When an email was sent to the Georgetown community on Oct. 15, 2025 announcing the selection of the university’s next president, some read the announcement for his qualifications, while others looked for his start date. Renato Llontop Calosi (SFS ’24) was fixated on a single letter.
“President Peñalver, he has the letter ñ in his last name, so immediately you identify, ‘Okay, he’s either Hispanic [or] Latino,’” Calosi said.
Calosi was correct: when President Eduardo Peñalver takes his seat onstage at his inauguration on Oct. 9, he will become Georgetown’s 49th president, second lay president, and first Latino American president.
Calosi, an alumnus originally from Lima, Peru, said that seeing someone like himself represented at the highest level of university leadership was exciting, especially because he was a part of a vibrant Latino community while on campus.
“Something that we really like to say about Latinos [is] no matter where we’re born, where we are, we all are part of the same family,” he said. “I think Georgetown really, really, really should be proud of this.”
Peñalver’s father immigrated to the U.S. in 1962 from Cuba, while his mother is the daughter of Swiss immigrants. In an interview with the Voice in August, Peñalver spoke about being Georgetown’s first Latino American president, noting that he’s long been a trailblazer.
“When I was at Fordham, I was the only Hispanic professor there, I believe, and then at the law school, and then the same thing at Cornell and the University of Chicago. That’s familiar territory. [I was] the first person of color to be Dean of Cornell, and then first layperson or person of color to be president of Seattle University,” Peñalver said.
“It’s part of what animates my leadership,” he added. “[It’s] important that I do well because that sort of creates opportunities for the people who are coming up behind me.”
Ahead of Peñalver’s inauguration, the Voice spoke to community members about what this first means for Latinos and the broader Georgetown community.
Other ‘firsts’
Peñalver is Georgetown’s first Latino American president, but Georgetown has had a previous president born in Latin America. Born in Michoacán, Mexico—then known as “New Spain”—in 1779, José Antonio López S.J. was the first Latin American president of a U.S. university, though he was of Spanish heritage.
Robert Emmett Curran, a professor emeritus of history and author of several books about Georgetown, said that López experienced a rapid ascent to becoming Georgetown’s acting president in 1840 before dying in 1841.
“[López] becomes interested in becoming a Jesuit, so he becomes a novice, enters the society, and eventually gets assigned to Georgetown, and in 1839 when [President] William McSherry dies from cancer, he becomes the acting president,” Curran said.
Decades after López, Georgetown’s 29th president Patrick Healy became the first president of color in 1874. Healy’s father enslaved his mother, who was one-eighth Black, making Healy one-sixteenth Black. While Healy publicly passed as white, his fellow Jesuits and administrators at Georgetown were aware of his racial background. Catholic superiors in Rome had previously rejected him as a presidential candidate because of his “special background,” but eventually acquiesced.
“The university certainly knew what they were doing, but the general public did not, because Patrick Healy basically passed,” Curran said. “It’s kind of a very convoluted, reluctant way in which Patrick Healy becomes, what has been claimed as the first president of color in any major university.”
Since Healy resigned from the presidency in 1882, Georgetown has not had another president who is known to have been a person of color.
Representation on campus
Georgetown’s class of 2029 is 9.38% Latino, compared with 20% of the U.S. population. As a result, representation for many—from students to faculty members—can feel sparse.
Years ago, director of graduate studies for Spanish Linguistics Victor Fernandez-Mallat arrived at the Hoya Hotel, excited to meet his colleague for a discussion on Spanish linguistics. Instead, he was mistaken for a driver picking up his client. Fernandez-Mallat found this experience particularly upsetting because it happened on his own campus.
“That’s an experience that is traumatizing,” Fernanzez-Mallat said. “It wouldn’t happen to a young white person, so why did it happen to me? I don’t think it happened to me because I’m young. I think it happened to me because I am Latino and I look Latino.”
As a child of immigrants who moved to Canada after the 1973 coup of Chile, Fernandez-Mallat often finds himself being the only Latino in spaces on campus and the broader world of academia.
“One thing that I’ve struggled with my entire life in academia is the imposter syndrome,” he said. “Most of the people that I know in my family are not college professors. My best friend drives trucks. There’s nothing wrong with being a truck driver, but it is important to also have people in other spaces and in other offices.”
After learning of the new president in an announcement email, Fernandez-Mallat felt an immediate connection to Peñalver.
“I am happy to have someone with his name, someone that looks like him, because he looks like he could be an uncle or a friend of an uncle at a party,” he said.
He hopes people like himself and Peñalver can be that figure for Latino students on campus.
Fr. Raimundo Salas-Schweikart (MPP ’22, PHD ’25), a Jesuit who lived and studied at Georgetown for five years, says that the Latino community on campus, particularly within religious life, is very close—and that having positive representation throughout the university only helps.
“It’s a great example [for students] of, ‘if President Peñalver is a member of the Latino community, and he is the president of Georgetown, well, I can be there too, someday, somehow,’” Salas said.
