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How One Student Transformed Challenges Into Change
When Sol Haro first attended Cal State San Marcos, he felt isolated. Not because of the school – Haro was an active student and involved in campus clubs – but because of a struggle with his identity. As a Mexican American child of a single parent from a low-income household, he felt a level of pressure to find a place where he thought he belonged. This pressure was amplified by Haro’s gender identity as a transgender man. He felt alone on campus — othered — because he rarely saw his identity reflected around him. “I didn’t see myself in my peers or professors,” Haro said. “I always tell people I’m a triple threat because I’m brown, I came from poverty, and I’m trans. A lot of things have happened in my life, so it's hard to find people who relate to me without disclosing all those things.” Haro graduated last spring with a degree in social sciences, and he now works on campus as a basic needs assistant for the Cougar Care Network. The impact of his work on campus earned him the President’s Student Champion Award for Inclusive Excellence and Diversity this year, and he was honored as the winner at the All Peoples Luncheon on Oct. 23. “Every human being has a right to basic needs, and we should not have to suffer to acquire them,” Haro said during his acceptance speech. By his senior year at CSUSM, Haro realized that what was blocking him from connecting with others was the internal shame he carried as a transgender man. With that in mind, he not only began working on self-acceptance but also sought to be a representation of transgender people in higher education that he longed to see. Last academic year, Haro learned about an opening for a civic engagement ambassador through Service Learning and Civic Engagement. He was drawn in by the office’s advocacy and decided to apply. In his application, he stated that while he is committed to neutrality, his passion is in helping those from underrepresented communities. Soon after becoming an ambassador, Haro began creating a comprehensive and easy-to-understand CalFresh guide for CSUSM students. After going through the challenging and confusing process of applying for CalFresh as a transgender man, Haro used inspiration from his mother to help motivate him to push for a change. “My mom was like, ‘If you don’t like something, then do something about it. No one’s gonna do it for you,’ ” Haro said. The guide is a tool to help all students, but it also highlights issues that transgender students seeking basic needs might encounter, such as what to do when their preferred name doesn’t match their legal name. This was not only a way for Haro to help other students on campus, but also a tool for self-empowerment. “I wanted to create this guide for every student, because getting basic needs is what you deserve. It shouldn’t be so difficult,” Haro said. While his guide focuses on the experiences of transgender, undocumented and mixed-status students, it is for everyone, and Haro encourages all students to apply for CalFresh. “More than half of our students probably qualify for CalFresh, and they’re not doing it because they either don’t know what it is or they have some shame around it,” Haro said. “But if you need that help, there’s no shame in receiving it. You don’t need to suffer for your basic needs.” Breaking the stigma around public assistance programs like CalFresh was also one of Haro’s goals with the CalFresh guide. He saw the shame his mother felt in using programs like CalFresh, Section 8 and Medi-Cal. That shame was amplified by how people reacted when his mom pulled out her benefits card at the grocery store. He said he doesn’t want to see other people struggle the way his mother did just to fulfill their basic needs. “Your physical health, your mental health, food impacts both of those,” he said. “Statistics show that when you have a lack of basic needs, you’re not showing up to class and your grades are dropping. How are you supposed to thrive in school and get your degree if all you’re thinking about is how hungry you are?” Haro has found that seeking assistance can be empowering rather than bringing shame. Creating the guide wasn’t easy. The CalFresh application contains technical language that can be hard for some to interpret. It required cross-referencing documents, taking notes while completing his own application and interviews, and spending hours on research. Every conversation Haro had with a CalFresh representative during this process became a valuable tool to help students. “I wanted the guide to be empowering for people,” Haro said. “Yes, the process is difficult, but once you get the benefits, it’s totally worth it.” Along with the CalFresh guide, Haro has also collaborated with various university departments and student organizations to raise awareness about social justice, voting rights and public policy issues. In 2024, he won the Innovation Hub’s Social Innovation Challenge for his proposal to redesign CSUSM’s commuter hub into a lounge focused on students’ comfort and basic needs. Last year, Haro also contributed artwork that centered on transgender joy and the normalization of transgender identities on campus. The picture, which is on display in the University Student Union, features Haro shirtless, three months after his top surgery. Haro described being open about his transness as “so incredibly scary but so empowering” and “filled with self-love.” As Haro continues his work with the Cougar Care Network, he’s thinking beyond the campus community. What began as a way to navigate his own challenges is now opening doors for others, a step toward lasting change built on lived experience and compassion. “This is representation,” Haro said. “I’m happy, I’m thriving and I’m filled with joy because of who I am.” Media Contact Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314
