Commentary: My Latinx students write what they know. And their words are powerful

The first college class I taught was Introduction to Creative Writing. I asked the students to write a personal essay on an incident that had a profound effect on them. Many wrote about family life, a beloved grandmother who died, a bully in middle school and other subjects you'd expect from young college students. But Veronica's essay was different. It began with, "I was two, and sitting on my father's shoulders when the National Guard shot into the crowd."

She wrote about the day of Archbishop Oscar Romero's funeral in El Salvador in 1980,