Julian De La Paz (SFS ’15) is a member of the Board of Governors for Georgetown’s Alumni Association (GUAA) and recently joined a group that is working to start a Latine Alumni Council within GUAA. When he saw Peñalver announced as president, he was “elated.”
“When I was a student, I really didn’t see a lot of that representation, at least in the classes that I took within the SFS. And that’s something that I hope has changed for students,” De La Paz explained. “When I see him at the helm of the university now, it tells me that things are already changing.”
De La Paz, who interviews prospective students as part of his role in GUAA, said that he thinks Peñalver’s role at Georgetown will absolutely serve as motivation for some students to apply or commit to Georgetown, as it shows that they have a place on campus.
“Students want to attend an institution where they not only feel supported, but they also see that support in their leadership,” De La Paz said. “If I were a prospective student today […] President Peñalver would definitely be a cherry on top to why I would want to be a student.”
Latino students remain cautiously optimistic
Calosi feels like what he’s already seen of Peñalver’s leadership style, even on social media, is very reminiscent of the Latino communities he’s been around his whole life.
“When it was move-in day, you could see him charming, talking to the students, helping them to move in, moving stuff with them. I think that’s something very, very Latino in some ways, because we’re very friendly—we don’t have this barrier between roles,” Calosi said.
Gogo Estrada (CAS ’29), an international student from Ecuador, is an active member of Ballet Folklorico Méxicano de Georgetown and Latin American Student Association, the RA for the Spanish-speaking floor, and studying Latino Studies in the college. Through these roles, he has had the opportunity to meet President Peñalver.
“He’s been very nice to us,” Estrada said, “He’s been a very positive change, at least branding-wise, for the university. A very outspoken person that really seems to, at the very least, be engaging with the community.”
While he was excited to see a change from previous presidents, Estrada still remains cautiously optimistic about Peñalver’s presidency.
“I do find it a little bit worrying the lack of mention of anything related to the actual workers here at the college, the challenges [regarding] immigration, and the different challenges that are presented to international students or workers,” Estrada said.
Despite this perceived inaction at Georgetown, Peñalver has had a history of leading his Latino community in advocacy work. As an undergraduate student at Cornell in 1993, he led a four-day long sit-in called the “Latino Cornellians’ Day Hall Takeover,” which led to the creation of the university’s Latino Living Center and increased funding for their Latino Studies program.
However, Estrada believes that the most pressing issues facing the Latino community on campus have yet to be addressed. The Georgetown Coalition for Workers Rights (GWCR) is running a campaign to amend Georgetown’s Just Employment Policy that they believe is failing to address the concerns of workers, many of whom are Latino. Following two directives from the Trump administration, Georgetown international students have also been denied the ability to gain experience through internships unless they are required to graduate.
Estrada worries that Peñalver’s inactivity on these issues is an indication that he does not intend to act with his Latino background in mind.
“Representation without action is meaningless,” Estrada said. “If we are only focused on coloring our issues over with a new coat of paint, instead of fundamentally changing the paint and surpassing the challenges that many in our community may face here, then there’s no point.”
Progress amid difficult times for Latinos
Mariela Cruz-Suarez (CAS ’28) also shared Estrada’s caution.
“You can have a Latino leading a Fortune 500 company or any other institution, but if they are not drawing from their Latinidad to be responsive to Latinos’ needs and everybody else’s needs, it doesn’t matter,” she said.
Cruz-Suarez also explained that being Latina on campus can be isolating, and she hopes that Peñalver will help create more spaces for Latinos to feel welcomed on campus.
“Because there’s a smaller amount of us, there also tends to be a smaller amount of us in leadership positions or in different clubs,” she said. “I hope that he is open to listening to Latino students on campus, immigrant or not, international or not, and is able to get our opinions, our ideas, our thoughts to build more opportunities for us.”
As a daughter of Honduran and Mexican immigrants, Cruz-Suarez said that the learning environment for Latinos has become increasingly difficult to navigate as Trump’s rhetoric on immigration enforcement leaks into conversations on campus. Recently, the Georgetown University College Republicans joined the Mass Deportation Coalition, endorsing their advocacy for the deportation of millions of immigrants.
“I know the pain they’ve caused when it comes to ripping families apart,” Cruz-Suarez said. “The anti-immigrant rhetoric still affects people in my community, still affects my parents because they are immigrants. And as a daughter of immigrants, I take that verbiage very seriously. I take those words very seriously. They’re painful to me, and it can be scary and sad knowing that my peers would look down on us.”
Even though she remains skeptical, Cruz-Suarez said that on inauguration day, she will be celebrating this historic moment.
“You may call us criminals. You may call us drug addicts. You may call us all these nasty things. But at the end of the day, here I am, a first-generation Latina student at one of the best universities in the world, about to watch the first Latino president be inaugurated,” Cruz-Suarez said. “You can paint us in a bad light all you want, but we will continue to prosper.”
