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С����Ƶ Whitman Fellow José Vargas-Muñiz talks about diversity in science and his work with The Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) in this feature.

The cautionary advice dispatched by his mentors when Dr. José Vargas-Muñiz was a college student dented his confidence and, on several occasions, tripped him up.

Don’t let your hands fly the way so many Puerto Ricans like you do when they’re excited about something.

In a professional setting, tell no one that you’re queer.

Try to lose your island-inflected speech, they’d suggested.

“‘You’re too loud,’” Vargas-Muñiz, a Southern Illinois University molecular geneticist and microbiologist, recalled another of those years-old warnings.

What confirmed that his mentors — Latino college advisors, speaking from the pain of personal experience — had given him some bad advice were the happenings he witnessed in 2010 at the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) conference.

“They brought performers that were honoring Hispanic music,” Vargas-Muñiz said of that gathering in California. “On the first day, they opened with a blessing by an Indigenous person from that area, from a group whose native land we were meeting on … One of the keynote speakers even welcomed everyone in Spanish.

“It was empowering,” he said. “They were interweaving cultural identity with the journeys people were on.”

As it celebrates its 50th anniversary, SACNAS remains rooted in a belief that science cannot be properly taught, researched, or applied to human beings’ daily existence unless scientists bring some essential parts of their background and worldview to that sphere. .

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