With a lucid and inspiring speech on issues relevant to the Hispanic heritage in the United States, Richard Negrin, Vice President of Regulatory Policy and Strategy at ComEd and promoter of Project Jumpstart, received the Heritage Award 2019 for his important work on behalf of the Latino community.
The award ceremony took place at the Crystal Tea Room during the Hispanic Heritage Month Gala, an event organized by Hispanic Media, which together with a significant group of strategic allies, ended the commemoration of Hispanic Heritage Month in Philadelphia where the remarkable work of its most outstanding members was recognized.
As a keynote speaker, Richard Negrin pointed out the strengths of the Latino community, nurtured by its culture and traditions. However, he highlighted our ability to resist and fight as our most valuable tool, “our ability to overcome adversity, our ability to handle hardship.” This heritage of resilience is “the biggest thing we have in common”.
His proposition states that this shared spirit becomes the resource that will help us face future challenges: “Our true power is our collective voice, our true power is in our collective vote, our true power is in our value.”
Armed with compelling arguments, Mr. Negrín also pointed to the most urgent problems which the Latino community is facing today: lack of education, lack of opportunities, and violence.
This last aspect was especially stressed during his speech due to its worrying manifestation as hate crimes.
“In the last 18 months, here in the United States, hate crime murders are up 35% and many of those victims are Latinos,” said the award-winning personality, and adding, “the forces of evil, the forces of intolerance are working and working to quiet our voices, to cancel our votes, to diminish our value, and in some instances they are trying to take our lives.”
Despite this difficult scenario, Richard Negrin expressed as a fervent believer in the spiritual forces available to the great Latino family: “Those attempts to push us back into the shadows will fail, they don’t know about our community, they don’t know about the resistance to which I referred, they don’t know that we remain united in adversity”.
And then he closed his speech with these moving words that aroused lively clapping emotional in the audience “We will not live in fear. Our power, our love and sound mind. That´s what our community is. Instead of cowing in the shadows, we`ll stand together in the bright sun. And we will celebrate; we will celebrate our heritage with no fear.”
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Along with Richard Negrín, other Hispanic community important figures were honored with the Crystal Award. They are: Joanna Otero-Cruz, Deputy Managing Director of the Community Services Cabinet; Kersy Azócar, Senior Vice President of Microlending Microcredit, at FINANTA; Natalia Domínguez, Community Partnership for the Mid-Atlantic Region (Pennsylvania, South Jersey and Delaware); Daniel Gustavo Loza, Attorney at Loza Law Firm and a Legal Real Estate Broker licensed in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey; and Hernan Brizuela, MD retired medical doctor with 43 years of outstanding professional practice and a deep sense of community.
The Gala was also attended by Mayor Jim Kenney, a city authority who honored those present with opening remarks in which he highlighted the importance of being united as a community and offered an outline of the history of the first Hispanic immigrants to arrive in Pennsylvania’s most populous city.
Hispanic Media, with more than 20 years in the area of media and committed to the Latino community in the United States, managed to exhibit for this gala a history of friendship, commitment and shared vision with several institutions and their special representatives. They were Teresa Lundy, representative of the new Philadelphia Sheriff; Dough Oliver, for PECO Energy; Juan Lopez, appointed by Goya Foods; Luz Colon, Governor’s Executive Director on Latino Affairs; Nilda Ruiz, President/CEO at Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha; Reverend Bonnie Camarda; Maria Gonzalez, President/CEO of HACE; and Jennifer Rodriguez, President/CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
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