“We are we, thanks to others” is a favorite mantra of Victoria Alvarez, one of the newest faculty members teaching Spanish at Berkeley. Alvarez was born and raised in Barçelona, Spain, and has a husband and two daughters. 

Her favorite thing to teach in Spanish is culture content and how to link it to the Spanish language. She believes that “you cannot teach the culture without understanding the language, and the other way around; you cannot understand the language without understanding the culture.” 

Her development of this belief stems from the fact that she is so far away from her own culture, and therefore wants her family, and by extension her students, to understand its importance like she has. 

Alvarez is very excited to join the positive environment of Berkeley, especially because of the incredible faculty and how hard they work to help students learn. A word of wisdom from her experiences is “If you mess up, because everybody makes mistakes, you can always apologize and try to make the best out of the situation.”