Kristen Lemus
Kristen Lemus is a junior majoring in political science with a minor in civil and human rights and the Hesburgh program in public service. Kristen is a Questbridge Scholar, a Building Bridges Scholar, and a member of the Student Coalition for Immigration Advocacy.
“A lot of people do put the blame on generations past, but what are we going to do now? Are we going to sit down and complain about it, or do something? And I think the mindset of my generation is that we're going to actually do something."
What inspired your interest in civil and human rights?
I always knew that I wanted to be involved in making the world a better place. I'm a native Californian, born and raised in Southern California, about 40 minutes south of Los Angeles. And I remember when my family and I would drive to the beach, passing downtown on the 605, I would look up from my journal and see an accumulated amount of pollution-- unable to see the skyline. I couldn't see the skyscrapers or the mountains, and I thought that that was so aggravating. How could we be living and breathing in these toxic chemicals? How could we be poisoning our own planet? I would write in my diary that when I'm president, I'm going to make sure that there's no pollution so I can see the skyscrapers and the mountains.
Apart from this, my own parents immigration story and how that translated to their lives in the States sparked my interest in civil and human rights. My dad immigrated from El Salvador and my mom immigrated from Mexico. Seeing their struggles assimilating to the culture despite racial prejudice or applying for federal resources on lunch breaks, such WIC or Head Start-- because they couldn't afford a babysitter-- simply taking advantage of resources for low-income households opened my eyes to inequality, as I was experiencing what life was like in the United States as a first-generation child. It was not only my family however, but the stories I would hear of other families waiting for the neverending paperwork to stop. The first question in my mind was always, why do we let this happen? Aren't people advocating for us? And when we would watch the news on TV I'd think, why does nobody up there look like me? So since I was little, I just always had that driving force in my mind saying, I want to be one of the people to represent those that don't have a voice. The people that think that they can't advocate for themselves-- because I was one of them. I didn't know where to start.
You spent last semester in Washington, DC. What did you do there?
I was an intern in the Capitol, for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. I knew I wanted to be in the House of Representatives but was contemplating whether I wanted to be with an individual representative or intern within a committee. Ultimately, I chose the committee because I thought that would give me an overarching sense of how policy works. Especially at the federal level, as most policies have to go through committees (your classic-- how a bill becomes a law). So I thought that was the best starting point.
I was assigned to the health and labor teams when I was on the committee. On the labor team, I learned about the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. There are various workforce boards across the nation, and a lot of them don't have equal resources. It just doesn't make sense to have a workforce board that isn't prioritizing their constituents. On the health team, I learned about the inequitable access to, for instance, kidney resources to combat diabetes for the Latino community.
Was there a moment during that internship where something so surprised you that you thought, I can't believe this is true?
What I didn't think about was, for example, the hidden trials and tribulations of COVID. There are so many impacts from COVID that we don't think about, and I think one of these factors was the creation of the vaccine. To produce a max exodus of vaccines, a company must start with clinical trials. A lot of the trials, to even get the vaccine up and running, didn’t include a lot of minority individuals compared to their white counterparts. So, in reality, a lot of vaccines aren't going to actually serve minorities in this country if they're not accurately represented and included in the test trials. They're not truly creating a holistic sample set.
So that was something I couldn't really wrap my mind around, especially when you think about the lack of diversity of other medications and vaccine trials in the past. Maintaining white as the norm explains why a lot of medications won't be as optimal for some minorities as it would be for others. So that was mind-boggling to me.
With the Klau Institute, you did interviews for the With Voices True project. Why did you choose to get involved with that?
I think a lot of it was me wanting to find my own community at Notre Dame. Arriving at Notre Dame, it's obviously a predominantly white institution. And so my first year was a little bit rough because I was trying to find, you know, what group I identified with, and I think I was having difficulty with that.
When I found out about the opportunity, I just thought to myself, what better way to try to connect with people than talking to people. I feel like I can bring out stories from individuals and, hopefully, make people feel comfortable sharing things with me that they wouldn't share with anybody else because I also have experienced those things.
I learned so much from those conversations. I interviewed friends, but if you don't outright ask about people's backgrounds, they're not going to tell you. So just having that dedicated time for them to be vulnerable with you was so beautiful. I just loved the goal, which is to gain a comprehensive view of what being a student is like on campus, especially if you are a person of color.
Do you feel that your CHR minor is in any way augmenting the way you look at your political science studies?
I think the first class that I took for my CHR minor was Building an Anti-Racist Vocabulary with Professor Durham. Actually sitting down and attributing an operational definition to what racism is, and how that impacts other people systematically, was so impactful for my studies. Having that definition always in my mind, working through this hierarchy of what racism actually is, has definitely contributed to my political science major.
Studying comparative politics to international politics, to American politics, it's very useful to have that in mind because what I want to do in the future is create policy that is equitable. And how else are you going to create equitable policy if you don't have that hierarchy in mind and think, no, we need to start from the bottom up rather than maintain the status quo. We can't keep doing this top-down sort of thing that inherently leaves others on the outskirts.
So I think the CHR minor is a great start at educating people aiming to enter the workforce and particular fields where it is useful to have this framework in mind. That's been missing in the past, and I think this is a great step towards, again, creating that holistic view of what an equal society is actually like.
Do you have any specific career goals?
This is ambitious, but I always tell myself that I would love to represent California’s 35th district in the House of Representatives. I just feel the need to do so, but even if it's just working for my member of Congress or going to Sacramento and being a state representative, something like that, I definitely think that that's the kind of world I want to enter. I keep talking about wanting to formulate policy and I think again, the best way to do so is being the person who actually does. But if not, just the realm of politics and being a representative for my community is where I see myself in the future.
In terms of the future, are you hopeful or are you cautious?
It's very, very easy to be negative. We are surpassing what our normal atmospheric temperature should be. There are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the states who don't have a clear pathway to citizenship nor the opportunities to actually apply for citizenship. There's this influx in migration rooted from escaping poverty, political turmoil, or war, especially with what's going on in Israel with Palestine. There are so many things that we can talk about that can make our perspective on the world so negative.
But my generation, we've inherited this, right? So it's so easy to blame others. A lot of people do put the blame on generations past, but what are we going to do now? Are we going to sit down and complain about it, or do something? And I think the mindset of my generation is that we're going to actually do something.
So I would say I'm hopeful. I think that it's the only way that we can feel, because if we don't feel hopeful, then what kind of world do we want to leave for our children, or our grandchildren. I would rather hope to leave a better world than what I came into.