Mulberry High School valedictorian Brenda Alvarez-Lagunas carried a basket of strawberries onstage to give her commencement speech as a way to honor her immigrants parents. Her mom and dad came to the U.S. from Mexico and have worked in Florida harvesting blueberries, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, and, yes, strawberries.
“These are not ordinary strawberries, they’re jewels,” Alvarez-Lagunas, said holding one berry up at a time for her fellow graduates and the audience members to see. “This one represents sweat. This one represents dirt. This one, I think this is the blazing sun. Oh, and these are aches and pains. In other words, they are my motivators.”
The aches and pains went far beyond the field, when her dad was deported when she was in the seventh grade. With her mom becoming the family’s only breadwinner, Alvarez-Lagunas said her drive to continue succeeding at her studies—while also working in the fields herself—was “motivated by my mother's hands that are slowly losing feeling from years of arduous work in the dirt and fields—and I am motivated by the endless support that I had been given."
Support that is leading her to new heights. The first in her family to graduate from high school, Alvarez-Lagunas is “now a QuestBridge Scholar matched to Stanford University where she plans to major in bioengineering to pursue a career as a medic or medical researcher,” Yahoo News reports.
She hasn’t been alone in honoring the work of immigrant parents this graduation season. San Diego State University student Erica Alfaro honored her parents by posing for her graduation photo in the strawberry fields where her mom also continues to work. "With love I dedicate my master's to my parents,” she wrote in a caption. “Their sacrifice to come to this country to give us a better future was well worth it.”
Like Alfaro, Alvarez-Lagunas hopes to inspire, saying she wants other students, especially those who are struggling, “to realize that their success has so much sacrifice and meaning behind it. Graduating high school isn’t a standard for us, it’s an accomplishment, a big one. I hope to have inspired students who come from similar backgrounds and hope they know that my speech was about us, not me.”
Watch her wonderful speech below.