Meet Our Scholars
Catie Gudino
Moreno Valley College
English & Film
She/They
Community College
California Endowment Scholarship Recipient
Catherine (Catie) Gudiño is a first-generation student to a single-family household who holds a strong passion for literature, film, history, and progressivism and hopes to be an English professor someday. With a robust devotion to activism, advocacy work, and civic engagement they hope to devote their life to mobilizing the continuous campaign for human rights, especially socially and throughout the educational system. Seeing firsthand the potential their family members possess and could have implemented into their educational pathway, had financial issues not persisted, they hope to succeed in ways not available to the rest of their family in order to make them proud and give them the voice they missed out on because of systematic economic barriers. Catherine currently attends Moreno Valley College with hopes of transferring to Berkeley, University of Riverside or UCLA. At their current college, they work one-on-one with students to help develop their writing skills, also taking it in their hands to incorporate inclusive skills for writing that embrace queer individuals. As a committed advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, Catherine partakes in annual college-held events like Drag 101: Performing Gender where the entire school is invited to a drag show and panel. Producing sanctuary spaces for students to ask questions and become informed on the specifics or misconceptions of LGBTQ+ life allows for embracing of differences rather than just toleration, indifference, or hostility. As a queer person of color, Catherine hopes to mend the institutionalized gaps for those who find themselves in similar states of uncertainty for their educational goals as them.