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Hilary Stern walked onto the raised stage at China Harbor Restaurant to address a packed audience on Feb. 4 at Northwest Asian Weekly’s Women of Color Empowered awards luncheon. Stern was one of 14 honorees, lauded for her work in bridge-building — the event’s theme — as executive director of Casa Latina, an organization founded in the early 1990s to organize day laborers and activists.
“I started to think of the metaphor of a bridge and building them and what they are and what it’s like to cross one,” Stern said. “A bridge is scary. It’s a very narrow place over an abyss that brings you to unfamiliar territory. The familiar territory is what you are leaving — everything you’ve ever known, your family, your language, your history.”