To celebrate the conclusion of Women’s History Month, the Cross-Cultural Center invited keynote speaker Betty Valencia — a 2020 Chapman graduate and former Orange City Council candidate — to speak during the closing event of Women’s Herstory Month March 30. Via Zoom, she spoke in detail about her work and the events in her life that have molded her into the activist, community organizer and leader that she is today. 

“There’s a difference between when you include somebody because you have a quota and when you create spaces where people feel they belong and they want to join,” Valencia said at the keynote. “And this is what I’ve seen at Chapman by many students in the last couple of years. You are calling out and you are standing up, you are interrupting and disrupting and you are creating, my friends, spaces of belonging.”

Natalia Ventura, a senior peace studies major and the lead assistant at the Cross-Cultural Center, has worked with Valencia in the past. She’s seen Valencia’s activism firsthand both on campus and in the City of Orange. 

“(Valencia) is a fearless Latina being the change on campus and not being afraid to make the community her own, even though it is a community that hasn’t always represented her,” Ventura said.

Valencia identifies as an immigrant, openly queer Latina woman. Growing up the youngest of 12 siblings, she immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico when she was 6 years old. Although Valencia didn’t graduate from high school, she has since received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from California State University, Fullerton and New Mexico State University, respectively, before completing her Ph.D. in leadership studies at Chapman University in December 2020.

“I am representing Mexico, I am representing women, I am representing queer women, I am representing queer women immigrants of color (and) I am representing Latinas,” Valencia told The Panther. “Not all of them, but I represent an experience of what it is like to represent all of these intersections.”

During her four years at Chapman, Valencia worked closely with her faculty adviser, professor and dissertation chair Whitney McIntyre Miller.  

“(Valencia) was really able to combine the work that we were learning in the classroom into the work that she was doing in the community,” said McIntyre Miller, a professor within the Attallah College of Educational Studies. “It was really a privilege for me and the other folks in the classroom to be able to see how she lived the leadership we were talking about.”

Valencia was an active political activist during her time as a student, consistently attending rallies and protests, leading crowds and starting chants. Valencia told The Panther that one of the most memorable social justice movements she partook in was the protest of the “The Birth of a Nation” movie poster at Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, which brought out more students than she had ever seen.

Valencia has also brought her activism off-campus and into her home city of Orange. She ran for city council in 2018 after Orange voted against becoming a sanctuary city. After enduring a six-hour council meeting where she was subjected to a multitude of racist comments, slurs and even a knife being pulled out in the courtroom, Valencia decided she wanted to help bring justice and fairness to the citizens of Orange.

“March is Women’s History Month, but it should really be all year-round and really focus on people in our neighborhoods,” Valencia told The Panther. “Who they are and how they are making history; it is important to really reflect on those trailblazers.”