PA: That's a very important question, because in many respects one cannot separate the person from the professional, and years of experience have given me a better way of answering that. For me the person and the professional is values oriented, values based. So, my values around humanitarianism, my values around caring and giving, and helping define me as a person, and they have for many, many years. How I grew up, my responsibilities, and my sense of service, my sense of volunteerism are all part of that; and, then, of course my keen attention to multiculturalism is based on my early life in an immigrant community.

PA: I believe in personal history, and when I think of Erickson's work in the psychohistorical model or framework of how we all evolve, I think psychohistory is a really good paradigm for thinking about this question. I grew up in an immigrant community, a multicultural immigrant community, primarily eastern European. That gave me multiple perspectives on immigrant lives, including my own family's. Also it gave me a perspective of some of the issues that we try to look at today and that became very important for me professionally, which are issues of pluralism, inclusion, concerns about stereotyping. Those early experiences were very informative and formative to the interests I developed. Although, I suppose I could have thought of other things that were also in the community or maybe not noticed any of this, because in my family I'm the only one who became a counselor and a psychologist. So, I think that independently there were other pulls that I had that made me curious. I used to think about myself as an anthropologist, you know, who observe and study, and notice behaviors of people.

PA: There are a few that I like to mention. I think it also speaks to how for me it's been hard to only stay in one realm of the multicultural arena because everything that I've been part of has been so interrelated. I would say one of my contributions has been my research with immigrants. I think of an article that still gets cited on personal loss and grief as a result of immigration. That's one of those articles that in our profession offer some concepts, some guidelines for how to think about the experience of an immigrant. And if one is an immigrant, perhaps also to look at one's experience. So that's one.

I think the other, embedded in the multicultural counseling competencies that I contributed to in several ways within ACA and within the American Psychological Association (APA), is the dimensions of personal identity model. That, I think, gives us another way of understanding human development, personal identity development, and again, psychohistorical context. I say it's a contribution because it serves as a template for working in counseling and in psychology to understand the person as a whole person and not as part of just one of various social identities. As you can see, I've attempted to do work where I have felt there are voids in the profession. Those are two.

Of course the third for me is in the area of the psychology of Latinas/os where I'm dedicating myself more and more to carving out an area not only in research but in education and training, and practice and relationship development. So those are three of the major areas but I have to admit there's a fourth, which is my work in the area of organizational development. Here, my work focuses on diversity and looking at systems change, looking at how groups work together within an organization. That has again been a contribution not only in a practical sense but to the literature as well. So those are the ones you document because you can see them in print or so forth.

On an interpersonal level, there are other contributions, whether it's within ACA with the Latina/o interest network, other leadership roles within APA, and other organizations like the National Latina/Latino Psychologists Association. For me mentoring is a big deal and I think mentorship of students, professionals, peers. I think all of that I value highly. I think its part of the relationship

PA: I think the barriers when one tries to be innovative, and as you say to create pathways, the barriers can be systems as well as people based. For example, the system may not have room at the time to accommodate something that was new, such as a new task force, a new committee, a new book. I can remember making presentations back in the early to mid 80s on human rights training at the Association for Counselor Educators and Supervisors' regional conferences that no one attended. Or, knowing that you were going to submit a proposal with the title cross cultural and it would be scheduled on the last day of the conference and no one would come.

PA: Well, recognizing that I believed in this and I wasn't the only one. So the way to deal with some of these challenges was to again engage allies. Therefore, with those human rights trainings, I wasn't the only one standing there by myself because no one came. I had colleagues who were allies who were very much also believing in the importance of these workshops and trainings.

I think some of the origin of the barriers is systemic; some of it is people not seeing the relevance. Our own members at times, you know, like people who believe all counseling is good counseling. You know, if you don't have to think about adapting it, or if you don't have to think about other cultural perspectives.

PA: I think we are clearly done with that goal to try and help people understand that adaptation is necessary. But what I would say is that I have only been successful because I have worked in collaboration with others who also share these principles and these values, and that any kind of organizational change is a collective effort. Thus, the pathways are open because one believes in it and one works with others.

