Collection is open for research.
Heriberto C. Bolaños was born in Michoacan, Mexico, in 1996. In 2002, he and his family immigrated to the United States, and lived in Hillsboro, Oregon. While in high school, he participated in the Bring Them Home campaign, which advocated for asylum seekers. He also was one of the organizers of a walkout that helped lead to the passage of Oregon House Bill 2845, which updated the public school curriculum to include ethnic studies. Bolaños co-founded the Westside Queer Resource Center, a nonprofit that serves the LGBTQIA+ community in the area of Washington County, Oregon. After high school, he attended Portland Community College, where he co-founded the PCC DREAMers Resource Center. He later attended Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon.
Sources: Information provided by Bolaños in his interview; "A sign, a walkout and a plan of action for Latinos in Washington County," by Allan Brettamn, The Oregonian, July 8, 2016.
Oral history interview with Heriberto C. Bolaños, by Sankar Raman, Nancy Dollahite, and Juniper Yarnall-Benson, SR 12340, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
This oral history interview with Heriberto C. Bolaños was conducted by Sankar Raman, Nancy Dollahite, and Juniper Yarnall-Benson on June 20, 2020, for The Immigrant Story, an organization that documents and archives the stories of immigrants and refugees in the United States. The interview was conducted using Zoom video conferencing software, but the recording held by the Oregon Historical Society Research Library consists only of the audio.
In this interview, Bolaños discusses his early life in Michoacan, Mexico, and talks about his family's farm. He shares the reasons his family immigrated to the United States in 2002 and describes his journey to Hillsboro, Oregon. He talks about his experience as an undocumented immigrant child in Hillsboro, including learning English. He also shares his experience of being assigned an Anglicized name by a teacher. He speaks about being part of a gang during middle school, and shares his reasons for getting out of it. He describes his activism during high school, including his involvement in a school walkout, and talks about how his family reacted to learning that he is bisexual. He closes the interview by discussing his career history and plans for the future.
Copyright for this interview is held by the Oregon Historical Society. Use is allowed according to the following statement: Creative Commons - BY-NC-SA,
An article about Heriberto C. Bolaños, "From Conflict to Confidence" by Juniper Yarnall-Benson, was based on this interview and published on The Immigrant Story website at