Vice president shares experience

By Gabriel Marshall, News Writing Student

Felix John Aquino, 55, who was recently appointed Vice President of Instruction at OCCC, shared his experiences in school, work and life with journalism students.

Aquino spoke not only about his childhood in New York, but also his travels, research and teaching experiences on three different continents.

Aquino’s father immigrated from Cuba in 1929; his mother from Puerto Rico in 1940.

Aquino was born in 1952, during the early stages of the Civil Rights movement.

Aquino spent his childhood attending public school PS 148 in Jackson Heights, New York.

“PS 148 was a typical big city school,” Aquino said. “I didn’t know any Anglo-Saxons.”

Aquino found a love for learning in fifth grade, he said.

He had a rough time in grades seven and eight, he said, but began really enjoying himself in high school.

Though built for approximately 3,000 students, there were nearly 5,000 enrolled in Newtown High School when Aquino attended.

“My salvation was that this school had a school within a school called an honor school,” Aquino said.

This honor school, which had a “very rigorous curriculum,” helped Aquino find his academic self. He studied Spanish for three years and Latin for two, and also took five years of science instead of the required four.

Upon graduation, Aquino attended Queens College in New York. Queens College is part of City University in New York, and was free. Here Aquino began studying anthropology.

While attending Queens College, Aquino spent a summer in far southern Mexico as a research assistant.

This was the first of several trips outside of the United States for Aquino.

After graduating from Queens College, Aquino received a graduate assistantship and began taking classes at Boston University, where he met the second great influence of his life, Professor Anthony Leeds.

“(Leeds) essentially invented modern urban anthropology,” Aquino said.

Leeds was preparing to do a project on rural to urban migration in Portugal, and asked if Aquino would like to come along to Europe. Aquino accepted and, on June 10, 1979, left to study labor migration in southern Spain.

Aquino said he enjoyed most of his time in Spain, but found the people of southern Spain to be “more openly racist” than in other places where he had lived.

After Aquino returned to the United States, he held several positions as a high level academic administrator.

He also taught as an adjunct instructor at several universities, including the University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas County Community College and Hudson County Community College in West New York, New Jersey.

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