I think too you don't give up. I think if you truly believe in it you find ways to make it happen. Creative ways. You also have to become legitimate in what you do so that that begins to reduce any kind of barrier or barriers that exist. I think the other is, you just can't talk you have to perform, you have to deliver. That's one of the biggest challenges for anyone who's in a new area, creating a new pathway. You have to back up what you are promoting with action, different actions, whether it's a workshop or an article, a book, and so forth. This applies to anything that we do that's new and that's not considered mainstream; and there are many things that even in the multicultural area are not considered mainstream. We have to continue to look at how, for example, multicultural perspectives are part of everything, and use language that includes ourselves in what colleagues "would consider mainstream writing and thinking."

PA: My own parents and my grandmother were the models for that. My mother had grown up in the same city where I was born in Ohio, where she knew what racism was all about. And I know she wanted to protect us from that. So our education took us into a setting where we were the only Mexican family in this Catholic school. So there were ways that I became the "other" very early and I think that was useful. It was very useful, but I also saw how becoming the other in a certain social milieu you knew how to begin to work and walk in different worlds then. And I think the good part of this was that I saw what was valued in this particular educational setting, which was being smart, and so you got benefits for that. The nuns were the ones who were the most empowering for me as a woman, as a girl. So that was one piece of it. I think another piece was my father. He was more of a social justice advocate than I realized at the time, because he was a leader in the Mexican community. He for many years helped other people who were trying to get their citizenship by driving them to Detroit, to go to the Mexican consulate. People would come to our home and he would help them do some financial planning. You know, small things, but he was very good with finances. He was a helper in that way, I mean he was a steel worker, he didn't have professional skills, but he was very smart and I saw that activism on his part. He didn't march, but he showed me a different way of behaving.

PA: ... and then my grandmother, who also came from Mexico, unprepared educationally. She came from a rural village, so what I saw with her was a spirit of transcending oppression. She had to have a lot of drive and fortitude to have run away from home, to have established herself in the United States. And, once my grandfather died, she survived him 44 years, to really make a place for herself. She had a home, a job, so when she passed away she had left a home, she had left a will, she had left resources for her daughters. I look at that and her self-empowerment, I guess is what you would say, and her willingness to not be stopped by obstacles. She didn't know the language, but she knew how to work. At the same time, she cared a lot, and that's something I always remember about her. Always opening her doors to new neighbors that didn't have a lot. We had a lot of new families who came from Puerto Rico and she became very much of a friend to some of these families. So I think all of those were examples in my immediate world that impressed me, in some way or another, because you know I pursued all of these avenues...

PA: If I were to identify a couple of things early on, I'll just mention one or two. One was when I was still in junior high or high school, I went to the Puerto Rican church to be a volunteer. There were missionary nuns and I think I was very interested in being in a Spanish speaking milieu because that was very new to me. It was a Spanish speaking parish. Where I went was English speaking and it was eastern European as I mentioned. So I felt just the cultural connection and the language connection. So I started doing some volunteer work there. It was very small but it gave me an idea of some of the circumstances people were coming from and some of the struggles people were experiencing as well trying to become settled in a whole new environment. I'm not just saying the fact that it was the States versus the Island, but also the weather. You know, you are from the Caribbean and you come to northern Ohio.

Also, I learned about the power of educators. There was an incident in one of my high school classes where a young Puerto Rican student was marginalized in an advanced Spanish class even though that was his language. We could have all benefited from it, but the teacher didn't know how to integrate him. I then reached out to him because I knew enough Spanish that I felt I could relate to him and bring him into the conversation. Those are two examples that stand out. So my sense of myself in terms of being a Latina was very strong early on, even though it wasn't perhaps popular or something that you got a lot of points for in society.

I think in terms of really making this a movement into my professional world was when I was a high school counselor and I had the opportunity to help a high school open its doors to immigrants from different countries. To help these refugees who came from the Soviet Union, Vietnam, China, I led an organizational intervention even though I didn't know that's what I was doing. What I knew was that how we were trying to assimilate these kids was not going to work. Therefore, I formed a team of teachers and counselors and administrators so we could think of the best way to help these students be successful. They were at our door, they spoke different languages, they came with different needs, and they came with different academic preparation. We had to find a way that our system could be adapted from the point at which they showed up at the school to the time they graduated. That was a very important foray for me into picking leadership. I think that I've not shied away from sticking my neck out on things when I believed they were important to be done and that they would serve a greater good.

