BY DAVID MEDINA
Rice President Reginald DesRoches and a host of Hispanic community leaders celebrated Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner for his eight years of service to the city at the university’s Faculty Club Dec. 15.
The celebration was part of the Mayor’s Hispanic Advisory Board annual holiday reception, which has been held at Rice for the past several years. Turner, who is term-limited and will step down at the end of the year, expressed his gratitude to the Hispanic Advisory Board members for their continued support of his administration and was especially grateful to the co-chairs Lenora Sorola-Pohlman and Roland Garcia.
Turner also praised DesRoches and Rice for their active engagement with the city.
“Thank you for your friendship. You and your wife have just been very, very, very gracious,” Turner said. “The university has been very supportive to the city of Houston, so I can’t thank you enough.”
DesRoches gave the welcoming remarks and talked about the growing Hispanic community at Rice, whose student population has increased to 20%, an all-time high for the university.
“So as you can see, our Hispanic community at Rice is thriving,” DesRoches said. “But we still have some work to do to make Rice even more inclusive and diverse. We plan to expand our faculty to be more diverse in color and gender, and we plan to make our foreign student population even more diverse by recruiting more students from Latin America.”
The annual reception also celebrates the winners of the Mayor’s Hispanic Heritage Month Award. This year they are Cruz Casiano for her work in education, Rachel Cevallos de Gonzalez for community activism, Marlen Trujillo for health care, Marcos Delgadillo Lope for youth activism, Mary Ramos for Lifetime Achievement and Rice alumna Geraldina Wise ’83 for arts in the community.
“The award is a validation of the rigorous intellectual path set at Rice that led to my understanding that art defines the human race; therefore, it is essential to all,” Wise said. “The award is an honor and a propulsion that will allow me to take my art deeper into the public realm and continue to help other artists to have opportunities for sharing.”
David Medina is the director of multicultural relations in the Office of Public Affairs.