Reclaiming the Soul of Our Alma Mater
When Georgetown asked me to deliver a 2025 Commencement Address, I froze.
Not because I was ungrateful. But because I was… stunned. For days, I asked the question I couldn’t quite quiet:
Why me?
I thought of the countless students who had walked those halls after me. The Rhodes Scholars, the valedictorians, the senators’ children and NGO founders. I thought of the polished speeches that might’ve been easier to give, the résumés that might’ve looked cleaner, the paths straighter.
But mine? Mine was full of stumbles and questions, political losses, long bus rides, and longer nights working jobs to afford staying. A story of red ink and rejection, of building coalitions after being voted out of them. A story that started not with applause—but with adjustment. A student leader who never won an election, a debater who couldn’t write a clean first draft, a Latino who was told he wasn’t Chicano enough.
And yet… they had called me.
That question—Why me?—stayed with me until a man in white stepped onto a Roman balcony and changed his name to León XIV.
Suddenly, I understood.
He was not the favorite the media predicted. Not the obvious heir. Not the loudest or most polished. But a man shaped by Latin America and the United States. A man who walks with two names, two traditions, two homelands. A bridge, not a brand.
When I saw him standing there, quiet and reverent, I stopped asking Why me?
I began to understand why now.
Because this moment—this world—needs voices forged in the in-between. Voices that carry contradiction with grace. Voices that belong to more than one place, yet speak from one soul.
And my soul, shaped by Georgetown’s stone and El Paso’s sun, by scholarship and sacrifice, by Jesuits and justice, had finally come full circle.
Homecoming as Revelation
Returning to campus was not just a visit. It was a resurrection.
Each stone remembered me. The trees along the brick paths held fragments of who I used to be: the tired sophomore walking back from J.Crew after a closing shift, the Community Scholar sprinting to class with a marked-up Aristotle text, the young organizer staying late in ICC to write a statement after a hate crime rocked our campus.
I returned as a father now. As the founder of hemispheric initiatives. As a servant of the Americas. But still, the eighteen-year-old boy who arrived on a three-day Greyhound bus ride—naive enough to wander onto the film set of Deep Impact—walked with me.
And when I stood before the Class of 2025, I carried all of him. The self-doubt. The silent prayers. The $6.75 J.Crew paycheck. The red-inked essay from Professor Elizabeth Velez. The feeling of being both guest and ghost in classrooms I had worked so hard to enter.
I carried it all—and turned it into flame.
Alma Mater as Fire
The moment I stood before the Class of 2025, I did not come as a guest.
I came as someone who had authored a path through this place—stone by stone, choice by choice—not to prove I belonged, but to expand what belonging could mean.
“Let’s talk about that phrase: alma mater,” I told them. “It does not mean ‘school.’ It means ‘nourishing soul.’ Not your résumé. Not your network. Tu alma. What lives in yours?”
I wasn’t asking to inspire reflection.
I was inviting a generation to remember their design.
Because alma mater isn’t a building. It’s not a seal on a transcript or a Latin phrase carved into limestone. It’s the force that shapes your instinct when the world stops making sense. It’s the blueprint of your character when no one is watching. It’s the quiet confidence that says:
I built something here. And now I carry it forward.
And that force—it was already alive in the graduates who stood with me.
Like Axel Abrica, whose voice brought the room to stillness—not as performance, but as presence.
Or, Michelle Ramos whose speech was not a student’s remarks—it was a declaration of authorship, of clarity beyond her years.
In their stories, I didn’t see hope—I saw arrival. Not potential, but power. They weren’t waiting for permission. They were walking in purpose. That’s what alma mater should offer: not polish, but positioning. Not a title—but a toolkit.
The Architecture of Self
During my years at Georgetown, I wasn’t finding myself. I was architecting myself—across communities, institutions, and constellations of effort that didn’t show up on any syllabus.
I debated foreign policy in one classroom, then walked across campus to draft unity statements after campus hate crimes. I lost student government elections, then co-founded coalitions. I was voted out of MeChA for expanding its vision, then led a hemispheric network of Chicano student organizations across the Ivy League.
Those weren’t setbacks. They were signals.
Each role I played—RA, public policy assistant, admissions ambassador—was part of the scaffolding I was building. Not to reach power. But to reach coherence.
Even my jobs—at J.Crew, at the US Peace Corps, at Generations United—weren’t “just” work-study. They were the spaces where I learned how to move between worlds. Where I sharpened the fluency to build across borders.
I wasn’t surviving Georgetown. I was shaping it. And in doing so, I shaped myself.
Legacy Is Not a Crown—It Is a Choice
As I stepped off the commencement stage, I wasn’t thinking of legacy in the way institutions often do. Not in endowments, or buildings, or applause.
I was thinking—respira. Not to calm myself. But to receive the moment fully. To anchor in its truth. And in that breath, I remembered the ones that came before it:
- The breath a student takes before walking into a room they were never expected to enter.
- The breath a voice like Michelle’s or Axel’s takes before speaking truth in public for the first time.
- The breath a father takes when naming his child not for the world that is, but for the one he is committed to building.
My son is named León Mateo. When he was born prematurely, we learned to breathe together. Respira—I whispered. Not as instruction, but as inheritance.
And when the white smoke rose above Rome and the name León XIV was announced, something ancient and prophetic stirred in me.
The question I had been carrying—“Why me?”—dissolved in that moment.
Because León XIV did not arrive with spectacle.
He arrived with silence. With grounding. With the same quiet hemispheric clarity I recognize in my own journey—walking between Mexico City, El Paso, Texas and Washington, D.C., between civic duty and cultural devotion.
In him, I saw confirmation:
That the voice of the Americas is not just relevant—it is essential. That Latin America and Latinos are not merely a region—it is a reservoir. Of vision. Of tenderness. Of uncompromising leadership that emerges from community, not conquest.
And I understood—
I was not asked to speak because I had reached a peak. I was asked because I had remained rooted. Because I had lived the question—and chosen to author the answer.
The Soul We Leave Behind
The students of the Class of 2025 are not entering an empty world. They are entering a world starving for meaning. For authorship. For coherence.
In a time when AI writes the résumé and algorithms edit the story, we must ask: Who is holding the soul?
Because alma mater—real alma mater—is not given. It is earned through presence and passed on through legacy.
And legacy is not what we leave behind.
Legacy is what we leave within.
So I leave this, to my son, to León XIV, to the Class of 2025, and to every soul navigating more than one language, one land, one truth:
Do not shrink for systems. Do not translate your dreams for others’ comfort. Do not adjust your brilliance to fit inside borrowed frames. Author. Architect. Embody.
Your story is not content. It is context.
And when owned fully—context becomes culture.
That is alma mater. Not a name you carry, but a soul that carries you.