PA: Some of the challenges were in the profession. I would say from people who would think that that's all I knew how to talk about and would in so many ways say that. Would also not understand how multiculturalism was part of counseling. Who thought that all I was talking about where ethnic minority people and that the deficit paradigm was still part of their thinking. So it was at times trying to explain it, trying to dissuade people from the idea that all counseling is good counseling and that all you had to do was give positive unconditional regard; or that all you have to do is attend, and not appreciating the cultural biases in all of those practices that are taught. Without saying that I'm doing a disservice to the profession, but if we don't question, you know, where are we? So I think those were some of the challenges. I think as well, as I said earlier, sometimes within associations there are rules or by-laws that sometimes get in the way. But I had to figure out ways to negotiate those. So I think you have the interpersonal and you have the systemic challenges. Also timing is sometimes a challenge. Sometimes I've been ahead of the curve, because now it's okay to talk about Latinos and counseling, you know. In the 90s it was like thinking that all I was talking about was Mexicans because people didn't really understand the diaspora of Latinos.

PA: At the professional level, in the early 80s there were about 5 or 6 of us who got together for the human rights work. For example, a colleague of mind who's still around, Holly Stadler, who's the chair at Auburn. Then, there was the Association of Counselor Educator's Supervisors. I wanted to make sure my model of personal identity talks about the intersection of identities. Very important for me is gender; and, therefore, very important for me is women's visibility and leadership in professional associations. So within ACES, I pull together a group of women because I felt we weren't at the table and we developed the women's interest network of ACES, still around and in different regions. More importantly, I think in pulling together with other allies from across the country, and in those days we didn't have the internet, so I was on the phone, I've felt a sense of we-ness and empowerment that we all needed as women. We became a vehicle for helping women look at professional development and such things as getting mentored, and the backing and promotion and tenure. Also, breaking into leadership within ACA in particular, that's where I did a lot of this work. So I felt as though we were creating systems of change. Prior to that there had only been one woman president of ACES. Subsequently there have been a number of women presidents of ACES. I think this is one of the catalysts frankly for that to occur. Also I would say in AMCD, the Association of Multicultural Counseling and Development, of becoming the first Latina president, of the first non-African American president in the association's history, and I came in the 25th year of the association. Subsequently we've had three Latino presidents, an American Indian, an Asian, so I think those are pathways that I've helped open. Again in relationship to colleagues, Bernal Baca has been a very key person, Azara Santiago Rivera, and now the networks growth, you know with Michael D'Andrea and Judy Daniels and people like that from the National Institute for Multicultural Competencies. So I think that all of these are allies.

PA: Yeah.

PA: I think we're in a maturing phase of the multicultural presence in the field of counseling and psychology. I think the maturing requires us to become not just empiricists in this area. Not just to say we have the empirical data so this legitimizes us; but to be able to take our concepts and our models further into mainstream counseling and psychology, number one. Number two, when you think about counseling and psychology, and the specialty areas within these disciplines, to be able to get social justice into them in particular. I think maybe incorporating a certificate where people could get to know how to do advocacy and so forth because in a regular counseling program you don't get all of that. With the multicultural area, for me that all counseling needs to be multicultural, so if I were to teach counseling theories, and I haven't had the time to do this, I would write a new counseling theories book that is totally based on multicultural models. I think if we're only teaching the basic skills, if we're only saying that these are the four or five legitimate theories of counseling in today's world, I think we're not giving our students, our professionals, enough to work with. I believe we are in a maturing stage, and that there's more to come.

PA: I think that is the whole model. All of these models, these ideas are very interdependent, they're very integrated. The world is becoming more and more complex. Our borders, all borders, are more fluid. We can be sort of forerunners using some of the work and the models to really advocate for change cross-countries, in a very international way. It's one thing to use this in the states, but I think in states like Kuwait if we use some of this when we're trying to do some political negotiations we could be benefiting our processes of understanding the other. Also within countries; you see what's going on in France, you see what's going on in some other European countries that have really not dealt with the various social cultural groups in their countries. I think many of our models are very practical and useful there as well.

