Main Speakers

Jane García - CEO of La Clinica de La Raza

Ms. Jane García is the Chief Executive Officer of La Clínica de La Raza, one of the largest community-based health care providers in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has led the organization since 1982, providing more than four decades of visionary leadership in advancing health care access for underserved communities. Under her leadership, La Clínica has grown from a $2 million community health project into a comprehensive health system with a $175 million annual budget, more than 1,200 staff, and 35 sites serving over 82,000 patients each year across Alameda, Contra Costa, and Solano counties.

Beyond her work at La Clínica, Ms. García has played a major leadership role in statewide health organizations and has been a strong advocate for equitable health care regardless of income or immigration status. She holds a BA from Yale University and an MPH from our very own UC Berkeley School of Public Health

Cástulo de la Rocha - CEO of Altamed

For more than four decades, Castulo has championed a simple but powerful belief: health care is a right, not a privilege, and that belief continues to guide AltaMed’s mission to serve communities with dignity, compassion, and excellence. Under his visionary leadership, AltaMed has transformed from a storefront barrio clinic in East Los Angeles into the largest Federally Qualified Health Center in California, and among the top five in the nation. Altamed has grown into the largest community health center in the United States, serving more than 700,000 patients each year. Today, the organization operates over 80 sites across Los Angeles and Orange Counties and is powered by a workforce of more than 6,000 employees dedicated to expanding access to care.

This innovative “whole community” approach to health care has earned him numerous awards from medical institutions and programs, as well as the honor of receiving a Medallion of Excellence for Education, Science, Medicine, and Civil Rights from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2017. He received the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation’s (MAOF) Aztec Award, the Latino Spirit Award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus, and the Cesar Chavez Legacy Award from the Cesar Chavez Foundation. Additionally, he was named one of the LA500 by the Los Angeles Business Journal and was honored by the Institute of Mexicans Abroad with the Ohtli Award from the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

Previously, the Los Angeles Business Chamber of Commerce honored him with the Distinguished Business Leader Award. This coincided with him being highlighted as a 2023 Univisionario and being named a Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights 2023 Immigrant Champion. He was also inducted into the Roosevelt High School Alumni Hall of Fame. 

An avid believer in the healing power of art, Mr. de la Rocha has spent 30 years assembling the AltaMed Art Collection. It champions the works of emerging and established artists who reflect the history, achievements, and struggles of overlooked communities, and it lives on rotating display across the entire AltaMed clinic network. He is a member of the Museum of Latin American Art Board. 

Dr. Charles L. Briggs

Charles L. Briggs is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in Folkloristics and a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. A scholar of remarkable breadth, he also serves as co-director and graduate advisor of the UCB-UCSF Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. His work sits at a compelling crossroads of anthropology, folklore, medicine, and media, drawing together questions that span the boundaries of multiple disciplines.

Briggs has dedicated decades of fieldwork to understanding how communities make sense of illness, death, and survival. He has conducted extensive research in Mexicano communities in New Mexico and among Indigenous peoples in Venezuela, immersing himself in the lives of the people he studies with deep commitment and rigor. Through this long-term engagement, he has built relationships with relatives, doctors, nurses, healers, and epidemiologists alike, working alongside them to understand why so many people continue to die from preventable diseases.

His scholarly interests center on the deeply entangled relationships between bodies, media, viruses and bacteria, narratives, songs, and race. Briggs is particularly drawn to how these forces constantly interact and sometimes collide in ways that prove fatal. He has investigated major epidemics of cholera and rabies in Venezuela, examining not only the biological dimensions of disease but also the social, cultural, and political conditions that shape who gets sick and who survives.

A central thread running through his work is the question of infectiousness,  not only of microbes, but of stories themselves. Briggs is fascinated by who produces the narratives surrounding diseases like H1N1, Ebola, and diabetes, and how those stories spread through traditional and social media to shape the imaginations of policymakers, clinicians, journalists, and the broader public. In this way, he treats storytelling and media as powerful forces that can determine the course of public health as surely as any pathogen.

