Michael Arellano (CAS’24, GRS’24) is this year’s student speaker at the BU All-University Commencement and will receive their dual bachelor’s and master’s degree in political science. Photo courtesy of Arellano

Commencement 2024

BU’s Commencement Student Speaker Is Proud of Being a Changemaker

Michael Arellano reflects on their activism, their identity, and their role in opening the LGBTQ+ Student Resource Center

“A lot of who I am really became clear to me once I came to BU,” Michael Arellano says. “BU is a place that will really challenge who you are, and those challenges are the foundation of the growth that I’ve been able to experience.”

Before Arellano (CAS’24, GRS’24), who uses they/them pronouns, receives their dual bachelor’s and master’s degree in political science on Sunday, May 19, at Boston University’s All-University Commencement, there’s one more challenge ahead—taking the microphone on Nickerson Field as the ceremony’s student speaker.

Arellano plans to tell a story focused on activism that was both driven by, and a driver of, personal changes. “It’s through this journey, that I confronted my identities, that I embraced my identities, and that I became empowered by them.

“I came from a community that was very diverse,” says Arellano, whose home is in Katy, Tex. “In my friend group, all of us were either children of immigrants or we were immigrants ourselves. I am a child of immigrants. And that’s something that I always thought was normal. My friends come from different backgrounds, and they have different music, and they have different food, and they wear different clothes. And those were all differences that I thought were very beautiful and that I wanted to celebrate.”

Back in sixth grade, Arellano had already declared their intention to be president someday. In high school they were elected class president and were active in the Houston Hispanic Forum’s career and education day and in a movement against texting and driving with an app called Safe2Save. Arellano says this activism came from a love for their local community.

“When I came to BU, it was different,” Arellano says. “Because that was the first time that I realized that there were things about my identity that I needed to confront, that I needed to embrace, and that I needed to empower within myself.”

As a queer Latinx person, Arellano now added justice to their motivations: “There are reasons that we need to come together to advocate for ourselves, to advocate for students that came before us, and to advocate for students that come after us.”

Arellano and a few others, including alumni and students from the Queer Activist Collective, founded the LGBTQ+ Student Task Force after researching programs at more than 40 BU peer institutions. Among schools with  LGBTQ+ centers, they found that BU was the only one with a center “that wasn’t open for students.” (BU had LGBTQ+ services for faculty and staff.) “So that began this journey of advocacy,” Arellano says.

“We had a climate survey, where we asked [BU] students and alums to talk about their experiences,” Arellano says. “We developed a report with 16 recommendations—it was over 126 pages long. And the first recommendation was the LGBTQ+ students center. What we advocated for is systemic change across all of BU, a culture change, and we are incredibly, incredibly grateful that we were able to create this change; now we can confidently say that the rest of BU LGBTQ+ students will have a resource center that they’ll be able to go to.”

The LGBTQ+ Student Resource Center, at 808 Commonwealth Ave., near the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, is, in its own words, “fostering community among students with programming and resources that encourage exploration and affirm identities at BU. Be proud, be you.”

“The effort of the LGBTQIA+ Student Taskforce to make the case for establishing the center is inspiring,” Robert A. Brown, then BU’s president, told BU Today when the center was announced. “I have no doubt that this new resource will make Boston University more welcoming for an important portion of our student body.”

The center serves as a community hub for LGBTQIA+ students at BU, offering training, alumni outreach and mentorship opportunities, events, and more. Arellano is proud to have been part of making it happen.

“There were only seven of us, you know, [and] we believed there are many different ways to advocate for justice and to bring about change for our community,” Arellano says. “You know, you can do an open letter, you can do a protest, you can do a petition, all of these ways are incredibly valuable. But we wanted to take an alternative approach.”

Given that many of the University officials they dealt with were scientists themselves, they decided the most effective approach would be a research report. 

“Reading the history”

Arellano kept working on the project even while taking two semesters off in 2022, in part to connect with their heritage.

“I took my gap year because I started learning in political science about all of the reasons why more people in my family have been murdered than have gotten married,” Arellano says. “I’m reading the history, and I see it in my family, how it’s been affected.

“You know, I started asking [for] stories that I had never, never asked before, because I was too afraid,” they say. “My grandfather didn’t make it past first grade. He doesn’t know how to read or write. I learned that my mom came to the United States seeking asylum fearing for her life, because there was a civil war happening in El Salvador. I remember one time I asked my grandmother about it. And the moment I asked her, she just started crying. And I was eight years old. And from that point, never again did I ask my family questions about their life.”

During their time at home, Arellano continued to devote energy to the LGBTQ+ project, but also wanted to expand it. They and their activist friends founded IMPACT (Intersection of Marginalized Peoples and Communities Task Force), constituted through the BU Student Senate, to advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The LGBTQ+ group submitted its report in October 2022 to BU’s provost, president, and dean of students. Arellano had learned that other schools have a Black student resource center, a Latino student resource center, and an Asian student resource center. So they said, “What if we found three more student task forces based off these three communities, because these were the most common across other universities, like Tufts and Northeastern.”

They were able to get almost 200 students across all three task forces to at least register and say they’d like to be involved. 

“In a lot of ways, it was about what kind of person do I want to be?” Arellano says. “This is what I believe in. And I’ve been able to make so many friends, so many powerful connections, build such a strong, sustainable community, where we are all loving each other, celebrating each other, and best of all, fighting and empowering each other.”

The first person in their family to get a graduate degree, Arellano says  education is highly valued: their mother had to keep working while studying for her bachelor’s degree, which took 12 years. Arellano has a variety of ideas for what the future holds, including working for the Latinx community and maybe a law degree focusing on civil rights and even a PhD in philosophy.

In the short term, Arellano is looking forward to spending time with their sisters, one still in high school, the other on a gap year from college, and help take care of their grandparents, who were a big part of their childhood. And maybe in the short term, teach high school, US history or government.

“Just because I leave BU, doesn’t mean my relationship with BU ends,” Arellano says. “There are plenty of opportunities to be involved as an alum, and one of my dreams is to be able to directly donate to IMPACT whenever I’m able to make a stable income, to reach out to the people in IMPACT and say, ‘What are y’all working on?’

“This is an incredibly interesting point at BU, because there’s so much change that’s happening,” Arellano says. “The new president that’s coming [Melissa L. Gilliam will take over as BU’s 11th president on July 1] almost makes me wish that I wasn’t graduating—almost. This is an opportunity to have a new face, somebody that’s forward-thinking, a visionary.

“I tell the leaders of the [BIPOC] task forces that my time and advocacy [at BU] is coming to an end and I was in the room with the people that made it happen. And now it’s time for you to be in that room. What I can do now is I can help you prepare for it, I will be there to support you through it. And every step of the way, you know how to call me.”

Arellano says the most common advice they heard from upperclass students during freshman year was to “get out of the BU bubble.”

“Looking back over my years here, that’s the number one thing I didn’t do. And I’m proud of it. I wouldn’t have done it any other way.”