuatl, tzotzil, mam, quechua and so many other languages taken from us. We don't honor that this month. We have a long way to go. That is why we are building a high school here in Oakland to teach us our true histories, cultures, and languages.
What does it mean to you personally to be able to support the local community through your work?
I am humbled and blessed to get to live out my life's calling. For the last 27 years, I've been able to be an educator, and I'm so thankful to be one of the founders of Homies Empowerment. We started in 2009, getting to work with amazing young people as we learned our history and became civically engaged and began to feed our people. Now 12 years later, we operate three centers, have a staff of over 30, feed thousands of neighbors every week, building a high school, running a care center to meet the needs of our community, and we do so with the dream of emancipation.
How is your organization helping kids and families in the community amid the pandemic?
Through Homies Empowerment, we are able to feed over 2000 families every week. We started to do so two weeks into the shelter-in-place, back in March of 2020, and we have not stopped. We are also teaching ethnic studies classes for young people as we build out our community learning center.
For more information, reach out to us at www.HomiesEmpowerment.com
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