While it may be true that you can take a girl out of the country but not the country out of the girl, that’s quite all right with Dr. Guillermina “Gina” Nuñez-Mchiri. Raised by migrant farm worker parents, with whom she worked alongside as a child, she carries those memories and early lessons into the classroom.
“Some say knowledge is power. I prefer to say, ‘Applied knowledge is power.’ We must do something with the knowledge we acquire,” she says.
An assistant professor of cultural anthropology at The University of Texas at El Paso, Nuñez-Mchiri puts her words into action every day, from offering extra credit to students who participate in a litter clean-up and then record their experience for class, to teaching citizenship classes. She credits her parents for her staunch support of service learning.
“My favorite motto is a saying — or dicho in Spanish — that my mother taught me: ‘No one is a prophet in their own land,’ which means we need to be willing to leave our comfort zone to get to know what we’re made of and then come home and share what we’ve learned,” she says.
