It’s impossible to miss. The coffee thermos, the cuff links, the shrine in the corner of his office: Marco Menéndez is wild about FC Barcelona. What immediately stands out about Menlo’s new Director of Institutional Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging is his above-and-beyond devotion to what he cares about. His love of the Spanish soccer team is perhaps the best example of that — he has not missed a game since the early 2000s, even when living in China, where games often broadcast at 3 a.m. Yet it’s what drove Menéndez to the FC Barcelona fan domain back in the 1980s that speaks volumes about his values.
He said it was the fact that the team is owned by fans rather than wealthy investors that hooked him. Menéndez added that the way FC Barcelona played soccer was and is unlike any other team. “They had a philosophy and a way of looking at a sport that had to do with humility and teamwork, more than a superstar trying to outshine everyone,” he said.
Back when dictator Francisco Franco ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975, his regime persecuted Barcelona’s regional language and identity, so FC Barcelona became a symbol of resistance against fascist oppression. The team was also one of the last to not have a corporate shirt sponsor. When they finally did, Barcelona’s players were advertising UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, on the front of their jerseys. Menéndez saw in this history his own values of social justice, and he has never turned back.
These values also steered him to apply for the open EDIB director position at Menlo, which he stepped into in August. He said Menlo’s emphasis on that last letter of the EDIB acronym is what really excited him about the job. “I like to consider belonging as the goal for all of the work,” Menéndez said. “I use equity as a lens for the work, and really, inclusion and diversity are the strategies that we put into play for the work. But it’s all about belonging.”
Menéndez said his first priority in any new job is connection: this means building relationships with community members and poring over the school’s EDIB documents to learn more about the history of Menlo. Then, he said, comes the action.
Menéndez is acutely aware of the reported uptick in bigoted incidents last year and the resulting expulsions, and he said part of the reason he was hired was because of his experience in healing a school community after similar events.
When Menéndez was just days into the job, the third annual Hispanic Heritage Month Assembly, usually held in the fall, was canceled. Menéndez said he felt for affinity groups that can’t be fit into the assembly calendar, but he added that he will work with the groups to celebrate their cultures in other ways. “[Assemblies are] not really giving your affinity the real importance that it should have, and I think that importance really revolves around bigger picture items like curriculum, like decision making, like student voice and things like that,” he said.
Though Menéndez doesn’t currently teach a class, he expects and welcomes teaching becoming a part of his duties. In addition to being a dean at Laney College in Oakland, Menéndez has taught history and social sciences at international schools in Guatemala and in China, where his wife is from.
In fact, Menéndez only moved back to the U.S. from Hong Kong this summer so that his eldest son could start high school stateside. Menéndez and his wife decided to split their kids’ education between China and America. Their kids completed early childhood education in Guangzhou, elementary school in the Bay Area and middle school in Hong Kong.
Menéndez, who grew up between Middletown, Conn. and Albuquerque, N.M., also studied abroad in Italy in college. There, he learned Italian, before picking up Spanish in Guatemala and Mandarin in China. “I love learning languages,” he said, adding that he aims for perfect pronunciation.
An avid chef, Menéndez’s internationalism is also reflected in his cooking. He often cooks Italian, Mexican and Chinese dishes (even if they don’t conform to his pescatarian diet). His favorite preparation, though, exhibits his Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage: arroz con pollo (chicken and rice). “That was the first dish I learned, and I feel like I’ve spent a lifetime trying to perfect it,” Menéndez said. “It’s never quite as good as my abuelita, my grandmother, but I always get lots of compliments on it.”
Along with his heritage, another huge part of Menéndez’s identity, he said, is being an amateur astronomer. “My telescope is my baby,” he said.
Menéndez said that, aside from the sublime beauty of the planets and stars, the history of different cultures’ relationships with astronomy attracted his forever-love of learning. Always going the extra mile for his passions, Menéndez even named his son Galileo.