PA: Right.

PA: I believe so. I think we've learned a lot by studying social systems and by looking at ourselves. I always said that the United States was like a social experiment inso much that it brought people from so many different cultures and backgrounds together. In our own struggles to try and sort things out, particularly in the areas of counseling and psychology, we've given it a lot of thought not only from an academic research, but also in pragmatic ways, I think we have a lot learned, and are continuing to learn, that can be beneficial elsewhere. I really believe that.

PA: Two ideas occur to me immediately and they both take the form of volunteerism. I think one has to become engaged in social justice advocacy. I think there are volunteer efforts probably in one's own community, where you can be both a participant and an observer of how systems work and how systems may disenfranchise people; and at the same time what you believe can be done to improve that. I think we clearly have a lot of areas in this country, where people don't have a great quality of life. Those are opportunities, whether it's through habitat for humanity, or through something in your own neighborhood where you can be a volunteer in your own town. Where I think we begin to see it differently than we read about in a textbook. I know oftentimes people want to go to another country for an emergent experience and I think that's certainly beneficial if you want to really get immersed in another language, like Spanish. That I think is another way. But it's important to go not taking a missionary attitude, because you're there to learn, you're not there to be a missionary, and do conversion. So I think that how one approaches that, in any of those settings whether here or in another country, you have to go in as a learner and not an expert.

PA: Well in some ways we are in transition. I think about counseling because certainly from the professional association side I have a window into looking at the various specialty areas and settings in which counseling takes place. Whether it's school counseling, or whether it's an educator, or the people who are involved in family counseling, what I believe it becomes more important is to see how the integration across these specialty areas and settings is becoming more and more necessary. You can't just treat the substance abuser, you have to treat the family. You can't just treat the child who's being bullied in a school setting without treating the family, without looking at the system in which this bullying is taking place, without looking at the larger context of society that allows, or in some ways has permitted bullying to take place with certain types of children. So I think that as the profession, we are moving, or needing to move in a way that there is more transparent across our specialties, across the settings, and more interdependent. Clearly embedded in all of this are multicultural perspectives or models; all about human development is multiculturalism. So I think taking that forward is going to cost us some conversations, is going to cost us some disagreements, but I think persistence in that is essential. People are floundering right now. Seeing immigrants in Nebraska, seeing immigrants in North Carolina, people don't know what to do. It's not just counselors, obviously all of the civil servants need a lot of work in this area and I think counselors can be very valuable for that.

PA: I would like to answer the rest of that question in another way too. I believe we need to look outside of the Euro-American models of counseling, the Euro-American theories that we base so much of our training and research and practice on. We need to look at indigenous models of helping, indigenous models of psychological, physical, spiritual well being. I think we really have to approach wellness or think about counseling as a profession of wellness. If we approach ourselves as a profession of wellness and helping both, the wellness paradigm allows us an opportunity to look at how wellness occurs in other settings. I mean there are wellness models that exist that try to attend to a whole person, the physical, the spiritual, and the emotional. As whole people we bring this indivisible identity with us. So, I would like to begin to look outside of ourselves not in a way similar to the anthropologists, who looked at other cultures as exotic. These aren't exotic ideas about the whole person; these are long-standing beliefs and practices. I would like us to see how we better incorporate the body, and the mind, and the spirit together as we do our helping and as we in fact try to promote psychological well being.

PA: Well I think that I've always been ... I've based a lot of my work by looking out, and I know that there's a richness in all of the cultural practices and belief systems in other countries and in particularly in the indigenous. It's like going back to our roots and looking at the roots of human kind; and seeing what those roots have been because they've transcended centuries of existence. We may be in a modern cybertech world, but fundamentally there are a lot of cultural messages that are embedded in what we do that we probably just haven't noticed, number one. Number two, I think that there are other civilizations that have existed for many, many centuries that we can continue to learn from. I always believe in turning out. We don't want to be culturally encapsulated. That's why I think we really need to continue to go out, and I clearly have that as an ongoing part of my agenda.