'Accidental Archivist' Helps Mexican Communities Learn Their History
Fernando Amador likes to call himself an accidental archivist. Long before he was an assistant professor of history at Cal State San Marcos, Amador was a doctoral student at New York’s Stony Brook University who was doing field work for his dissertation in Mexico. Hoping to comb through the historical archive of the people of Temacapulin, a small town northeast of Guadalajara, he was surprised to learn that they didn’t have one. What they had was thousands of documents piled haphazardly into boxes, all too vulnerable to environmental damage in the event of, say, a flood. Helping to organize the town’s historical record wasn’t part of Amador’s dissertation, but his conscience wouldn’t allow him to return to New York with the papers in such disarray. So he gave himself a crash course in archival studies – which traditionally is more the domain of librarians – and, with the aid of some volunteers from the community, he led an effort in 2022 to whip the archive into shape. During the three months that Amador was in Temacapulin, word of his project spread to neighboring towns. It just so happened that the Indigenous community of San Juan de la Laguna (La Laguna for short) was in the midst of an effort to organize its own historical documents. The people behind it invited Amador to town, and he discovered that this project involved almost twice as many documents (nearly 20,000), stretching back more than a century earlier, to the late 1600s. “When I saw that this project was a different beast compared to the first one,” Amador said, “I knew we needed more resources and more help.” After a hiatus of a few years – during which he finished his dissertation, earned his Ph.D. from Stony Brook and was hired by CSUSM – Amador finally found himself in position to revisit the La Laguna archive. Last spring, he received a $15,000 grant from the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library, the largest library in the world and the home of such storied pieces as the original Magna Carta. Over the summer, Amador spent two weeks in La Laguna, and the funding not only paid for his trip, but allowed him to purchase laptops and hire and train five members of the community as full-time workers on the 10-week project. “I never imagined I’d end up in this field, but it truly offers incredible opportunities,” he said. “I get to meet new people and develop skills in an area where, surprisingly, historians often know nothing about – archives. You’d think that’s odd, like chemists not learning about the equipment in their own labs. Now that I’m doing this work, I realize just how striking that gap is between what historians do and the archival side of their profession.” Amador streamlined and accelerated a process that had progressed in fits and starts since his initial visit to La Laguna three years earlier. In helping gather the materials, he found that many of them were stored in unfavorable conditions, such as sacks, cardboard boxes and bound together with string. Many also were marked with water stains. As the group surveyed and created an inventory of the documents, they encountered samples both mundane (countless tax receipts) and captivating. One example was a paper record of a legal battle in the early 20^th century between a town resident and an immigrant from Lebanon. “How did a man from Lebanon end up in this little town?” Amador said. “That whole story sounds fascinating. Discovering history through these documents is, in a way, truly thrilling.” Beyond just the work itself, the biggest challenge that Amador faced was gaining the trust of an Indigenous community that traditionally has had a fraught relationship with the local government and the outside world at large. “With me coming from the United States, people wondered, ‘What are his priorities? Why is he here helping us? What’s in it for him?’ ” he said. “It really came down to open communication – reassuring them that I’m doing this because I love the work and involving them in the process as much as possible.” As the grant-funded initiative wraps up this fall, Amador is considering a return to La Laguna in January to review the finished product in person. And as the domino effect continues, the second project might lead to a third one. Another nearby Indigenous community heard about the work Amador led in La Laguna and requested his support for its archival project, which features more digitized material instead of old, yellowing papers. For that one, which remains in the preliminary stages, he is coordinating with classically trained archivists, namely Sean Visintainer and Jennifer Ho of the CSUSM University Library. He’s also talking with Visintainer and Ho about the possibility of introducing and teaching a history course in archival studies. “I really did stumble into this type of work. I still am even hesitant to call myself an archivist,” Amador said. “I'm learning so much, and there's still so much for me to learn. But it does seem like this is where my career is headed – bringing archival studies and history together in some way.” Media Contact Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

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