Briggs is the author of several influential books, including The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico, Learning How to Ask, and Competence in Performance. With his collaborator Clara Mantini-Briggs, he co-authored Stories in the Time of Cholera and Tell Me Why My Children Died, works that bring together ethnographic depth and urgent humanitarian concern. Across all of his scholarship, Briggs remains committed to understanding how knowledge, power, and inequality shape the experience of health and illness in communities around the world.

Dr. Xochitl Castañeda

Dr. Castañeda is the Director of the Health Initiative of the Americas at the School of Public Health since its founding in 2001. This initiative is considered one of the world’s leading programs on health and migration, and works to coordinate and optimize resources to reduce health disparities of the Latino-origin population living and working in the United States, a commendable effort in our times. A medical anthropologist by training, Dr. Castañeda was educated in Guatemala and Mexico. She did a post-doctoral fellowship in reproductive health at UCSF. She also received training in social science and medicine at Harvard University and at Amsterdam University.

For over seven years, she was a Professor of Public Health Sciences and a P.I. Researcher at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health, where she directed the Department of Reproductive Health. In 1999, she received the National Research Award on Social Science and Medicine. In 2010, the California Latino Legislative Caucus awarded her with the National Spirit Award for her leadership in initiatives to improve the quality of life of Latino immigrants in the U.S.. In 2019, Dr. Castañeda was awarded the Ohtli reward by the Mexican government, which is the highest honor given by the Mexican government to citizens living outside of México. She was also awarded the awarded the Mexican National Award of Health for 2020 in the category of “Sin Fronteras” (No Borders) for her lifetime of work to improve the health of Mexicans living outside México. Dr. Castañeda has published over 150 manuscripts and has served as a consultant for more than 30 national and international institutions.

Luisa Buada - CEO of Ravenswood Family Health Network

Luisa Buada, is a Native San Francisco Bay Area Californian, the daughter of a Filipino farm worker  and a registered nurse who has dedicated her life profession for the past 53 years to community  health. Buada has been instrumental in providing health care to the neediest residents of the larger  Bay Area region including the Salinas Valley. For over five decades, Luisa has expanded access to  health care to tens of thousands of residents who would not have care otherwise. With limited  resources, Luisa is creating healthier communities, one patient at a time. 

From 1978 to 1980 Buada led the founding of a community health center for farmworkers in the  Salinas Valley – Clínica Popular del Valle de Salinas. She founded the Berkeley Primary Access  Clinic in 1991 and was integral in the establishment of LifeLong Medical Care in 1996. 

She was the CEO of Ravenswood Family Health Network for 21 years. Ravenswood provides  critically-needed health care services to predominantly low-income, uninsured, and newly arrived  immigrant residents in East Palo Alto, south San Mateo County and north Santa Clara County. 

Under her leadership, Ravenswood grew from 13 employees to 364 by the time she retired in 2023.  The original 7,800 sf modular building was replaced by a newly constructed $39 million dollar, beautiful two story 38,300 sq. ft. facility in 2015. In April, 2020, RFHC acquired MayView Community  Health Center sites that serve Palo Alto, Mountain View and Sunnyvale. Today, Ravenswood Family  Health Network offers comprehensive, multigenerational medical care, along with dental, optometry,  pharmacy, Imaging and preventative health services to over 30,000 patients in over 100,000 visits  annually. Ravenswood also connects patients to additional resources that impact one’s health – food, shelter, clothing, special education, and intimate partner violence and parenting support. 

Luisa currently serves part time as the Director Capital Projects for Ravenswood overseeing  construction and capital fundraising. On February 12, 2026, she completed an eleven (11) operatory  dental clinic construction project in Redwood City that will serve 4,500 low income dental patients a  year.  

Speakers of Honor