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HOME - About Roland Palencia (who is he?)

Since I was a child, my moral compass has guided me to alleviate suffering and dedicate my life to serving others, particularly those living on the margins of society. I was born and raised in Puerto Barrios, Izabal, a port on the Caribbean side of Guatemala between Belize and Honduras, a town steeped in a vibrant multi-lingual and multi-cultural environment. This significantly shaped how I see and experience the world to this day as most of my neighbors, friends, and schoolmates in Puerto Barrios were racially and ethnically diverse, a blending of people of Indigenous Maya, African, Asian, and European ancestry. I grew up immersed in the linguistic soup of over 20 Mesoamerican Mayan languages such as Q’iche’, Q’anjob’al, Mam; Garifuna (a mixture of Arawak, Western African, and European languages), Spanish, and Belizean English.  

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My parents owned “Panificadora San Jose,” the largest bakery in Puerto Barrios in the 1960s, a small business with three shifts and over 20 employees. Due to his political beliefs, my father was assassinated at the age of 35, and my mother migrated to the U.S. at the same age, later to be joined by all of her five children, me being the second oldest. These life events and early experiences of being born in an entrepreneurial environment, tragedy, and migrations, my Catholic religious upbringing, plus my nascent awareness of being gay, created a crisis of Self while paradoxically becoming sources of strength.   

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I arrived in Los Angeles, California, on the eve of turning 18; a few years later, I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a B.A. in History. 

At Los Angeles High School, I served as the President of the English as a Second Language (ESL) Club, which aimed to connect recent immigrant students with extracurricular activities, including after-school tutoring, social gatherings, and cultural and heritage celebrations. This was my first official leadership position in the U.S. This gave me a taste of freedom and personal and collective agency leading to an awareness of the vast opportunities and possibilities equally sabotaged by the forces of prejudice surrounding immigrants that continue to shape entire communities today.      

At UCLA, I was involved in student organizations and eventually co-founded Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU) in 1981 and VIVA!, an LGBTQ+ artist collective, in 1987. The GLLU and VIVA! experiences were the genesis and the blueprint that informed my leadership for decades. Thereafter, I led several nonprofit organizations. For professional information, please click this link BIO and CV.